1. Dimensions of Human Behavior: Person and Environment
Chapter 8
Culture

2. KEY POINTS ADDRESSED Meeting the Challenge of Definition
A Social Constructionist Perspective
A Multidimensional, Postmodern Approach
Understanding the Historical Traditions
Intellectual Orientations
Three Major Types
Basic Axioms About Culture
Relevant Culture Concepts and Theoretical Perspectives
A Practice Orientation
Important Concepts, Definitions, and Uses
Maintaining and Changing Culture
Symbols as Metaphors
Chapter 8: Culture

3. Meeting the Challenge of Definition: A Social Constructionist Perspective
Definitions and discussions of culture tend to reflect the theoretical perspectives and purposes of the definers.
The view of culture presented in this discussion:
Exposes social differences and human variation
Highlights the cultural bases of various forms of inequality
Describes ways in which variations in human behavior have led to subjugation and have become the basis of racial, ethnic, economic, gender oppression, and inequality
Chapter 8: Culture

4. Meeting the Challenge of Definition: A Multidimensional, Postmodern Approach
“a set of common understandings, manifest in act and artifact”
inside somebody’s head as understandings
in the external environment as act and artifact
Involves the construction of meanings associated with the social and material world
Includes both behavior (act or actions) and the material outcomes of that behavior
Constrains and is constrained by nature, biology, social conditions, and other realities of human existence
Chapter 8: Culture

5. Understanding the Historical Traditions: Intellectual Orientations
Enlightenment
Concerned with the universal application of a rational and scientific thought process
Cultures and civilizations could be ranked
Biological determinism
Continues to exert strong influence on everyday understanding
of culture
Romantic
Differences in culture reflect different frameworks of meaning, understanding,
and lifestyles
All people and their cultures are relatively equal in value
Cultural relativism
Useful in social work practice to understand individuals’ points of view and the context of their life
Chapter 8: Culture

6. Consider: Tina and Stan
Identify the ‘remnants’ of the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods of intellectual thought in the contemporary stories of Tina and Stan.
Chapter 8: Culture

7. Understanding the Historical Traditions: Three Major Types
Traditional culture, or premodern culture, refers to pre-industrial societies based on subsistence agriculture
Modern culture is characterized by rationality, industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism of the 20th century
Postmodernism refers to contemporary culture characterized by global electronic communications
Chapter 8: Culture

8. Basic Axioms About Culture
Chapter 8: Culture

9. Consider: Relevant Culture Concepts and Theoretical Perspectives
Discuss how/why a particular theoretical perspective is associated with each of the following concepts:
Ideology – dominant ideas about the way things are and should work
Ethnocentrism – elevating own ethnic group and its social and cultural processes above others
Cultural symbols -- something verbal or nonverbal that comes to stand for something else
Worldview – an idea of reality, a “concept of nature, of self, of society” associated with cognitive
domain
Ethos – “tone, character, and quality of [people’s] life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood”
associated with the emotional or affective
Cultural innovation – culture is adapted, modified, and changed through interactions over time
Cultural conflict – the symbols we use are arbitrary and can mean different things to different
groups of people
Chapter 8: Culture

10. Toward a Practice Orientation: Important Cultural Concepts
Culture is both public and private …has emotional and cognitive components that play out in public in our social actions.
Symbols are a way of communicating private meaning through public or social action.
People’s actions express their worldview (how they think about the world) and their ethos (how they feel about the world)
Chapter 8: Culture

11. What is a Practice Orientation?
A postmodern theoretical orientation that:
Focuses on people’s actions as expressions of their worldview and their ethos
Seeks to explain cultural innovation by what people do as thinking, intentionally acting persons in the face of embedded ideologies and cultural conflict
Explores different meanings for things we take for granted and variation in the social environment
Chapter 8: Culture

12. A Practice Orientation: Conceptualizing, Organizing, and Analyzing Cultural Processes:
Practice Orientation Questions:
How do social systems shape, guide, and direct people’s values, beliefs, and behavior?
How do people, as human actors or agents, perpetuate or shape social systems?
Practice Orientation Focuses on:
How human beings construct meaning, intentionality, and public behavior
How human beings produce systemic cultural change, adapt, or maintain the culture
Practice Orientation Goal :
To develop a deeper understanding of inequalities based on race, ethnicity and social class, and gender relations, among other sociocultural processes
Practice Orientation Key Elements:
History, social structure, and human agency
Chapter 8: Culture

13. Using a Practice Orientation: Key Elements and Implications
History – consider people’s diverse motives and actions as they make and transform the world in which they live, the memories of official and unofficial observers
Structure – consider how we reproduce trends, patterns, and structures when we assume the rightness of our values, beliefs, and meaning and see no need to change them; how hegemony (dominance of a particular way of seeing the world) is a barrier to cultural change
Human Agency – consider people as active participants in their lives, who construct culture by investing the world with subjective order, meaning, and value; that they are capable of exercising their will to shape their lives; that they can construct social and political identities to resist and contest cultural hegemony
Chapter 8: Culture

14. Consider: Tina and Stan
Compare and contrast the culture of poverty and practice orientation as ways to understand Tina and Stan’s worlds.
Chapter 8: Culture

15. Maintaining Culture By:
Common Sense – what people have come to believe everyone in a community or society should know and understand as a matter of ordinary, taken-for-granted social competence
Traditions – cultural beliefs and practices so taken for granted that they seem inevitable parts of life
Customs – cultural practices that come into being and persist as solutions to problems of living … collective memories of the group
Chapter 8: Culture

16. Changing Culture Through:
Assimilation – the cultural uniqueness of the minority is abandoned and its members try to blend invisibly into the dominant culture
Accommodation – partial or selective cultural change. Nondominant groups follow the norms, rules, and standards of the dominant culture only in specific circumstances and contexts
Acculturation – mutual sharing of culture; groups remain distinct, certain elements of culture change through exchange and blend of preferences in foods, music, dances, clothing, and the like.
Bicultural Socialization – a nonmajority group or member mastering both the dominant culture and their own
Chapter 8: Culture

17. A Final Note: Symbols as Metaphors
Concepts used as symbols and metaphors across centuries and continents to generate meaning and power in society:
Race – a system of social identity; a fundamental principle of social organization but has no validity as a biological category (meanings and uses of race shift, depending on the social, economic, and political context)
Ethnicity – static traditions, customs, and values that reflect a deep and enduring cultural identity and a desire to keep that identity intact
Ethnic Identity – is how ethnic groups define themselves and maintain meaning for living individually and as a group
Chapter 8: Culture

18. Symbols as Metaphors
Social class – way of ascribing status, prestige, and power based on education, income, and occupation
Gender – what our culture symbolizes and means by maleness and femaleness
Family – a set of relationships among two or more people to carry out various social and biological functions, such as support, nurturance, sexual mating, procreation, and child rearing
Chapter 8: Culture