Measuring Culture

by John W. Mohr, Christopher A. Bail, Margaret Frye

Social scientists seek to develop systematic ways to understand how people make meaning and how the meanings they make shape them and the world in which they live. But how do we measure such processes? Measuring Culture is an essential point of entry for both those new to the field and those who are deeply immersed in the measurement of meaning. Written collectively by a team of leading qualitative and quantitative sociologists of culture, the book considers three common subjects of measurement―people, objects, and relationships―and then discusses how to pivot effectively between subjects and methods. Measuring Culture takes the reader on a tour of the state of the art in measuring meaning, from discussions of neuroscience to computational social science. It provides both the definitive introduction to the sociological literature on culture as well as a critical set of case studies for methods courses across the social sciences.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Cultural

256 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2020

Reviews

[Nat]

Academic disciplines are weird things. I've been reading a decent amount of work in the field of 'cultural anthropology' (Sperber, Mercier, Henrich, Mesoudi, Morin, etc.), which investigates the cultural mechanisms by which information is transmitted, and which uses historical research, archaeology, comparative ethnography, primatology, and social experiments as evidence. This book concerns what seems like a neighboring discipline with a great deal of overlap with cultural anthropology, namely cultural sociology, but there is very little overlap in references--none of the authors I mentioned above are cited in this state of the art survey of cultural sociology, and (I believe), the reverse is also true: I hadn't previously come across most of the work that is cited in this book.

Cultural sociology seems less influenced by debates in cognitive science, though there is some indication of influence in Ch.1, on studying individuals. There is more emphasis on studies of institutions, some overlap with conversational analysis, and lots of overlap with 'big data'-style approaches in the digital humanities (network analysis, topic modeling). The discussion of these techniques is conversational and accessible, and I immediately downloaded a bunch of papers that were discussed that are clearly relevant to some quantitative history of analytic philosophy stuff that I'm working in collaboration with a digital humanist.

[Cariadne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I selected this book in error. I had thought this would have actionable concepts on measuring culture from a business perspective, such as, a company culture. However, I think it would have been helpful for these academics to dive into that topic to round out the collection they have here.

Disappointed it did not address my area of interest. Additionally, as someone interested in societal culture, I still did not find this to be an engaging read -- not enough relevance and too much historic blah -- or useful/valuable. This is the sort of thing academics put together to say they have published a book.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is definitely a sociological perspective of culture. That is to say, if you care to see what sociologists gave to say about culture, this is a great book. If you want another perspective, this is constraining, even within sociology. That said, this is valuable if only for the citations and the reasoning for these shifts in interest and valuable in witnessing sociology's growing interest in historically non-human aspects to social culture. Dispite this, there is a lot of published work outside sociological canon that this book doesn't come close to addressing, particularly in interdisciplinary spaces.

[Waris Ahmad Faizi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Analytical!

The book provides a methodological roadmap for analyzing culture using systematic and empirical tools. Rather than treating culture as vague or purely interpretive, the book demonstrates how meanings, symbols, and institutional logics can be measured through relational methods such as network analysis, discourse analysis, and formal modeling. The book bridges qualitative insight and quantitative rigor, showing how cultural structures can be studied with analytical precision while preserving their complexity. It is especially valuable for scholars working in cultural sociology, computational methods, and mixed-method research.

[szymborskalyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good introduction to modern soc of culture.