Gary Alan Fine
Although it has once been conventional to treat culture as a “characteristic” or “feature” of societies, many cultural sociologists now emphasize the importance of examining grounded cultures. But this move has often lacked sufficient attention to what it entails. My intention here is to present the theoretical stakes of this shift to analyzing culture from a micro- or meso-level of analysis. Culture should be conceptualized as a set of actions, material objects, and forms of discourse held and used by groups of individuals. In this view culture is a tool that is situated in particular communities of action, shaping the contours of civic life (Fine and Harrington 2004). As a result, culture is tied to the existence of shared pasts and prospective futures.
Breaking from treating culture as belonging to large-scale social systems (macrocultures), an approach that emphasizes the “micro-” or “meso-”level of analysis needs to be specified. I examine how culture can be linked to interacting groups and to well-networked population segments, focusing on the development of idiocultures, subcultures, and countercultures. Such a perspective, grounded within social psychology, suggests that the locus of culture need not to be limited to society-based populations, but can be analyzed in light of social worlds and communication networks. I extend the idea of culture by emphasizing that it is a form of practice that is linked to local understandings and social relations. A microsociology of culture is a valuable addition to more structural, institutional, and societal views.
Sometimes social scientists, as well as the larger public, comfortably refer to the characteristics of American culture, French culture, or Brazilian culture. Such analyses have value in providing strategies to understand societies in the context of their exceptionalism, looking for means of differentiating a people or a nation from those who stand outside constructed boundaries. However, because of the cognitive, affective, and behavioral diversity within a geographically based population, any analysis that assumes a national culture is necessarily limited and imprecise. A national culture is in practice a many-splendored thing, splintered in various ways, while holding to an ideological claim of unity. In its totality a national culture is somewhat akin to a mist, everywhere and nowhere, sensed but invisible. Often culture is treated as something that people have—or are “given”—by virtue of their location within a spatial community, rather than something that they shape or construct.
Admittedly, nations and regions have elements of a “collective character” that reveal themselves in societal representations. However, the microsociological goal is to determine how these values and beliefs operate in group space and how multiple group cultures, similar to each other through a circulation of members, weak network ties, or common milieux, affect the belief in a national culture, given institutional support through media representations and collective commemoration. Locale matters through the interactions within groups, but also through the shared imagination of larger systems.
Ultimately cultural domains are transmitted and displayed through action, a recognition that privileges examining locales in which culture is performed. The study of culture properly belongs to the analysis of groups—from primary groups (including families) to interacting small groups (clubs, teams, cliques) to networked segments that are tied together through their ongoing interaction, communication, spatial co-presence, or consumption (populations based on age, race, gender, or region). I begin with the most molecular level of analysis—the domain of face-to-face groups and their linkage to group idiocultures—and then examine larger communities based upon socially differentiated networks that form subcultures and countercultures, the latter implying some level of resistance to hegemonic cultures.
Every interaction scene, no matter how tiny, develops a set of common, meaningful referents. These bits of communal understanding—collective memories—are established from the opening moments of group life. This approach was presented in Fine’s (1979) article on “Small Groups and Cultural Creation: The Idioculture of Little League Baseball” and subsequent studies that applied the “idioculture” model to other social domains, such as mental health organizations, congregations, workplaces, and social movements. The group-based analysis of culture reflects the human desire to create tight communities with shared pasts and prospective futures. Culture is to be found in all groups. Because these include policy makers (Janis 1982) and bureaucratic organizations (Herzfeld 1993), some group cultures have more external influence than others. Ethnographic accounts of “diggers” (who search for buried antiques) in Kaliningrad (Sezneva 2007), Israeli military units (Sion and Ben-Ari 2005), Argentinian opera lovers (Benzecry 2007), and Japanese motorcycle (“bosozuku”) tribes (Sato 1991) all depict powerful local norms and shared images, demonstrating that group cultures are not limited to American culture, despite the preponderance of research done there. Wherever groups define themselves with common problems and the likelihood of continued interaction, group cultures are established. The microsociological approach, arguing for attention to the local conditions in which shared meaning is generated, suggests that the establishment of traditions, shared references, and customs is integral to identity and cohesion. Such creation depends upon ongoing performances that organize and routinize interaction, creating a group style (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003). In turn, as Lawler et al. (2008) have argued, different group structures may produce distinctive “microsocial orders.”
Any fully sociological understanding of the creation of group cultures must recognize the extensive institutional influences that impact the local scene, providing the conditions for shared action. The backgrounds (both demographic and habitus) of participants, coupled with the expectations that stem from group interaction, contribute to the expansion of a group’s meaning system when a triggering event occurs—an event that sparks a recognition of collective experience. This process takes external cultural themes and incorporates them within group discourse and action. Once established, cultural elements provide a mechanism by which members recognize their group as salient and create cohesion with fellow participants. Every group has access to a combination of background culture (the known culture of the group), the moral standards of discourse (the usable culture), the instrumental goals that participants desire (the functional culture), and support for the status hierarchy (the appropriate culture). What eventually becomes recognized as characterizing group life is a result of immediate interactional demands (what becomes triggered).
Whether one accepts the processes that are claimed for this model of cultural development, which emphasize the functional needs of ongoing micro-communities, the focus of a group-based approach is to understand the creation of culture through processes of interaction, arguing for a sociology of localism. A sociology of localism emphasizes that the creation of group content depends upon the recognition of shared pasts and planned futures, and does not proceed by examining cultural products as divorced from social actors or by differentiating culture as a set of ideas that transcend time and space. Given that culture-creating processes are shaped by the knowledge, understandings, and goals of participants, they create not just random cultural elements, but an integrated and thematic content-based culture that stems from the past history, current desires, and imagined futures of members. The sociology of culture must analyze how traditions unite groups, providing a cultural grounding for trust, affiliation, and cohesion that then generates shared meaning and the creation of collective identity (Farrell 2001). Without this recognition, cultural content can become the basis on which groups divide or disintegrate. It is not only that tight-knit groups create culture, but that culture facilitates the establishment of tight-knit groups (and occasionally disrupts them). As Perrin (2005) argues, civic organizations depend on discussion based upon an understood political microculture that systematically varies among types of organizations as well as taking variant forms in particular spheres.
Idiocultures are evident in small groups in all institutional domains, including dyadic relations. The examination of families, gangs, sociometric cliques, workgroups, sports teams, cults, and fraternal organizations provides instances of how local cultures shape the content of social relations. The culture of the group provides a cognitive and emotional structure through which individuals recognize their collective pasts and plan for their shared futures (Katovich and Couch 1992). Put differently, microcultures—looking forward and backwards—have a temporal dimension. By recognizing their small group culture, participants understand that they share traditions. These traditions can be invoked with the expectation that they will be understood by other members. Thus, they can be used to address external challenges to the group.
This model of microcultures as structuring devices argues that social order is generated through the development of shared traditions and understandings. Following Collins (1981), collective attention constitutes a microfoundation for macrosociology. As I discuss later, groups build upon each other, creating expansive structures through their network linkages. Or as Collins (2004: xiii) remarked, “The aggregate of situations can be regarded as a market for interaction rituals.” Collins’s approach is consistent with the process that James Scott refers to as me-tis, emphasizing the knowledge that derives from everyday, familiar experience. Scott writes, “Me-tis resists simplification into deductive principles which can successfully be transmitted through book learning, because the environments in which it is exercised are so complex and nonrepeatable that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to apply” (1998: 316). This is what Scott refers to as “the art of the locality.”
To borrow from Jeffrey Goldfarb’s resonant image, this model of culture is linked to the sociology of small things, a perspective that captures the place of action. Goldfarb starts by theorizing the kitchen table—a microcultural space. His essential point is not simply that small, mundane cultures need to be theorized, but that the conditions of the environment under which they are produced provide for allegiance and shared perspectives. Through their tight-knit culture these domains motivate certain forms of action. The locale provides the basis for both social relations and the content of group life. In the words of Goldfarb, “When friends and relatives met in their kitchens, they presented themselves to each other in such a way that they defined the situation in terms of an independent frame rather than that of officialdom” (2006: 15). Flowing from the hearth, a framework of meaning is established that abounds with the agentic responsibility of the group. Communities can come to see their spaces, their microcultures, and their place in them in ways that have recursive effects. The hearth becomes a central symbol in the resistance against Eastern European authoritarianism, but kitchens and porches are found throughout the globe as meeting points in which primary relations are bolstered and discourse addresses modes of responding to local challenges. Hearths are widely duplicated, each with its own microculture that provides a remembered and referential past and encourages present talk. Similar discussions can be found in book-stores, salons, and clubs, and from there they can in time colonize public meetings and gatherings (Habermas 1991; Emirbayer and Sheller 1998: 732; Mische and White 1998: 706). In small places participants can assume that others share a history, emotional contours, and a sense of belonging. These are locales of likeness. Tiny publics (Fine and Harrington 2004), small cultures of shared interest, and experience provide the basis of a civil society and the creation of a shared and robust public culture.
An approach that focuses on local cultures addresses several critical theoretical problems in the sociology of culture. This strategy provides for understanding how innovation, socialization, affiliation, and change become manifested, revealed in action that, when successful, evokes an affiliative response. By understanding the dynamics of community and the creation of collective identities, an emphasis on local culture stands at the critical and often unexplored junction of the individual and the institutional, thus addressing forms of cohesion as well as disaffiliation. A sociology of the local emphasizes that routines that create community and identity are generated in place and time. If they are not explicitly part of a political project, they may respond to the political projects of others. The challenge for speakers within ongoing, unscripted interaction is to organize the unpredictable, interpreting it in light of beliefs in how society does and should operate. These shaping events that determine the culture of a group are not random. They are predictable in their broad contours, if not in their details. The challenge is that those events that shape collective life are readily understandable after the fact (reading backwards), but cannot be determined before they occur (looking forwards). Participants must shape their behavior, aligning ongoing interaction with established group standards. Even if we cannot predict the moments of everyday life—the jokes, insults, errors, or queries found in conversation—participants strive to make group interaction orderly and habitual. This commitment to the stability of interaction scenes—a commitment to a smooth flow of action—allows for members and analysts to feel comfortable in their expectations, even as new interpretations are generated.
Despite their fluidity and continual adjustment, conversations and collective action become routinized, grounded in shared practices, and embedded in group culture. Research within conversation analysis emphasizes this point, finding formal structures at the most granular level of talk (Schegloff 2007). Other scholars of conversation argue that practices of talk are responsive to external rules and pressures (Gibson 2008). Even when action sequences are altered in fact, we strive to persuade ourselves that they remain much the same, evolving incrementally. Given that action is unscripted, how readily coordinated lines of action can be established and maintained is both a startling and comforting achievement. Once a direction is established and understood, participants collaborate and collude in the hope that the outcome will satisfy all those with investments in it. Although conflict cannot always be avoided, under conditions of stability actors have considerable flexibility and leeway to shape performances. The desire to support the routines of an ongoing group and fellow members, keeping interaction flowing, means that negotiated agreements have weight, so much so that disruption often requires accounts from the perpetrator and produces avoidance from the audience.
Ephemeral micropublics (“Goffman publics”) (Ikegami 2000: 997; White 1995) have a particular challenge in the creation of negotiated agreements to which participating social actors will adhere, but by means of establishing local cultures and practices self-referential groups can overcome the problem through shared expectations and a commitment to ritual. As a result, a local sociology is related to, but distinct from, the Goffmanian approach to the interaction order (Goffman 1983). Despite a shared concern with interaction ritual, dramatism, examining free-floating, untethered interaction, is contrasted to localism, the claim that action is shaped by and responsive to the salience of the group to participants. In contrast to a view that treats behavior as a response to the actions that have immediately proceeded it, seeing interaction as a form of continuous adjustment to an ever-changing and somewhat unpredictable stage, localism emphasizes the stability of group spaces with norms, standards, and expectations. The perspective of localism emphasizes the power and prominence of group rules. As a result, practices, actions understood by reference to local cultures, are central, in that such activity is linked to a bounded interactional domain, such as the kitchen table of Goldfarb’s analysis. The response to situations as places in which social ties are displayed constitutes a grounded performance, shaped by the recognition of actors and audiences within a continuing and self-referential public that shares (albeit imperfectly) a recognition of norms, values, beliefs, and rituals. Treating groups as publics means that each ongoing group constitutes a local outpost of society. Even though actions extend beyond the interacting group, the boundary of the group—realized by the participants—establishes and perhaps consecrates the legitimacy of the actions within. The local scene represents a particular instance of the larger culture, with its style, rules, and beliefs defining how social relations should be transacted (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003).
For a local sociology, culture operates as a form of group practice, linked to the meso-level of analysis—the space between individual action and the structural constraints of institutions. Interaction by itself lacks the specification of collective references through which action is transferred into routine. Local cultures organize action into a commitment to continuity, incorporating temporality and order into social life through the recognition of shared pasts and prospective futures (Katovich and Couch 1992). In other words, small group culture permits communities of actors to access tradition as part of their social field, displaying it in the forms of ritual and common references.
Although I have emphasized the linkage of culture to interacting groups, a social psychological approach to culture is not limited to intense, face-to-face microsocieties, but can be extended to larger social units by extending the small-group model. This involves treating cultures as being based upon a network of groups. Such an approach could theoretically be extended to the interpretation of national cultures because of the mass media and institutional support for widespread and mainstream cultural production and dissemination. However, the examination of subsidiary social domains that lack formal institutional support is likely to be particularly valuable because of the greater emphasis on creation of cultural forms within the context on ongoing interaction. Seeing subcultures manifest in group processes emphasizes that culture is not uniformly spread throughout a social system, but is embedded within tiny publics.
For the past half-century, social scientists have recognized that culture operates not only on the level of the nation, but within its subdivisions. These subdivisions can involve class, race, age, and gender—any domain that leads to a recognized common identity and a sense of “belonging” because of the placement of individuals within a demographic or cultural category. Such domains include the truffle trade in Provence (de la Pradelle 2006: 139–51), classical South Asian philosophy (Collins 1998: 177–271), and poetry in Tokugawa Japan (Ikegami 2005: 171–203). The underlying point for a microsociology of subcultural groups is not to emphasize the shared characteristics of the members in their biological or functional status, but to suggest how social characteristics shape the diffusion of cultural elements and the incorporation of those traditions within a set of social relations based on common affiliation.
The linkage of the process of diffusion with group identification is crucial. As a result, lines of communication are often linked to social categories. As Tamotsu Shibutani (1955: 566) remarked, “Culture areas are coterminous with communication channels.” In this, Shibutani emphasized that subcultures do not depend only on physical copresence, but rather on lines of communication, as a network perspective would suggest. These might consist of a set of gathering points (those “third places” that Ray Oldenburg (1989) describes) with continually changing attendees or open nodes of dissemination, such as internet websites or discussion boards. Such locations—physical or virtual—create spaces that draw certain types of individuals to them and, as a result, create knowledge boundaries in which some individuals are aware of cultural forms, while others are ignorant of them. Crucial are both the intersection of interacting groups that share cultural traditions with media transmissions and other communications networks that link these nodes. Weaker bridging ties connect knots of strong ties. The establishment of a common culture occurs through networks of small groups linked by media outlets that target population segments or through other forms of cross-group ties. We can conceptualize a process of differential association of social actors that links populations to cultural forms. As a result, where and whether cultural forms will be spread results from preferences and likelihoods of association within the segmental groups being considered.
Subcultural theory has traditionally focused on groups that were defined as standing outside “mainstream culture,” often deviant groups, rejecting alignment with the established norms and values. While mainstream culture is itself internally differentiated, subcultural groups were seen as separate from what was defined as widely accepted by the society in which these groups were embedded. The concept of subculture was, in effect, a means of establishing a cultural boundary. As a consequence research has examined cultures of delinquency, cultures of poverty, or the Southern culture of violence. These analyses, popular in the middle decades of the twentieth century, were based upon the claim of an obdurate dialectic between categories of Us and Them. Subcultural theory has typically depended on recognizing an otherness that is coupled with a belief that those defined as Others conform to the norms, values, and rituals of their own social category. Even examinations of youth subculture have this focus in emphasizing the power of confrontational style (Hebdige 1981). Few if any scholars define their own cultures as subcultures. Not every social segment is said to have a subculture; the operating assumption is that some segmental groups are fully embedded in civil society, whereas others stand apart. Of course, mainstream culture (however that diverse domain is defined) does not reflect the only set of choices that is possible.
The interactionist perspective on subculture (Fine and Kleinman 1979) emphasizes the importance of webs of contact in the creation, activation, and perpetuation of cultural elements. This view suggests that cultural systems constitute social worlds, a concept that derives directly from the work of Anselm Strauss (1978). David Unruh (1980: 277) defines social worlds as “amorphous, diffuse constellations of actors, organizations, events, and practices which have coalesced into spheres of interest and involvement for participants [and in which] it is likely that a powerful centralized authority structure does not exist.” Without necessarily relying on demographic differences, the social-world approach emphasizes the importance of common interests and interpersonal contacts as the basis of community and the generation of culture. The existence of a subculture makes concrete the common concerns of the group in the absence of a clear authority structure, incorporating such elements as norms, values, beliefs, moral principles, and performances. This recognition of shared standards leads to embracing a collective identity.
This interactionist perspective locates culture within groups, but leaves open the challenge of explaining widespread understandings among population segments that are not in immediate contact. Although a small group can be studied as a closed system, group members do not interact exclusively with one another. We must theorize how groups intersect and how culture is diffused within population segments. Small groups are connected with numerous other groups through a system of interlocks or social connections. Such linkages take many forms, and can involve ties among individuals or small groups, but in each case the effect is to create a shared universe of discourse that can serve as the referent for each local establishment of culture. The contents of subcultures (what they are “about”) are conceived of as emanating from group cultures and then subsequently shaping other group cultures through diffusion. Although interlocks can take many forms, I describe four: multiple-group membership, weak ties, structural roles, and specialized media diffusion.
Individuals rarely participate in a single group, but often are involved in several groups simultaneously. As a result, cultural elements that are accepted in one group can easily be introduced into others through overlapping memberships. Consider, for instance, the child who attends summer camp. Not only do camp cabins constitute groups with their own idiocultures, but each serves as an agora—a trading zone—in which local knowledges are transmitted. When campers return to a home community, these new cultures can potentially be shared and made traditional, expanding their range. The person who participates in two ongoing groups with only a few joint members serves as a crucial linkage for diffusion and cultural change. That many groups have these linkages permits ideas to transcend boundaries. The idea of the cultural “meme” emphasizes that certain elements will be seen as more transmittable (and more fit to survive) and will have a wider range (Dawkins 2006).
No matter how intense and densely connected their core social relations, most individuals maintain acquaintanceship relations outside of their stable and intense interacting groups. Networks based upon ongoing interacting groups are never fully bounded. Those external contacts or “weak ties” (Granovetter 1973; Collins 1998) are crucial for disseminating information widely and rapidly. Studies of rumor, of gossip, or of news in times of crisis demonstrate that information can spread quickly under favorable conditions—if the information is seen as significant and the relational structure is conducive to diffusion. Networks of weak ties have boundaries—racial, class, age, geography, or gender—limiting these pools of knowledge from being open to all. Further, different networks may transmit particular cultural genres, based on the assumed interest of the target (such as off-color humor, health information, or celebrity gossip).
Cultural information is also spread by those with particular structural positions in intergroup relations. Individuals who in their work or leisure roles intersect with multiple groups, organizations, or communities have the ability to spread information; these actors include motivational speakers, itinerant preachers, and standup comics. While their primary role obligation is not to diffusion culture from group to group, this constitutes an indirect result of their multi-group contact.
The final interlocks that knit groups together are the specialized media. Media reach numerous groups simultaneously, providing the basis of shared knowledge. Media productions (opera, rock fests) are not accessed by random audiences. To the contrary, awareness results from prior interest, as interest shapes the boundary of exposure.
An important domain in the study of subcultures is that of countercultures, because, as noted, groups that are treated as subcultural are those that stand apart from the mainstream. However, in contrast to the traditional subculture, participants within countercultural groups typically share a consciousness that they are oppositional or counter-hegemonic (Yinger 1982). As typically defined, countercultures politicize or define their cultural themes as constituting a social critique. More explicitly than subcultural participation, embracing a counterculture suggests the explicit choice of an identity that differentiates a person from a dominant class. Fortunately for the stability of society, such groups are typically limited in participation. A countercultural perspective is inevitably historically and geographically situated, and, so, for example, countercultural movements were more prominent in the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s than currently, even though the distinctive styles of some youth groups (Goths, for instance) incorporate countercultural elements. In societies with strong youth movements, such as activist movements in Brazil (Mische 2007) or alienated youth in Japan (Sato 1991), these opposition networks can be quite robust.
Within the contemporary American context at least, the cultures of groups that oppose dominant systems are rarely fully oppositional; oppositional claims may constitute only a relatively small portion of a group’s activity. Still, it is that rejection of dominant norms and values that both outsiders and insiders use to characterize the group. At issue is how a group’s members come to treat their shared identity and activity: whether their identity is primarily internal to the group or whether—as in the case of countercultural groups— the subculture presents an active rejection of the mainstream culture.
Just as the culture concept in sociology can be linked to macro-sociological analysis, culture as a form of practice and as a negotiated order equally belongs to the micro- and meso-level. Culture ultimately comprised of actions that are performed and viewed or objects that are manufactured and consumed. This suggests that the locale and the timing of production are critical to its analysis. I began by describing culture as a behavioral domain that is constructed in and indigenous to small groups. Extending the analysis, I argued that society is comprised as a network of interlinked groups, which when it is segmented into networks of groups leads to the recognition of subcultures. Those subcultures that take an oppositional stance to the consensually recognized social order, and in which identities support this rejection, permit some cultures—as in the case of countercultures—to be sites of resistance, not only in their ideas and their collective action, but reflected in the selves of actors.
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