Cultural Action Research Articles

Are we allowed to win this time: new warrior culture in action and government betrayal in the American Rifleman 1975–2023

The emergence of New Warrior culture in the post-Vietnam era has largely been unexplored by sociology of culture. While recent research on the NRA has explored significant aspects of gun culture such as advertising, narratives, as well as ratings of gun empowerment etc., less work has investigated how the NRA facilitated changes not only in gun culture but in the “systems of social relations” between gun owners and the government but also in “systems of meaning” in how gun owners understand their guns. This paper argues that the NRA’s use of Native American warrior narratives, combined with other New Warrior narratives, maps onto Swidler’s unsettled time. Merging classic warrior narratives based in service to the nation alongside extensive use of Native American warriors, the NRA leveraged warrior narratives as a way of facilitating the transformation of warrior identity from one who defends the nation to one that is prepared to fight their government. In this way, the NRA was able to communicate antigovernment narratives without openly embracing the conspiratorial antigovernment ideals espoused by some factions of the militia movement by changing warrior cultural narratives from defending the nation to fighting against its government.

Using Cultural Repertoires during Unsettled Times

Abstract This research draws on the theory of culture in action, which explains how consumers selectively mobilize their cultural repertoires to understand and solve daily problems. Contemporary life, however, is increasingly unsettled, challenging the adequacy of consumers’ repertoires and how they use existing institutional cultural resources. This qualitative study identifies four ways in which consumers use their cultural repertoires and institutional resources during unsettled times. Formulaic uses are when consumers mobilize familiar cultural tools and existing resources to resettle. Versatile uses are when consumers develop new cultural tools to transform while working within demanding institutional resources. Freewheeling uses are when consumers mobilize familiar cultural tools for play but rework institutional resources to be less demanding. Finally, troubleshooting uses are when consumers extend their existing cultural tools to suffice but reject institutional resources. These varied uses of culture capture how consumers either mobilize or develop their cultural repertoires and institutional resources to serve different ends. This study provides a more dynamic, pragmatic, and nuanced explanation of how consumers summon culture to solve problems during unsettled times. A conceptual model explains this process, and the discussion highlights the theoretical contributions.

The Protestants’ Dilemma: When Cultural Mismatches Shape Deliberate Action

Abstract Drawing from an ethnographic study and 63 interviews of Protestant professionals in the workplace, this article develops a conceptualization of how a cultural mismatch—defined here as a moral conflict between actors’ beliefs and values and their contextual norms and practices—catalyzes actors to strategically and deliberately shape future lines of action. In this study, a range of Protestant executives, professionals, and workers in China experience a cultural mismatch and respond in a number of ways. This study builds on accounts of culture in action to argue that when actors’ values and beliefs conflict with their organizational context, such cultural mismatches can shape action in not only unconscious, automatic ways or as post hoc justifications, as much of the extant scholarship has emphasized, but can also deliberately shape future lines of irrational, strategic, and creative action.

Cultural Objects, Material Culture, and Materiality

The study of cultural objects and their materiality has moved to the center of cultural sociology. This review synthesizes the work of this third wave of cultural sociology, demonstrating how insights from the study of cultural objects and their mechanisms of meaning-making deepen our theories of culture in action, culture and cognition, and the production and reception of culture. After placing this third wave in the historical context of cultural sociology, this review clarifies three concepts: cultural objects, material culture, and materiality. This review then makes a series of interventions around meaning-making and action based on insights from scholarship on cultural objects and materiality. First, it advocates attention to qualities in addition to symbols. Then it examines how object affordances constrain and enable meaning and use and how objects have material agency. Then the role of cultural objects in stabilizing and destabilizing meaning and social arrangements is discussed. Finally, cultural power—whether and how cultural objects shape belief and behavior—is considered through the orienting concepts of figure and ground.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Centenary Retrospective: Film Culture in Action

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Centenary Retrospective: Film Culture in Action

Culture in Action: How Is Culture Perceived and Driven in Leading Organizations with a Significant Indian Presence

Organizations focus a lot on their culture to attract the best talent to work with them. Leaders of these organizations expound their values on social media, employ PR agents and consulting firms to fine-tune their values, commonly stated through their websites, newsletters, and official communications, but how do people working there actually perceive these values? How are they driven from leadership to the lowest level of employees? This article attempts to address these issues by a qualitative research methodology based on Grounded Theory. Responses of employees working at leading organizations discuss their perceptions of culture in action, how values are driven, their anticipations for the future, and areas of improvement in their organizations. A thematic frequency-based analysis method is used to derive common themes, which can infer common patterns in action across 23 organizations with a strong Indian presence. The respondents span mainly across HR and marketing, with responses from finance, strategy and technology also included.

우리는 왜 1990년대를 기억하는가

The 1990s are already in the past, but they are still being recalled to our society in various forms. The phenomenon of past culture re-emerging in the present time and space is not so new, but what this paper pays attention to is why it is the 1990s and why it is now. To this end, this paper first examined the characteristics of culture in the 1990s through Arjun Appadurai's concept of landscape and Raymond Williams' concept of structure of feeling. From this point of view, it was confirmed that culture in the 1990s was forming a structure of feeling in the context of changes in domestic and foreign politics, economy, and international order. In particular, it has been confirmed that the dominant are consumer culture and cultural industry, the residual is a culture of action and reaction of political power, and the emergent is digital culture, and they coexist together and form a structure of feeling of culture in the 1990s. Later discussions focused on the concept of memory and dealt with the aspects of this 1990s culture being recalled and what it means today. First of all, it was discussed that culture in the 1990s was a kind of myth, although it is currently residual. This is because it has economic value and at the same time provides a refuge from the contradiction of reality. And it has been confirmed that remembering the culture of the 1990s is part of the way individuals expand and continue to connect and participate, and that today, it is becoming a puissance of the community. Through this, it was confirmed that remembering the culture of the 1990s means that our society recognizes the value of the residual, and that it is part of the performance of social members to construct identity.

Cultural safety as a foundation for allyship in disability arts

The practice of allies – the non-disabled producers, directors, curators and facilitators who support the work of disabled arts and media makers – has not been subject to dedicated analysis. In this article, we argue that cultural safety, respect, and trust is a precursor to good allyship in the creative industries. We outline factors that influence feelings of safety or non-safety for disabled arts and media makers, and the way the legacy of the medical model makes it difficult for many arts and media workers to appreciate and enact enablers of safety as part of an allyship relationship. Education through reports and training sessions is not enough to ensure would be arts allies can establish cultural safety. What is required, we argue, is direct experience of how disabled artists and long-term allies enact cultural safety through the disability space, time and relational concepts central to disability arts, culture, and aesthetics. POINTS OF INTEREST There has been little research on the work of allies in art and media industries Arts allies are defined as the non-disabled policy makers, producers, directors, and facilitators who support the work of disabled arts and media makers Arts allies often focus on logistics, infrastructure, and systems (e.g. adding ramps, hearing loops, interpreters, or other adaptations) to make arts and media projects/workplaces more accessible to disabled artists Allies must also consider cultural safety as part of their support of arts and media projects/workplaces. Cultural safety recognises that disabled people have a shared identity, community, and culture, based on a shared history of oppression, shared lived experience, and shared language to describe that experience, and projects/workplaces that do not respect this are alienating Reading reports, attending events, and participating in conversations is not enough to establish knowledge of disability identity, community, and culture We consider how would-be allies can acquire the exposure to disability culture in action required to create cultural safety, respect, and trust in their allyship relationships with disabled arts and media makers

Navigating complexities, exploiting shortcuts: Talking about culture as researchers and university educators

Simplistic understandings of culture as ‘national culture’ and of the relation between language, identity, and culture, have been criticized for quite some time. Today, many teachers in higher education have developed a critical awareness of the complexities of culture and interculturality, and many would no longer subscribe to a simplistic understanding of culture as ‘national culture’. Yet despite this awareness, ‘national cultural’ parlance has not disappeared. Drawing on videotaped interactions among researchers and university educators of German as a Foreign Language during a workshop in West Africa, I demonstrate how we as researchers and university educators navigate complexities when discussing ‘culture’ and when, how, and why we, then and again, revert to simplistic concepts of culture in our talk. Analyzing the practices and ‘common sense resources’ we deploy and the discourses we thereby mediate provides insights into how we configure understandings of culture in action and points at problems in the ways we talk.

Feminism and Firearms: Gun Ownership, Gun Carrying, and Women’s Empowerment

In this article, I use the 2018 Guns in American Life Survey (GALS) to investigate the relationship between feminist identity, gun ownership, gun carrying, and women’s empowerment. Notably, while identifying as a feminist lessens the likelihood that a woman will own a gun, of women who own handguns, feminists are more likely to carry their guns all or most of the time. Past victimization is associated with ownership and carrying, confirming genuine concern by women about their safety. Finally, findings reveal that women are more empowered by guns than are men and the relationship is moderated by age. Results are discussed in light of the current American gun culture focused on self-defense and a carry mindset that some women develop as feminist culture in action.

Values, skills, and decision-making: A cultural sociological approach to explaining diagnostic disclosure

This paper provides an analytical framework for explaining the practice of diagnostic disclosure by drawing on theoretical developments regarding the question of “culture in action.” Based on ethnographic and interview data collected from fieldwork at a major cancer hospital in China from 2015 to 2019, this paper explains how doctors and family members make decisions about diagnostic disclosure. We argue that it is important to understand the practice of diagnostic disclosure as motivated by the actors' values on the one hand, and constrained and enabled by the actors’ skills on the other hand. It is also necessary to distinguish between personal and public values, as well as medical and interpersonal skills. Based on these distinctions, we will be better equipped to explain why diagnostic disclosure has encountered difficulties in family-centered societies, such as China.

Materiality as a Basis for Valuation Entrepreneurship: Re-modeling Impressionism

This paper addresses the recognized need for connecting scholarship on materiality and evaluation by conceptualizing how materiality provides grounds for “valuation entrepreneurship.” It extends the scope of materiality scholarship by considering an ignored organizational outcome while offering stronger evidence for the role of supply-side factors in social evaluation. The theoretical model posits that materiality affords opportunities for identity construction and social organization that can lead to the emergence of a new theory of value contesting the evaluative regime. This framework is applied to the reanalysis of a famous case: Impressionism. The analysis shows that new materials and methods of painting served as a “focus” for the social organization of artists with a shared identity of craftsmen. These artists espoused a new theory of value that advocated the “unfinishedness” of artworks and used natural perception as an objective basis for contestation of the “subjective” evaluative regime at the salons. The contestation had political overtones, drawing on cultural resources and scientific tenets to justify the valorization of individuality and decentralization of art appraisal. An endogenous account of culture in action presents materiality as a natural counterpoint to the emphasis on conceptualization.

Masters of None? How Cultural Workers Use Reframing to Achieve Legitimacy in Portfolio Careers

This article examines how cultural workers interpret and respond to reputational challenges they encounter when leading portfolio careers. Specifically, the portfolio career model involves the cultivation and signalling of adaptability through broad competencies and diverse portfolios comprised of boundary-spanning work. These practices conflict with standards of artistic legitimacy and highlight specialist-generalist tensions, since they can make workers appear to be ‘jacks of all trades, masters of none’ – unskilled, opportunistic dabblers, lacking expertise and artistic integrity. The article draws on 56 interviews with cultural producers working as filmmakers, fashion designers and musicians. Findings show how workers engage in ‘reframing’ to reinterpret the symbolic meanings attached to their behaviours and, in the process, carve out new positions and standards for legitimacy within their fields. Reframing is structured by field and labour market conditions, but also represents the possibility of change as a form of culture in action.

The Role of Social Media in Shaping the Trends of University Youth towards the Requirements of the Knowledge Economy

The study aims to identify social media's role in shaping university youth's attitudes towards the knowledge economy's requirements, and the study belongs to the descriptive studies. The study conducted a survey on a sample of 400 individual adolescents by using questionnaire form. The study concluded that social media has contributed to the development of the knowledge economy by being an important source for obtaining information about the knowledge economy, directly contributing to the formation of awareness among individuals, working to raise the level of knowledge economy culture among community members, and working on forming specific trends for the individual towards knowledge economy requirements. The most important participation mechanisms that it undertakes through social media to spread the requirements of the knowledge economy is to interact with pages interested in transmitting news of the knowledge economy, publishing pictures, posts or news related to the knowledge economy in society, commenting on issues related to the knowledge economy. The most important obstacles to the requirements of the knowledge economy through social media are represented in the following: the lack of mechanisms for developing knowledge behaviors among young people, the lack of awareness of the knowledge economy culture in action and content, the lack of proficiency in the use of information and communication technology, the violation of the intellectual property rights of knowledge, the destruction, destruction or theft of electronic websites.

Quality culture in action for a respiratory course: A dynamic CQI process at an engineering based allopathic medical school

Carle Illinois College of Medicine (CIMED) opened its doors in 2018 as an allopathic medical school under provisional accreditation by the Liaison Committee of Medical Education (LCME) and in 2014, the LCME mandated that all U.S. medical schools implement the process of internal continuous quality improvement (CQI). Here, the authors take a retrospective look at how CIMED utilized frequent and granular student feedback to contribute to continuous quality improvement (CQI) during the school’s Respiratory course, by citing specific examples of changes and student satisfaction outcomes from the inaugural class (2018) to the second class (2019). The authors outline how this cycle of evaluation and action can effectively incorporate students into the CQI process to enhance student success via faculty-student partnership. Furthermore, the authors discuss the nuance of feedback interpretation by the involved faculty and advocate for CQI based on a deeper understanding of the student experience such that change initiated by CQI may extend beyond benchmark data collection. The authors discuss how dynamic feedback may be helpful in achieving equipoise between long-standing principles of medical pedagogy and newer trends in medical education, while still maintaining student satisfaction and continuing to develop a culture of quality improvement.

Finding Resonance Amid Trauma: Moral Injury and the Role of Religion Among Christian Post-9/11 U.S. Veterans

AbstractRecent scholarship examines the relationship between moral injury and religion but rarely analyzes social processes at work therein. This article uses data from interviews with 47 post-9/11 veterans who once or currently identified as Christian to explore how religious beliefs and practices preempt, mitigate, or exacerbate moral injury. While many veterans experienced potentially morally injurious events, the differences between those with moral injury and those without depended on whether they could find resonance with meaning-making toolkits amid trauma. Dissonance stirred by incoherence in one’s moral narrative and betrayal of significant relationships spurred manifestations of moral injury. Those who achieved resonance relied on religious moral frames they brought with them or those supplied by military culture, or they engaged in explicit moral deliberation. This study reveals a complex process of belief maintenance during moral crises that extends and challenges previous examinations of culture in action, resonance, and moral injury.

Organizational culture in action: A cultural analysis workbook (3rd edition, pp. 270). Gerald W. C. Driskill. New York: Routledge, 2019, pages, $83.95 paperback.

Organizational culture in action: A cultural analysis workbook (3rd edition, pp. 270). Gerald W. C. Driskill. New York: Routledge, 2019, pages, $83.95 paperback.

The influence of internalized racism on the relationship between discrimination and anxiety.

This study used 2 waves of data to longitudinally examine whether internalized racism moderated the association between racial discrimination and anxiety symptom distress. Participants were 157 Black college students attending a predominantly White institution who completed measures of racial discrimination, internalized racism, and psychological distress. Using hierarchical linear regression, results indicated a positive association between racial discrimination and subsequent anxiety symptom distress for individuals with moderate and high levels of internalization of negative stereotypes and hair change. Findings suggest that experiences of anxiety symptom distress, in the context of racial discrimination, may differ as a function of one's acceptance and internalization of dominant White culture's actions and beliefs toward Black people. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

What is culture? Systems of people, places, and practices

Culture is a fuzzy concept without fixed boundaries, meaning different things according to situations. To address this issue, I introduce a p-model to understand culture as a system of people, places, and practices, for a purpose such as enacting, justifying, or resisting power. People refers to population dynamics, social relations, and culture in groups. Places refers to ecological dynamics, institutional influences, and culture in contexts. Practices refers to participatory dynamics, community engagement, and culture in action. Power refers to forcing others into compliance (power-over people), controlling access to spaces (power in places), and behaving as desired (power-to practice). I use racism to illustrate the p-model and suggest applications in theory, research, and practice in developmental sciences.

Italian Material Cultures

ABSTRACT This article explores research related to material cultures and the role played by material objects in the construction of italianità. A survey of critical concerns and historical perspectives on the intersections between Italian Studies and Material Culture Studies locates material culture within the evolving interdisciplinarity of Italian Studies and highlights the methodological approaches adopted in the field. This is followed by three new case studies of material culture in action which, by encompassing a wide temporal base and diverse forms of materiality (ceramic, stone, paper), illustrate how material culture and its study can transcend traditionally inscribed geographical and chronological boundaries, inviting more transnational and transtemporal approaches to the study of Italian culture. The article also proposes how Italian Studies can embrace Material Culture Studies and integrate the methodology into existing disciplinary approaches.