Cultural Toolkit Research Articles

Employing a Cultural Toolkit to Work Through Paradox

Employing a Cultural Toolkit to Work Through Paradox

“Hurdles” or “lubricants”: Petty corruption and Chinese migrants in Africa

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana and China between 2016 and 2022, this paper provides a sociological analysis of how new Chinese migrants in Ghana, and more generally in Sub‐Saharan Africa, navigate their social and economic integration into the host society by dealing with petty corruption in everyday life. This article examines how similarities and discrepancies in corruption norms contribute to “cultural matching” and cultural conflicts in Sino‐African encounters, as well as the coping strategies and social‐cultural techniques the migrants develop to navigate their relationship with local bureaucracy. My findings demonstrate that for migrants within the Global South, corruption in the sending and receiving regions is likely to be rooted in different politico‐economic structures and cultural grounds. Conflicting understandings of corruption can pose challenges to migrants' initial adaptation in the host society. However, as the migrants develop a proper “cultural toolkit,” engagement in corruption and rent‐seeking activities may provide a “cultural matching” interface that facilitates the rapid integration of new migrants into the local market and society. This study provides new insights into our understanding of bureaucracy in international migration, corruption, and migration settlement, as well as the sociocultural negotiation of corruption codes and norms in cross‐cultural encounters.

“If I got it, she got it”: Black mothers' food provision and symbiotic mothering

AbstractObjectiveThis study advances contemporary theories of motherhood, mothering, and foodwork within the context of poverty by focusing on the ways that low‐income Black mothers engage interdependent culturally distinct mothering strategies in light of a porous social safety net.BackgroundContemporary standards for good parenting are increasingly resource‐based.As such, the intricate and tactical ways that low‐income Black mothers manage to make food ends meet with little means and few resources are often obscured in favor of hegemonic forms of mothering.MethodThis study draws on 44 in‐depth interviews with low‐income Black mothers and grandmothers to examine their survival strategies, focusing on food provision.ResultsFindings reveal that these mothers prioritize basic needs provision, such as food and feeding, and achieve this often difficult goal by engaging a cultural toolkit that we term symbiotic mothering. Symbiotic mothering is constructed and reinforced through the collective processes of maternal exchange, mutual aid and resource pooling, and the intergenerational and horizontal transmission of cultural knowledges, values, and practices.ConclusionsWhile there is a wealth of scholarship interrogating the ways Black women deviate from dominant mothering expectations, symbiotic mothering highlights the unique cultural skillsets these mothers actively engage to meet the everyday demands of mothering, particularly related to food provision.

The Racialization of the Cultural Toolkit and the Racial Positions of Asia and Asian America

Drawing from eleven (11) in-depth interviews with Korean and Korean American students at a predominantly white university (PWI) coupled with ethnographic participant observation of registered Korean American and Korean student organizations, this study develops how “Hallyu”—a nomenclature to refer to the Korean cultural wave—is received and interpreted by Asian and Asian American students. Borrowing from Eng and Han’s racial dissociation and Swidler’s metaphor of a cultural toolkit, this study shows a broader understanding of the immigrant experience of Asian Americans while simultaneously highlighting the dominant frame in which Asian Americans see themselves within the racial order vis-a-vis Hallyu. Furthermore, this study captures the racial dynamics of Asian American college students as they express (1) racial apathy, (2) racial and ethnic identity crises, and (3) experience of hyper-racialization. In complicating these nuances, this study illustrates the limitations of diversity, inclusion, and efforts at “multiculturalism,” suggesting analysts of race start from a global, transnational framework to examine the racialization of Asian and Asian Americans.

Social Media and the Inlaying, Infixing, and Annealing of Cultural Toolkits During Cultural Change

Social Media and the Inlaying, Infixing, and Annealing of Cultural Toolkits During Cultural Change

Understanding the positive and negative outcomes of developmental challenges on the social psychology of female executives in top management teams

AbstractDrawing on social identity theory, this conceptual article proposes how working in a male‐dominated top management team (TMT) leads to changes in the social psychology of female executives over time. Further, it simultaneously incorporates the role of various factors to develop a comprehensive understanding of positive as well as negative change experiences of female executives. Based on thorough review and integration of the relevant literature from the domains of organizational behaviour, gender management, and psychology, key themes have been extracted and a conceptual model has been proposed. It is suggested that female executives are likely to face epistemological shock after becoming a part of male‐dominated TMTs; however, proactive interactions and development of their cultural toolkit is expected to polish leadership capabilities and improve leader identity in them. Conversely, challenges in developing their cultural toolkit may lead to experiences of emotional exhaustion and the eventual psychological detachment of female executives from their teams and work environment. Unlike the focus of existing literature on general social and cultural challenges faced by female workers, this research offers a unique theoretical direction regarding the essence of extensive psychological changes and their long‐term prospects for females in male‐dominated TMTs. Finally, it also offers practical implications for highlighting various ways to encourage proactivity and social support for creating diversity and inclusion‐based leadership in organizations.

Multimodality as civic participation

Abstract In October 2018, a collaboration between young rap artists in Thailand’s Indy rap scene, Rap Against Dictatorship (RAD), launched a video criticizing the ruling Junta that went viral within days of publication. The Junta soon after released its own video as a response to RAD. The production and publication of both videos are what Scollon (2001) calls social actions mediated by a distinct cultural toolkit. This study analyzed how modes such as music, text, color, camera angle, gestures, voice, image and iconicity emerged in both videos to realize scalar differences in civic participation. The Junta’s video represents a high sociolinguistic scale, whereas RAD realizes a lower scale. In a time of political unrest in Thailand, sociolinguistic scale and the semiotic resources that people employ to realize scales are a lens to analyze how different stakeholders address various perspectives of the political situation and appeal to different levels of civic participation.

The Role of Religion in Moldovan Populist Mobilization Strategies: A Competition between Traditional and Religious Values?

ABSTRACT The article contributes to the study of the relationship between religion and populist mobilization strategies of non–right-wing-populist actors in the post-Soviet space. It analyzes how religious references are employed to appeal to voters’ collective identities in the Republic of Moldova. The analysis of two Moldovan parties’ electoral campaigns in 2019–2020 highlights how notions of “religious values” and “traditional values” are used to evoke the “cultural toolkit.” By stressing the homogeneity of voters or the dichotomy between “the people” and “the elite,” the parties tie their religious references to different geopolitical narratives and society’s sets of core values.

Good jobs, scam jobs: Detecting, normalizing, and internalizing online job scams during the COVID-19 pandemic

Good jobs that allow remote work have enabled white-collar professionals to stay home during COVID-19, but for precarious workers, online advertisements for work-from-home employment are often scams. In this article, based on in-depth interviews conducted between April and July 2020 with nearly 200 precarious workers, we find that precarious workers regularly encountered fraudulent job advertisements via digital media. Drawing on Swidler’s concepts of the cultural tool kit and cultural logic, we find that in this time of uncertainty, workers defaulted to the focus on personal responsibility that is inherent in insecurity culture. Following the cultural logic of personal responsibility, job seekers did not place blame on job search websites for allowing the scams to be posted, but normalized the situation, deploying a scam detection repertoire in response. In addition, the discovery that advertised “good jobs” are often scams affecting workers’ desire to continue job hunting and perceptions of potential future success.

The massacre generation: Young people and attitudes about mass shooting prevention

AbstractObjectiveWe propose that citizens navigate an increasingly complex social and political world using a “cultural toolkit” shaped by firearms and gun violence. Young people in particular have experienced more mass shootings than any previous generation and have witnessed a lack of government response to these massacres. This article explores the attitudes that members of the Massacre Generation express about mass shooting prevention.MethodsWe analyze data from several public opinion surveys conducted following major mass shootings in the United States using logistic regression. These surveys were fielded and sponsored by a variety of organizations and asked a nearly identical question about whether mass shootings can be prevented by societal and governmental action.ResultsWe find that the Massacre Generation is indeed more likely to think the government can prevent mass shootings by implementing stricter gun control laws. We find evidence of these attitudes in multiple public opinion surveys from 2012 to 2018. Furthermore, we find no age effect in multiple surveys conducted between 1999 and 2011, suggesting that these attitudes are a relatively new phenomenon.ConclusionYoung people today express that government regulation (i.e., stricter gun laws) can prevent gun violence, placing them at odds with older generations. We discuss the implications of our findings for gun policy development and the future of the gun debate.

Far From Void: How Institutions Shape Growth in Informal Economies

Entrepreneurship scholars often lament the lack of economic growth in contexts of poverty and informality. We propose that this dismal assessment, as well as subsequent prescriptions to address it, flow from a narrow epistemological approach to informality based on absence, where the lack of (Western) market-supporting legal and regulatory institutions explain missing economic growth at the firm level. In contrast, we build a theoretical approach grounded in presence, proposing that a more comprehensive incorporation of existing institutions may reveal less visible, individual level types of entrepreneurial growth occurring in informal economies. To do so, we conceptualize informal economies as institutional interfaces built of “bits and pieces” from market and non-market institutions. We propose that the configuration of these interfaces influences the cultural toolkits of inhabitant entrepreneurs, which in turn shapes how they grow in an informal economy. Specifically, we link three dimensions of institutional complexity at the institutional interface (jurisdictional influence, fragmentation, and incompatibility) to three types of growth (direct, dispersed, and disguised) that vary in terms of visibility. Our theory animates understanding of diverse informal economies and the entrepreneurial activity that exists within them.

КОНЦЕПТ ТРИЕДИНСТВА «СИМВОЛ-ЗНАК-ОБРАЗ» В ТРАДИЦИОННОЙ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОЙ КУЛЬТУРЕ НАРОДОВ АРКТИКИ

The article analyzes the "concept" as a cultural toolkit in the study of artistic forms of traditional culture. The concept of the trinity "Symbol-Sign-Image" is determined, reflecting the universal properties of artistic meanings and creative heritage in the context of the unification of the ethnic modern world. In modern times, with significant ethnic differences in traditional culture in Artik, universal concepts have developed that create stable forms, identified with certain ethnic groups and states. The concept of "concept" in the context of culturological tools is determined by the totality of scientific approaches to the study of traditional artistic culture. To date, there is no single definition of the concept, since the categorical-methodological toolkit reflects many aspects of the studied objects of the concept, associated with the diversity of identifying essential characteristics and features of cultural phenomena. The potential of a concept as a methodological toolkit is determined by its universal properties. Thus, the concept of the trinity "Symbol-Sign-Image" has all the features of an instrument of cultural knowledge.

Race and the Financial Toolkit: Bridging Cultural Theories to Understand Behavior and Decision Making in the Racial Wealth Gap

In this article, I theorize the “financial toolkit” or the repertoires that inform financial decision‐making processes and explain why and what racial differences we should expect. I argue that while prior literature has focused on financial repertoires with large racial differences, we should expect both similar and distinct financial repertoires by race given that social networks and neighborhoods of residences are racially segregated, but mainstream media sources and national narratives create common financial discourses. Using data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, I show that while Black, Latinx, and White respondents all draw on social network and media sources for information about finances, that the financial practices they identify as ideal are only similar when articulated as broad, vague practices. Racial differences emerge among specific financial behaviors about how to engage with money. These findings contribute to our understandings of how culture contributes to the racial wealth gap, how institutions contribute to cultural toolkits, and how race informs behavior and decision‐making.

Symbolic representations of cultural industries at content trade fairs: Bourdieu's “economic world reversed” revisited

From business events such as content trade fairs, we can learn about the institutional logics of contemporary cultural industries. In our ethnographic fieldwork at six different trade fairs in three industries (book, music and TV), we identified five ways of legitimating the commercial production and distribution of cultural goods: cultural industries are represented as an idealized form of business, as art for art's sake, as innovation and technology, as entertainment and as a public sphere. Our findings both confirm and contradict Bourdieu's theory of cultural production fields. In accordance with Bourdieu's description of the field as a reversed economic world, we observed an industry which struggles to disguise ordinary economic transactions, such as negotiating deals, ordering services or making contracts. In contrast to Bourdieu, we do not find a strong homology between a position in the field and its symbolic representation. Rather, we observed that small enterprises from the restricted field of cultural production as well as large-scale producers and distributors of cultural goods use the same narratives to legitimate their practices. Borrowing from recent advancements in organizational institutionalism, we interpret the symbolic representations at trade fairs as a cultural toolkit from which people in the industry strategically choose in order to pursue their interests.

Appalachia: Putting the "Critical" in Race and Crowdsourcing a Pathway Model on Institutional Racism.

As the website Understanding and Dismantling Racism: Crowdsourcing a Pathway Model in Appalachia explains, we are seeking assistance in refining a pathway model that elucidates institutional racism from the unique standpoint of Appalachia. We think that Appalachia has a distinctive cultural toolkit that shapes its orientation on issues. Our goal is to use crowdsourcing to harness this unique Appalachian ethos to refine the Pathway model on Institutional Racism based on comments, edits, questions, and ideas left on the website.

La costruzione dell'immaginario M5S attraverso i social media: qual è stato il ruolo del Direttorio? = The construction of M5S imaginary through social media: what has the role of the Directorate been?

Over the last decade, the term populism has become increasingly popular. However, due to the mutability of populist movements and the diversity of the contexts in which they have developed, it has been difficult to place the different manifestations of the populist phenomenon within a single ideology. In fact, a populist narrative seems to resort to the cultural toolkit at its disposal, drawing from time to time on different components of the social and cultural environment in which it is immersed, without being crystallized in a coherent and static ideology. From this perspective, populism can therefore be traced back to the type of discourse used to frame a political event, in which the narrative component of the discourse is used strategically – or adaptively – to constitute a multifaceted and contradictory political identity to which everyone can refer even if not all the instances are shared. To investigate the hypotheses regarding the role of online communication in the construction of such populist narratives, we will analyse all the tweets produced by the three best known representatives of the Five Star Movement (Alessandro Di Battista, Luigi Di Maio and Raffaele Fico) from 2013 to 2019 by means of computational techniques. Starting from the works that have already defined the communicative style of the founder Beppe Grillo, our goal is to shift the attention to the Directorate, the plural leadership of the Five Star Movement innovative organizational structure and understand its role in the construction of the social imaginary connected to the party.

Religion, Spirituality, Community, and Change at a Residential Homeless Shelter

ABSTRACT This article looks at the effects of religion, spirituality, and religious community in an evangelical Christian homeless shelter. We describe the culture of the shelter as well as the life stories of its residents, with the goal of understanding how residents experience the shelter and how religion and the religious community help them cope with their past and improve their situations. We illustrate how many of the residents connect to the spiritual and cultural toolkit, culture and community at Grace Ministries, and then incorporate these elements into their life stories, which helps them start tackling issues such as low selfesteem, depression, and addictions.

Cultural evolution and prehistoric demography.

One prominent feature of human culture is that different populations have different tools, technologies and cultural artefacts, and these unique toolkits can also differ in size and complexity. Over the past few decades, researchers in the fields of prehistoric demography and cultural evolution have addressed a number of questions regarding variation in toolkit size and complexity across prehistoric and modern populations. Several factors have been proposed as possible explanations for this variation: in particular, the mobility of a population, the resources it uses, the volatility of its environment and the number of individuals in the population. Using a variety of methods, including empirical and ethnographic research, computational models and laboratory-based experiments, researchers have found disparate results regarding each hypothesis. These discordant findings have led to debate over the factors that most significantly influence toolkit size and composition. For instance, several computational, empirical and laboratory studies of food-producing populations have found a positive correlation between the number of individuals in a population and toolkit size, whereas similar studies of hunter-gatherer populations have found little evidence of such a link. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature in this field of study and propose corollaries and interdisciplinary approaches with the goal of reconciling dissimilar findings into a more comprehensive view of cultural toolkit variation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography'.

Social accounting in the context of profound political, social and economic crisis: the case of the Arab Spring

PurposeThis paper explores how social accounting operates in the context of profound political, social and economic crises. Specifically, it examines how companies constructed strategies of action to produce and organise social accounting practices under different sociopolitical and economic contexts prior to and after the Arab Spring.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on Swidler's theory of “Culture Toolkit” and 43 semi-structured interviews with 17 firms and their stakeholders in the Arab region.FindingsThe study argues that context influences social accounting practices by shaping a cultural toolkit of habits, skills and styles from which companies develop their social accounting related strategies of action. During “settled” periods, companies draw on resources to develop their social accounting practices whilst they seek knowledge and feedback on boundaries and expectations of the socio-political and economic contexts. During “unsettled” periods, companies begin to adopt highly organised meaning systems (i.e. ideologies) from which new ways and methods of social accounting practices are deployed.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the extant literature by providing insights into social accounting practices in the under-explored context of the profound political, social and economic crises that followed the Arab Spring. In addition, we introduce Swidler's Culture Toolkit theory to the accounting literature.

Race, culture, and economics: an example from North-South trade relations

This essay refines the understanding of culture and race – with operational and temporal dynamics – to explain North-South trade outcomes. Following traditions in economic sociology and anthropology, culture is presented as a toolkit of values. The recent rise of racism and xenophobia as values associated with populism can be traced to cultural toolkits that have sedimented histories. The cultural unsettledness of the present times has brought these values to fore. The blindspots in political economy ignored the cultural embeddedness of interests and values as they evolve through time, and therefore missed both the examination of important outcomes and their historical roots. The paper provides an empirical example from racialized values embedded in the history of North-South trade relations.