Grid-group Theory Research Articles

A tentative anatomy of Christian responses to anthropogenic climate change

Abstract This pilot study addresses the differences in responses to anthropogenic climate change expressed in published normative statements for a cross section of Christian denominations and groupings from the UK and USA as well as international groupings. Grid-group cultural theory is tentatively employed to better understand these differences. Because the cosmologies identified by grid-group theory have as their basis the metaphor of the body, this is in effect a tentative anatomy of Christian responses to anthropogenic climate change. As a test case, this paper explores whether or not it is fruitful to attempt to challenge a given cosmological outlook to better communicate climate change and how this might be achieved or whether to speak to that cosmological perspective and how this might be achieved. In addition, this paper explores how each distinctive cosmology might contribute helpfully in responding to anthropogenic climate change. Finally, avenues of further work to expand this approach are explored.

Controversy Over Tongue-Tie: Divisions in the Community of Healthcare Professionals

ABSTRACT While recent decades have seen a rapid rise in cases of infant tongue-tie and in surgery to correct it, a controversy is now raging over the condition. Opinion is especially divided over so-called posterior tongue-tie, a variant which is detected based on the “feel” of the sub-lingual space. Drawing on ethnographic research with clinicians in England, we clarify the professional and personal commitments involved in the controversy. Our analysis is informed by Douglas’ theory of cultural representations (grid-group theory), in which ideas of what is natural and unnatural constitute central metaphors.

Perceptions of child physical discipline among Burmese migrants living in Mae Sot, Thailand

Despite the United Nation's disapproval of child physical discipline and its association with numerous negative outcomes, physical discipline continues to be used globally and is often present in countries experiencing financial or political instability. Burmese migrants living in Mae Sot, Thailand experience instability due to their experiences of socioeconomic disadvantage, cultural and religious discrimination, and forced migration. Exploring the perceptions of child physical discipline in this at-risk population could elucidate reasons for its use and provide direction for future educational and child protection interventions. The main objective of this study is to explore parenting in adverse circumstances. In particular, this paper aims to understand the attitudes and beliefs regarding child physical discipline among Burmese migrants in Mae Sot. This analysis included 80 micro-narratives about a current or previous parenting experience from Burmese migrants who self-identified as a parent. SenseMaker® technology was used to collect qualitative micro-narratives. Inductive thematic analysis and directed content analysis using the Grid-group theory was conducted. Physical discipline in this population frequently involved the use of a stick or other implement and was almost exclusively administered by family members. Thematic analysis revealed reasons for the use of physical discipline (including a desire for obedience and as a consequence of parental stress), conditions for its use (such as child's age and severity of their behaviour), and alternative disciplinary strategies (including discussion and explanation). The cultural environments presented in the Grid-group theory (hierarchical, fatalistic, individualistic, and egalitarian) each align with the aforementioned themes, suggesting that there is a spectrum of acceptability of child physical discipline in this population. A three-pronged approach that focuses on establishing legislation, shifting cultural attitudes, and addressing social determinants should be considered to address the use of child physical discipline in this migrant population. Legislation should explicitly prohibit child physical discipline in all settings, including the home. Educational interventions on the long-term harms associated with child physical discipline could help shift cultural attitudes on its use. Lastly, chronic stress and insecurity in this population could be alleviated by providing Burmese migrants with permanent legal status.

Dimensional Structures of Human Societies: An Alternative Interpretation of Agoramétrie-Type Survey Results

Surveys of social and political issues using Agorametrie methodology drawn from widely different social environments have revealed consistent two-dimensional, factor-analytic solutions. Rukavishnikov and van Meter refer to the first dimension as “modern-radical/traditional-conservative” and “openness/closedness”; the second, as “frustration/satisfaction” and “emotional/non-emotional”. These distinctions are critically evaluated and an alternative interpretation is proposed. Two sociorelational dimensions are drawn from Douglas’s Grid-Group Theory, interpreted as two pairs of opposite social-relations models of Fiske-Haslam-Bolender Relational Models Theory. Accordingly, the Group emphasizes communal-sharing (CS) as opposed to market-pricing (MP); the Grid, authority-ranking (AR) as opposed to equality-matching (EM). Affect-Spectrum Theory links valenced, secondary-level emotions to quadrants of the Grid-Group space, with quadrants characterized by sets of secondary-level emotions. Van Meter’s hypothesis that the two-dimensional survey results suggest two kinds of human societies, the “cooperative” and the “hierarchical” is reasonable, but it is proposed that the sociorelational bases of these societal types are the complementarities between CS and EM, and between AR and MP. Neurosociological implications of the data and theorizing are discussed.

Subculture by autonomy and group cohesion and its effect on job satisfaction of R&D professionals in an R&D organization

AbstractProfessional research and development (R&D) organizations typically employ highly educated professionals to work on a range of creative, intellectual projects in their chosen fields. In these organizations, organizational culture and subculture are critical factors connected with project success. This paper explores the existence of subcultures and the factors that contribute to subcultures within a professional R&D organization, and examines subcultural effects on the job satisfaction of R&D professionals to suggest a suitable cultural type for professional R&D organizations. Autonomy and group cohesion are considered, so grid–group theory is applied to measure R&D culture. The subjects were 285 full-time researchers who had worked at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, an international IT institution, for over 5 years. Differences were found in organizational culture according to the research fields and types (applied and developmental research). The egalitarian culture type (low grid, high group) is found to be suitable for improving job satisfaction in R&D organizations.

Gridding, Mass Line and Social Management Innovation

Since July 2011, when thecpcCentral Committee and the State Council issued the “Proposals for Reinforcing Social Management Innovation,” gridding management, as an experiment that began as early as 2004 and as the core content of the innovative social management framework, is gaining increasing attention from the international community and the academia. Based on Mary Douglas’ grid-group theory and my own field surveys, this paper examines four distinct cases comparatively, including the 50-year-old Fengqiao Experience which was recently highlighted by President Xi Jinping and the earliest gridding model of Beijing’s Dongcheng District, concluding that the gridding development process highlighted the need for maintenance of political stability in and after 2011. Since then, the mass line or social management innovation tilted towards a surveillance society characterized by institutionalized control.

Approaches to Ethics Management in the Public Sector: A Proposed Extension of the Compliance-Integrity Continuum

The compliance-integrity continuum is the dominant framework for conceptualizing approaches to ethics management. This article proposes extending it in the form of a fourfold typology inspired by grid-group theory. An application to gift policies shows how the typology can support managers in their creative search for an appropriate approach. It also shows how the typology helps to avoid the deterministic thinking that is almost inherent in the use of a continuum. The article concludes with a recommendation as to how the four types should be combined in practice.

The Status of Education and its Consequences for Educational Research: An Anthropological Exploration

Education as an institution fulfils the key social functions of promulgation of knowledge and the development of future citizens. Rather than these key functions earning it respect, education and its practitioners are the targets of criticism and what Labaree calls ‘scorn’. This article seeks to progress the work done by Labaree on the origins of education's low status. It uses Douglas's grid-group theory to explore how the low status of education both opens it to criticism and inclines it to the thought styles that further entrench its position on the margins.

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.

Corporate cultures and the use of space: an approach from Cultural Theory

This paper applies and adapts an approach derived from anthropology previously known as grid–group theory and later as Cultural Theory (CT). CT is concerned with connections between forms of organization and the values and behaviors of actors within them. It first briefly outlines the structural bases of CT. In doing so it offers a framework for understanding how corporate organizations can be classified as cultures, demonstrating four archetypal categories. It identifies dominant features of each then shows with examples their manifestations in different uses of space – both internal and external. Space is linked integrally to information flow and control. Predictable and forecastable patterns are identified for each archetype. They are shown to relate to the differential selection, enforcement or abnegation of boundaries and the varying forms of exploitation, constraints and sanctions used to sustain them. The paper then examines the symbolic and ceremonial uses of space and effective and ineffective uses. It shows how organizations cannot be considered unicultural; but are mixed “regimes” comprising symbiotic but not necessarily synergistic cultures.

No Escape from the Iron Cage? Governmental Discourse in New Labour's Community Safety Policy

This article seeks to provide an explanation for why it is that local crime and disorder reduction partnerships (CDRPs), established by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, have thus far failed to display the kind of self-governing networked governance that is generally expected of partnership approaches. Rather than searching for explanations that focus upon the “competence” of the CDRPs, the politically inspired “control freakery” of the centre, or the structural influences on late-modern crime control, the concept of grid-group theory is employed to show how CDRPs exist as structures that are vulnerable to the influence of a range of conflicting, competing and contradictory modes of social organization that pull in very different directions. This meso-level focus affords a better understanding of the difficulties faced by CDRPs, and of how they might be overcome in the pursuit of networked governance.

Culturally Shaped Patterns of Disciplining Children

Research indicates an association between parents’ disciplinary practices and their children’s developmental outcomes. Research also suggests that disciplinary practices vary with demographic factors such as class, ethnicity, and gender. This article draws on the Douglas-Wildavsky grid-group theory to explain the association between demographic factors and disciplinary practices in microsocial terms. This theory links disparate sets of core beliefs and value priorities to contrasting conceptions of the family (including distinctive orientations toward parenting) and parental preferences for different disciplinary strategies. Studies by other researchers provide empirical support for these linkages. This grid-group theory application contributes to theory development through (a) bridging macroexplanations and microexplanations by showing how culture contributes to shaping parental practices, (b) distinguishing rival sets of core beliefs and value priorities that help researchers and practitioners understand parents, and (c) indicating ways for practitioners to apply these distinctions in family intervention.

The Greening and Governance of Crime Control

This article examines the suggestion that crime control policy should emulate environmental regulation by concentrating on the alteration of fundamental incentive structures. The ‘greening’ of policy can occur in a number of different ways. A dominant model of environmental regulation is skewed towards government and technicist in orientation. This model does not consider the diversity of incentives that incite action and runs up against a commitment problem. An alternative model of regulation, derived from the grid-group theory of Mary Douglas, is described and its promise for inspiring a culturally plural model of crime control that is not dominated by the state is explored. These suggestions are substantiated by examining recent debates concerning policing and crime prevention and the progress of the Crime and Disorder Act in England and Wales, which might point to an altered role for the state in the provision of security.

Socio-Demographic Effects on Cultural Biases

Grid-group theory claims that patterns of social relations only, and not socio-demographic characteristics, can account for biases, of which the theory prescribes four: hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism and fatalism. Survey analysts conventionally employ respondents’ socio-demographic correlates when accounting for values. We take the value survey strategy and apply it to grid-group theory’s four biases. Employing a 1999 survey administered in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland ( n= 4,832), we combine two goals in this article. We test how sex, age, education and income can account for biases. By extension, we test grid-group theory’s claim of no such effect. The results show that biases are influenced by socio-demographics in ways unaccounted for by the theory. The four correlates explain on average 9 per cent of the variation in the biases. Education is the only correlate that has a negative and significant effect across all biases in all countries. Women adhere to egalitarianism, whereas men adhere to individualism. Age is a consistent positive correlate of hierarchy, whereas income is a consistent negative correlate of fatalism. Grid-group theory will not be impaired if it can be shown how robust socio-demographic correlates interact with patterns of social relations.

Socio-Demographic Effects on Cultural Biases: A Nordic Study of Grid-Group Theory

Grid-group theory claims that patterns of social relations only, and not socio-demographic characteristics, can account for biases, of which the theory prescribes four: hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism and fatalism. Survey analysts conventionally employ respondents’ socio-demographic correlates when accounting for values. We take the value survey strategy and apply it to grid-group theory’s four biases. Employing a 1999 survey administered in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland (n= 4,832), we combine two goals in this article. We test how sex, age, education and income can account for biases. By extension, we test grid-group theory’s claim of no such effect. The results show that biases are influenced by socio-demographics in ways unaccounted for by the theory. The four correlates explain on average 9 per cent of the variation in the biases. Education is the only correlate that has a negative and significant effect across all biases in all countries. Women adhere to egalitarianism, whereas men adhere to individualism. Age is a consistent positive correlate of hierarchy, whereas income is a consistent negative correlate of fatalism. Grid-group theory will not be impaired if it can be shown how robust socio-demographic correlates interact with patterns of social relations.

Too Many Voices, “Too Problematic to Be Plausible”: Representing Multiple Responses to Local Economic Development Strategies?

Recent writing around urban political economy has highlighted the difficulty of representing multiple responses to local economic development strategies. It has been argued that it is conceptually important but nonetheless problematic to account for the multiplicity of individual, business, institutional, community, social and other groups' involvement in, interpretation of, or consumption of dominant city images and urban regeneration projects. This paper attempts such a project, presenting empirical case material from the UK city of Stoke-on-Trent, utilising the ethnographic grid–group theory conceived by Mary Douglas, and later developed with Aaron Wildavsky into a ‘cultural theory’ of political and economic change.

Cultured punishments

Increasingly, criminologists have made reference to Mary Douglas’s writings on risk. Less frequently is it noted that Douglas’s work on risk is dependent upon a more fundamental classificatory scheme, what she calls grid-group theory. This theory measures cultural biases in terms of their level of prescriptiveness of norms (grid) and affiliation between individuals (group). This theory gives four distinctive cultural types, each of which has distinctive attitudes to risk, crime and blame. These types reflect the institutional relations of a particular collectivity within a society. This paper maps contemporary debates on the transformation of punishments onto grid-group theory and argues that criminological theorizing has effectively restricted itself to only two of Douglas’s four cultural types. Expanding the parameters of the debate would not only allow a more accurate representation of what is going on, but may also tentatively sketch a map toward a more optimistic future.

Using grid-group theory to explain distinctive Japanese political institutions

Particularly for Americans, Japanese political institutions present a paradox. On one hand, in comparison to other advanced industrial societies the size of Japan's public sector (as a proportion of GDP) is extremely small. On the other hand, Japan's small but expert state is highly interventionary, leaving far less to the vagaries of markets than the United States or even the more statist societies of Europe (Johnson 1982). This contrast leaves many American analysts, particularly economists but others (Esping-Andersen 1997) as well, in a quandary as to whether Japan is a liberal individualistic society. I draw on Douglas-Wildavsky “grid-group” theory to explain these seemingly contradictory institutional characteristics as the result, not of liberal individualistic influence, but of conflict between and the alternation in dominance of two factions of Japanese hierarchy. My primary focus of attention rests on showing how these two hierarchical factions produce a public policy orientation with a predisposition toward state social intervention but periodic restraint with respect to public social programs that accounts for the modest fiscal size of the active Japanese state. I also examine Japanese public policy responses to recent difficulties in overcoming recession and confronting increasing immigration to clinch the case that Japan is a society in which various factions of hierarchy, rather than liberal individualism, dominate.

Nordic cultural baselines: Accounting for domestic convergence and foreign policy divergence

The five Nordic countries converged remarkably when developing domestic institutions, but they diverged significantly when developing foreign policies. Grid-group theory prescribes four contending cultures—hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism—and offers a basis for understanding the structure of political coalitions and conflicts. Surveys from the five Nordic countries measuring cultural baselines are used to estimate the degree of convergence and divergence. The countries converge with reference to high agreement with egalitarianism, individualism, and hierarchy, and disagreement with fatalism. This concords with the historically strong regime of social democracy in this region. The five countries diverge with reference to their foreign policy in that they polarize along two dimensions. To the east, there is increasing fatalism associated with countries not being members of NATO; to the north, there is increasing egalitarianism associated with countries not being members of the European Union. Given the importance of popular support through referenda, an eventual accession of Norway and Iceland to the EU cannot happen unless egalitarianism diminishes among their publics.

Political Culture, Patterns of American Political Development, and Distinctive Rationalities

Drawing on Douglas-Wildavsky grid-group theory, the article shows how changing social circumstances prompt distinctive patterns of shifting cultural allegiance and intercultural coalitions which in turn distinguish three lengthy eras of American political development. The resulting portrayal of American political development is more complex than the oscillation between two poles depicted by Hirschman as well as McClosky and Zaller, for the characterization employed has three poles in two dimensions. But this more complex portrayal better explains the changing character of American political life across eras. The conclusion focuses on what I regard as the two most significant implications of this view, showing that: (1) contrary to widespread opinion, the most recent era of political development affords egalitarians an insecure position on the American political stage, and (2) this conception of political change reveals deeper insights about political life by distinguishing rival, culturally constrained rationalities.