How Culture Changes
There is a debate today over the dynamics of
cultural formation. One’s strategies and tactics are significantly shaped by
one’s understanding of these dynamics. Here are the basic contrasts:
Bottom Up vs. Top Down
Individuals vs. Institutions
Masses vs. Gatekeepers
Artifacts vs. Matrix
Conscious Choice vs. Unconscious Coercion
Information vs. Imagination
University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter argues that the common
view of cultural change is sociologically ill-informed and consequently
ineffective. Good intentions and increased activity are no substitute for an
accurate understanding.
Culture is the frame or story through which we live our lives.
Winston Churchill said we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. Culture
formation works in the same way: it’s a historically informed dialectical
process. Culture is both socially constructed and socially constraining. We make
culture and are, in turn, made by it. Culture is the frame or story through
which we live our lives. Everything is seen or explained through its lens.
Culture includes the ideas, images, and institutions that shape a given
society’s understanding of what is thinkable, sayable, and doable in a given
time and place. It serves as an invisible matrix.
Those individuals or gatekeepers that have decision-making authority within the
culture industry have a disproportionate influence in society. Culture is a
public reality maintained by public institutions. Hunter writes, “While everyone
participates in the construction of their own private worlds, the development
and articulation of the more elaborate systems of meaning, including the realm
of public culture, falls more or less exclusively to the realm of elites. They
are the ones who provide the concepts, supply the language, and explicate the
logic of public discourse.” Those individuals or gatekeepers that have
decision-making authority within the culture industry have a disproportionate
influence in society. The culture industry is the academy, arts, media,
advertising, and entertainment. They function as the creators of the collective
ideas and images of a society.
Power of Culture
Religious elites have an existence that is
essentially meaningless to the economic, political, and cultural dynamics of
advanced industrial society.
The power of culture is its ability to create an unconscious matrix of ideas and
images. Hunter writes, “The power of culture is not measured by the size of a
cultural organization or by the quantity of its output, but by the extent to
which a definition of reality is realized in the social world—taken seriously
and acted upon by actors in the social world. In modern society religious elites
have an existence that is essentially meaningless to the economic, political,
and cultural dynamics of advanced industrial society—a sideshow to the ‘real’
issues of the day.” Religion in a post-Christian society has been relegated to
the private subjective realm of individuals and families, rather than the public
objective world of business and politics. Sunday is disconnected from Monday.
Cultural change is top-down, not bottom-up, diffused through culture-forming
institutions rather than the mass mobilization of individuals. Market
populism—the combination of consumerism and egalitarianism—masks this process.
Culture formation does not function as a mass consumer market. Culture is not
the aggregate of atomized individual choices. It cannot be correctly thought of
in the language or categories of politics or business. Consequently, changing
individuals will not ultimately change culture—even if every individual in a
society were included.
The gatekeepers of the reality-defining institutions frame the public metaphors
and shape the collective imagination. These institutions, in turn, set the
parameters for the private behavior and consciousness of the masses.
It is this failure to acknowledge a role, not to mention a disproportionate
importance, for institutions and elites that constitutes a major problem
in current thinking about cultural change. One reason for this blind spot is
that to acknowledge the power of institutions is to seemingly relinquish one’s
own agency. But agency is always mediated—by the past that we inherit and the
present we confront. Individual agency—while critically important in local
settings—is largely an illusion at the societal level. It is institutions, such
as the church, that give cultural traction to individual agency over time and in
society at large.
Moreover, there is a food chain in cultural innovation and diffusion, beginning
with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible to those whose work is
most concrete and visible. With the advent of digital communication and the
Internet, there is a proliferation of information and an acceleration of its
cultural diffusion. Intellectual innovations that once took decades to filter
into the cultural mainstream now happen immediately and globally.
Each of these linkages is strategically important. Lasting change doesn’t happen
unless there is a constructive strategic partnership between academics and
activists, between theorists and practitioners, scholars and businessmen.
Most Conceptual
• Theorists (discover knowledge)
⇓ Researchers (prove knowledge)
⇓ Academics (teach knowledge)
⇓ Popularizers (simplify knowledge)
⇓ Consultants (advise about knowledge)
• Practitioners (apply knowledge)
Most Concrete
Cultural influence thus requires a long-term commitment of intellectual effort
and financial resources that are strategically placed. Changing the cultural
direction requires reshaping the taken-for-granted assumptions about
reality, which necessitates gaining access to the reality-defining spheres of
cultural influence and establishing strategic linkages to the channels of
cultural diffusion. The aim is to reframe the collective imagination.
There are no short cuts or quick fixes to lasting cultural change.