Grid-group Analysis Research Articles

From football stadium to Iron Age hillfort. Creating a taxonomy of Wessex hillfort communities

AbstractThe variability of Wessex hillfort form, use and development has long been noted, but not satisfactorily explained. This paper seeks to explain this variability and suggests that each hillfort may have had its own distinctive history of use, dependent upon the nature of the hillfort community – the people who visited, inhabited and used the hillfort. This paper starts by using grid–group analysis to define identities that can be found among modern communities – such as that of spectators of contemporary professional football clubs – which helps to frame our understanding of hillfort communities as constituted of households with differing motivations, loyalties and identification with the material environment. The variable trajectories of hillfort development are thus explained by the changing cultural relationships between Iron Age households and hillforts.

Scientific community through grid-group analysis

Mary Douglas introduced the grid-group map as a tool of anthropological analysis. Several studies have been applying this approach to study social phenomena, but very few concerning the scientific community. This article aims to bridge the current gap, building sociological ideal-types in the scientific community based on grid-group analysis. First, we illustrate the main features of Douglas’s grid-group analysis, up to and including the latest studies developed in the social sciences. Then, we apply Douglas’s approach to a sample of scientists, reporting scholars’ stances in the grid-group plane. Finally, we put forward a new elaboration of grid-group analysis and propose ideas for further research.

A Grid-group Analysis of Tourism Motivation

Marketing theorists have widely proposed that culture is one of the underlying determinants of consumer behavior and that increasing globalization is creating a multicultural marketplace. Empirical inquiries in the field of tourism remain scarce, particularly regarding the understanding of behavioral influences. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the influence of sub-cultures on tourism motivation. Drawing on grid-group cultural theory, an analysis of survey data from 727 Chinese tourists reveals that respondents classified as different cultural types had different travel motivations. Contributions and limitations of the study are discussed, and future research directions are suggested. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

I Fought the Law and the Law Won? Legal Consciousness and the Critical Imagination

The study of legal consciousness within socio-legal studies entails a focus on the ordinary, quotidian and, crucially, almost invisible life of law in society. To study legal consciousness is to study the taken-for-granted and not-immediately-noticeable: the background assumptions about legality which structure and inform everyday thoughts and actions. This article examines legal consciousness through the lens of the cultural theory of Mary Douglas. The application of her grid-group analysis offers important insights into the dimensions along which legal consciousness may vary. In doing so, it sheds light on an under-studied feature of the legal consciousness landscape: collective voices of dissent. We explore, via a secondary data analysis of radical environmental activists, a legal consciousness which expresses particularly clearly a collective rejection of the authority of state law. The analysis reveals a complex and multi-faceted legal consciousness where a rejection of state law may be coupled with a gaming approach towards it for collective aims, and can be fueled by a faith in legality above or beyond state law. It also points to the organizational vulnerability of dissenting collectivism and a corresponding affinity between a legal consciousness of collective dissent and one of fatalism. Our analysis allows us to critique and refine Ewick and Silbey’s influential account of legal consciousness. These analytical and theoretical insights point towards a future research agenda which maintains the legal consciousness tradition of focusing on the structural qualities of law while avoiding the pitfalls of a theory of general legal hegemony.

I Fought the Law and the Law Won? Legal Consciousness and the Critical Imagination

The study of legal consciousness within socio-legal studies entails a focus on the ordinary, quotidian and, crucially, almost invisible life of law in society. To study legal consciousness is to study the taken-for-granted and not-immediately-noticeable: the background assumptions about legality which structure and inform everyday thoughts and actions. This article examines legal consciousness through the lens of the cultural theory of Mary Douglas. The application of her grid-group analysis offers important insights into the dimensions along which legal consciousness may vary. In doing so, it sheds light on an under-studied feature of the legal consciousness landscape: collective voices of dissent. We explore, via a secondary data analysis of radical environmental activists, a legal consciousness which expresses particularly clearly a collective rejection of the authority of state law. The analysis reveals a complex and multi-faceted legal consciousness where a rejection of state law may be coupled with a gaming approach towards it for collective aims, and can be fueled by a faith in legality above or beyond state law. It also points to the organizational vulnerability of dissenting collectivism and a corresponding affinity between a legal consciousness of collective dissent and one of fatalism. Our analysis allows us to critique and refine Ewick and Silbey’s influential account of legal consciousness. These analytical and theoretical insights point towards a future research agenda which maintains the legal consciousness tradition of focusing on the structural qualities of law while avoiding the pitfalls of a theory of general legal hegemony.

Grid–group analysis and tourism: tipping as a cultural behavior

Cultural bias, or grid–group theory, was developed by Mary Douglas in the 1980s to explain individual behavior within a particular society. In this paper, grid–group theory is adapted to show how it may be used in a tourism context. The advantages of this approach are that the same typology can be used for both hosts and guests, not only in general terms, but also for given types of behavior. Grid–group theory shows how the same individual may exhibit different behavioral patterns in different situations. The example used to illustrate this approach is tipping. The literature on tipping provides mixed and conflicting results. By using grid–group theory, it is possible to explain why these mixed results may occur.

University-Community Engagement: A grid-group analysis

University-community engagement involves complex issues, entangling multiple and interacting points of view, all of which operate in a wider dynamic evolving social environment. For this reason, there is often disagreement about why engagement is necessary or desirable, and whether there is one optimal method to practice it. To address this issue, I argue that university-community engagement can be examined as a form of enquiry. In this view, engagement is viewed as a system that arises through the recognition of the dissent it embodies. As such, enquiry functions to process disagreements into diverse methods of communication. 
 
 Most of the disagreements utilised by universities are derived from external sources, thus university-based enquiry must necessarily involve a dialogue with a broader community or environment. In this sense, university-community engagement can be viewed most generally as a method that processes disagreements into shared understandings through enquiry. 
 
 To demonstrate how university-community engagement functions from an enquiry point of view, I use Mary Douglas’ grid-group diagramming method to develop a critical typology for classifying university-community engagement. My modified grid-group diagram provides a structured typological space within which four distinct methods of university-community engagement can be identified and discussed – both in relation to their internal communicational characteristics, and in relation to each other.
 
 The university-engagement grid-group diagram is constructed by locating each of Douglas’ four quadrants within Charles Peirce’s four methods of enquiry. Peirce’s work is introduced because each of his four methods of enquiry deals specifically with how disagreements are processed and resolved. When Peirce’s methods for fixing belief are located in Douglas’ grid-group diagram, they create a sense-making framework for university-community engagement. It is argued that the model offers a heuristic structure through which to view the diversity of university-community engagement and create shared understandings of the appropriateness of a wide range of possible engagement methods.

Re-theorizing Jim Collins's culture of discipline in Good to Great

Jim Collins's empirical study Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don't (Harper Business, New York, 2001) has made a worldwide impact on management and leadership practice and research. His concept of “culture of discipline” is central to his ideas for achieving enduring, sustainable organizations, whether in the business or nonprofit sectors. In this essay the culture of discipline is re-theorized in the context of Mary Douglas's grid–group analysis to provide a home within a broader theory which will locate the culture of discipline in relation to alternative cultures. The framework is illustrated with applications in a study of small, high-technology firms in peripheral areas of the UK, leading to the recognition of an organizational form missing from most of the management literature and furthering the exploration of a model of humble and collaborative leadership as an alternative to the model of charismatic or heroic leadership growing out of American management culture.

The information systems professional as a hermit

In this article, the contributions that Michael Thompson has made to the development of cultural theory are laid out. This is done by highlighting the ways in which Thompson has built upon the grid–group analysis of Mary Douglas. Thereafter, it is shown how cultural theory is compatible with, and can be strengthened by, the complexity theories that have been formulated within the natural sciences. The resulting theoretical framework is then applied to explain the persistent cultural gap between the business planning and the information systems (IS) departments within companies. It will be argued and demonstrated that the IS professional can usefully be understood as following the views and practices characteristic of the hermit, as defined in cultural theory.

Grid-Group Analysis, Social Capital, and Entrepreneurship Among North American Ethnic Groups

A prevailing hypothesis among social scientists is that a high degree of social capital within immigrant groups promotes the development of self-employment, particularly in the first generation of immigrants. The authors identify social capital with high group placement in grid-group analysis for which they have produced new codes suitable for use with secondary data. Using the Electronic Human Relations Area Files sample of North American Immigrant Groups, each culture was coded on six measures each for grid and for group. Testing the social capital hypothesis using income and self-employment data from the 1990 census, the authors found a negative correlation between high group and high self-employment, particularly for the first generation. This finding suggests that high levels of general social capital on a group level may not be as supportive of entrepreneurship as previously asserted. The study's results are compatible with the “family social capital” model of entrepreneurship.

Chefs and Occupational Culture in a Hotel Chain: A Grid-Group Analysis

A fierce recession in the UK between 1991 and 1995 led the hotel group Forte, like most companies, to initiate urgent turnaround and survival policies. This paper reports on a study of chefs' behaviour within Forte Crest Hotels, London, the strain placed on their occupation during this recession and the aftermath of Forte's levered corporate change policies in 1994–95. The enquiry was carried out before the hostile take-over of Forte by Granada in January 1996. Using grid-group analysis, a qualitative study based on structured interviews was undertaken. These interviews were analysed for commonalities and differences within a grid-group analysis framework, which addresses organisational, individual and group behavioural phenomena in a given social context. The findings reveal behavioural insights into the occupational identity of chefs and the allegiance they give to their occupation when faced with a programme of radical change initiated by management.

Grid-group cultural theory: an introduction

This article offers an introduction to grid-group cultural theory (also known as grid-group analysis, Cultural Theory or theory of socio-cultural viability), an approach that has been developed over the past thirty years in the work of the British anthropologists Mary Douglas and Michael Thompson, the American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, and many others. This assessment begins with a presentation of the main claims of the theory, distinguishing two characteristic breads of grid-group cultural theory, in the one it is conceived as a heuristic device, in the other it is seen as a full explanatory theory. This brief is followed by a discussion of the typology generated by the theory. This includes a presentation of the two dimensions of sociality it posits, the cultural map they produce, as well as the four (or five) cultural types derived from them and their designations. The article proceeds with a discussion of key issues including the incorporation of other typologies (such as the one developed to analyse myths of nature), the relations between cultures or rationalities and several methodological issues. Finally the article introduces the contributions to this special issue of the GeoJournal.

A political-cultural map of Europe: family structures and the origin of differences between national political cultures in the European Union

Differences between the national political cultures of the European states are puzzling. They are too often taken for granted or treated as an elusive explanation for residual differences that can not be accounted for in comparative politics. Here they are put at the core of a comparative analysis. This article explores the origins of differences between national political cultures. It deals with national political cultures from the perspective of Cultural Theory or grid-group analysis. A national political culture is conceived as a ‘conversation’ between subcultures associated to national political institutions and practices (and not as an aggregated pattern of individual orientations toward political objects). National political cultures can be characterised on the basis of ideal typical patterns of relations between the basic cultures or rationalities distinguished by Cultural Theory. After an assessment of the differences between the national political cultures of the Member States of the European Union, the paper considers traditional family structures as possible sources of differentiation, elaborating upon the work of the French political historian Emmanuel Todd who has documented the correspondence between the geography of traditional family structures and the geography of ideologies in Europe.

Political Culture and Treatment Strategies in the Nordic Countries

Taking as a point of departure Mary Douglas' grid-group analysis, elaborated on by Aaron Wildavsky in his cultural theory, the article explores the variations in the development of methadone treatment programmes in the Nordic countries from the mid-1960's to the mid-1990's. In Sweden, the first Nordic country to start an organized treatment of heroin addicts with methadone in 1966, the strategy has been characterized by many rules and strong control. In Denmark, methadone treatment was introduced in the late 1960's, and it has been characterized by few rules and weak control. In Norway, methadone treatment was banned in 1979, after some years of occasional experiments. But the spread of HIV among intravenous heroin addicts altered the attitudes and a small and highly regulated program was set up in the beginnings of the 1990's. In Finland, the attitude has been reserved, primarily due to the small population of heroin addicts. The organized treatment in the 1970's was limited, and still is, as it was set up again in 1995. In spite of the differences, however, there are two main patterns of harmonization that should be noticed. Firstly, as a result of HIV, regulated programmes have been developed in all four countries in the 1990's. Secondly, the prevailing abstinence-oriented philosophy has been questioned and supplemented by harm-reducing measures. Today, there is a stronger tendency to treat drug addicts as clients in the Nordic welfare state, entitled to individual treatment in the countries' general health and welfare systems.

The structure of hospitality: a cultural explanation of industrial diversity

There are various ways to explain the structure of an industry and the organisational structures and forms within it. In this paper we explain organisational diversity in the hospitality industry with the cultural attributes of markets to be catered. An approach based on Grid-Group analysis is outlined and a basic model linking these dimensions to product strategy and organisational structure is suggested. Various domestic and outbound markets are contrasted in terms of their cultural attributes to determine whether the predictions of the theory about observable structures hold.

Explaining the Occurrence of Charismatic Leadership in Organizations

Charisma is commonly regarded as disruptive and unpredictable. Its origins are treated as mysterious and unexplainable. This view of charisma is due in part to a tendency to reify charisma, but more importantly to the lack of an adequate theory of social organization. After clearing up some methodological confusions surrounding the concept of charisma, I present a theory that predicts the type of organization, and the type of organizational situation, in which charismatic leadership will occur. By joining Mary Douglas's grid-group analysis with Herbert Simon's decision theory, I show that charismatic leadership, far from being a disruptive force, serves an integrative function in egalitarian organizations hampered by disagreement on facts and values.