Toward an Institutional Approach

Several of my remarks, apart from being critical of the prevailing traditions, point in what might be regarded as a common direction for reinvigorating the empirical study of cultural change. Specifically, some of my arguments point toward multifactoral rather than unicausal explanations of cultural change and highlight the importance of considering the specific contexts, processes, and mechanisms that translate broad societal changes into concrete episodes of innovative cultural production. In the remaining space it is not possible to fully follow up on these suggestions. I can, however, indicate some of the directions in which such a discussion might go.

As a starting point, we should recognize that a considerable amount of rethinking of the basic concept of "culture" has taken place since the cultural adaptation and class legitimation models came into prominence.

Rather than viewing culture primarily as a subjective set of beliefs, values, or orientations current treatments of this concept increasingly focus on the observable features of culture, namely, discourse and other kinds of symbolic acts. Once culture is understood in this fashion, it becomes more apparent that the study of culture must pay attention to speakers and audiences, discursive texts, the rituals in which discourse is embedded, and the social contexts in which it is produced. As something that is not simply affirmed subjectively but produce collectively, culture clearly depends on social resources, and the availability and distribution of these resources is likely to play a major role in influencing the direction of cultural change. Cultural change necessitates, even more so than before, an approach that focuses on the institutional contexts in which it is produced, enacted, disseminated, and altered.

That cultural change comes about not simply as a result of the disparate pressures of social experience on individuals but as the product of culture-producing organizations has generally been de-emphasized in the cultural adaptation and class legitimation literatures. But it has not been entirely overlooked. One can, for instance, find suggestive passages in Marx that point toward this conception of culture. Writing in the Communist Manifesto about the creation of a world market for economic goods, Marx and Engels ([1848] 1967, 84) add: "As in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature." They also liken cultural production to material production in their discussion of the problem of oversupply in advanced capitalism, stating that there is "too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry." They also speak of cultural change in these terms, asking rhetorically: "What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed?" ([1848] 1967, 102).

But if culture is produced and cultural production requires social resources, then we must ask about the range of variables that may be relevant for understanding changes in the form and content of this product. For heuristic purposes it may be useful to divide these variables into three categories: the institutional contexts in which culture is produced, the broader environmental conditions that influence the kinds of social resources available to these institutions, and the specific action sequences within institutional contexts by which culture is produced.

Institutional contexts serve as the immediate settings in which culture is produced. Of particular relevance are the roles occupied by the direct

producers of culture, their relationships with other producers (both colleagues and competitors), and the nature of their contact with relevant audience groups. Beyond the immediate interests and experiences of these actors, their relationships with broader sets of organizations, coalitions, and interest groups are also likely to be important. Because resources are crucial to the production of any cultural activity, the relationship of cultural producers to the state, to economic elites, and to other cultural authorities is likely to be especially important.

The broader social environment subsumes many of the variables that have been identified in the traditional literature—social complexity, rates of economic growth, distributions of power among social classes, etc.—but it is particularly concerned with the character of the resources that may influence the institutional configurations in which cultural activities are produced. Rather than positing that these variables have a direct, unmediated influence on culture, the institutional perspective conceives of a mediated form of influence, channeled through the institutional contexts in which cultural production takes place.

Finally, the idea of "action sequences" highlights the fact that even within institutional contexts the production of culture is a process. Among the questions encountered in examining this process are questions about agency, the activities of cultural producers, their responses to crises and other contingencies, and the manner in which their responses are limited by the institutional structures in which these responses take place. By bringing questions of cultural change to this level of specificity, investigations can also focus on the ways in which different ideological formulations compete with one another, how social relations are imbedded in the "texts" produced, and how these texts are mirrored in the social interaction that ensues.

An institutional approach of this kind implies a great deal of indeterminacy in identifying the broad factors generating cultural change. This indeterminacy, however, appears to be truer to the historical record than the tight theoretical formulations with which sociologists have labored in the past. If anything, the cultural adaptation and class legitimation models have suffered from ambiguity because their simpler formulations strain the bounds of credibility. In contrast, combinations of institutional variables, environmental variables, and action variables leave room for considerable diversity in the factors that operate to produce cultural change in different times and places.

To suggest that theories of cultural change move in the direction of looser, more multifaceted models does, of course, not imply any radical deviation from the empirical work that has already been under way for some time. It merely affirms what the more insightful of these studies have already begun to show.