I've been somewhat blindly throwing about the term "culture work" lately and thought it high-time to nail down just what I mean -- so I thought I'd just try out a few comments to see what people think.
1) Culture work vs cultural work. As I use it, "culture work" is intentionally an awkward misphrasing, where "culture" becomes an adjective in place of the more natural "cultural". Cultural work, a natural, common-sense phrase, should to my mind encompass traditional arts/ design/ fashion practices (painting, dancing, singing, sewing etc), work that is oriented to such practices (curating a show, framing a painting) and the like. This allows "cultural" to have its everyday use in relation to aesthetic phenomena. But the awkwardness of "culture work" tries to pull the word out of its normal use and draw attention to "culture" as it is understood by social scientists: a value-neutral analytic term designating the shared conceptual, symbolic and emotional fabric of a community. Work in this context is not "work that has culture" since the broader definition effectively inserts culture into every act anyway. To my mind, "culture work" really means work that is purposefully oriented to altering or instrumentalizing shared concepts, symbols and emotional cues to either change, reinforce or revive their usage or meaning.
2) Culture workers. In the way I outline it above, I think it stands to reason that everyone is pretty much always doing culture work, but most of what is done only has minor, synchronic effects on the culture itself (even if we're looking at culture with a very fine grain). So for example when office workers gather around a water cooler, their small-talk serves to classify, categorize, define and otherwise differentiate meanings that are acceptable to the group. This has an immense effect on defining group boundaries (excluding some people) and shaping status hierarchies, but it is also very unstable and ephemeral: for example, a charismatic individual might quickly reconfigure the office culture without anyone really noticing, while authority figures might impose rules of conduct that squash these micro-culture practices. But, of perhaps more interest to us, so too might the effort of culture experts produce effects even when there are no direct ties....
3) Culture experts. The term "culture experts" can help us categorize quite disparate but conceptually equivalent forms of expertise: artists; entertainers; propagandists; advertisers/ marketers; intellectuals; academics. Each of these groups, which vary in terms of professionalization processes, claim expertise in culture (using the sociological definition). The conversation around the water cooler might be affected by any of these in about the same way. An office worker might mention to his colleagues that he saw Death of a Salesman and it made him embarrassed about how much time he spends at the office -- this might shift the conversation more toward shared commitments to family life, which might in turn make the workaholic in the office feel excluded. Another worker might mention instead having seen Glengarry Glen Ross and (misinterpreting the subtext completely) is fired up about putting in long hours -- which makes the workaholic feel included but excludes the single parent. A TV commercial might unite the office around a certain type of humor or lifestyle product that includes some but excludes others. A politician focuses a specific sort of patriotic configuration etc. The point here is that expertise can render results broadly (synchronically) but is contingent on a broad platform/ distribution channels.
So, what would be studying if we set out a "culture work" research agenda?
Here's my take in regards to the US Army (which is what I study):
A) Culture matters a great deal in war because it is tied to morale and also because it constrains some forms of behavior (deviance, atrocity) and enables other forms (risking your life, letting your friend risk his life). The gold standard for culture work in war from a democratic, civil perspective would be the fostering of an environment where soldiers are capable of doing very uncivil things like killing enemy soldiers (without incurring a lifetime of trauma as a consequence) but are also very reluctant to harm noncombatants, rape/ abuse each other, or otherwise transgress civil norms. This gold standard may well be impossible to achieve at the institutional level. A number of competing but nongeneralized ethical stances posit different "gold standards": militarism posits patriotic acts of violence to be a cause for celebration; pacifism rejects the possibility of ethical violence; technophilia sees the solution in the means of waging war.
B) There are a lot of culture experts on the battlefield, and the density of culture work on the battlefield is increasing. Culture experts there include reporters, entertainers (present through media), but also a variety of professionalized Army culture experts: public information and command information officers, experts in civil affair, counterinsurgency/ state-building, psychological warfare and some others. The goals of culture experts vary considerably.
C) The platform for the dissemination of culture work has changed radically of late as soldiers gain access to the internet.
Anyway, this is pretty elementary and rough stuff and I imagine most if not all of you have thought through these points but I just wanted to lay them out as clearly as I can in the hope of getting your feedback -- which I'd really appreciate!
Hey Tom, thanks for posting. My response goes like this:
ReplyDelete1) By this definition, who does 'culture work', and when? You answer this in
2) "everyone, all the time, when there's work being done. BUT, some people do it more than others (point 3)."
- So if this is the case, why conceptualize it? Why not operationalize work in a 'culture' way, to say that in work, there is always meaning being produced in a structured way? This seems to me the link which Lamont has given us permission to make, between culture in knowledge economies which expand beyond the work of science, into social science and beyond. It is a circuitous route, but one necessary to get some people to the perspective of cultural sociology (where "culture" precedes most all claims). What the move back into non-science fields means is a differential of "hard" knowledge, i.e. expertise, which you raise as point
3) If everyone is making meaning all the time (by shooting the shit, by getting reports off with panache, by parking next to their buds in the lot...), then experts are presumably those who "win" at the symbolic production game, right? How do we know? To take Eyal's side on the expertise thing, it's to go back to Latour and actor-network theory (ANT), which, based in ethnomethods that are analytically "value free," foreclose explanation (and therefore prediction), and instead simply describe the empirical world while suggesting some possible mechanisms (which few ANTs have ever actually claimed for themselves). Eyal's ANT approach to the expertise question (positioned mostly against Collins & Evans' "realistic constructionism" of experts) says we can know expertise as a quality of a transaction (or set of transactions, e.g., filing engrossing reportage within a series, or finding “the bug” again and again in your troubleshooting), and not the essence of a person. It claims that experts don’t exist in any functional way, and that expertise is a constant process of reinstating your expertise.
- So my question for your point 3 is, who’s an expert, and what are they doing to make them that? And then, are they really the only ones doing that? You inch close, but don’t make the move, with
A-C) I think an interesting engagement for you, in light of these disconnected lines, would be to engage the roles of the former paradigm, the production of culture approach, and characters like the “gatekeeper” and the “tastemaker,” in light of what we now contend with in terms of cultural sociology and ANT/expertise. I could see a really compelling parallel between army press officers and pop music promoters, but made more rigorous by trying to explain the organizational boundaries which (in my view) are much more “real” in army than in showbusiness. Someone like Keith Negus would be a place to start. I’m sure there are some other, more relevant cases to engage as well.
Joe
Correction: Collins & Evans' approach is better characterized as "substantive," though "realist [n.b.] construction" is how they further break-down their use of the term.
DeleteJoe