Abstract
The first time I became aware of John Mohr’s work was as an undergraduate student, when I developed a fascination for the impact that social and cultural meanings have on behaviour in and around organizations. The field of cultural sociology was strongly marked theoretically and methodologically by John Mohr (for instance, his frequently cited article on formal methods for the measurement of meaning structures, published in 1998). Such works have inspired scholars to further investigate how social life is influenced by and constructs cultural meanings and how to measure these processes. It is therefore unsurprising that so many talented scholars, who have each made outstanding contributions to the field, have come together to craft and publish this fascinating book after John Mohr’s passing in August, 2019.
Measuring Culture is addressed to all scholars interested in ‘the development of theories and methods that explain how people assign meaning to events, objects, individuals, or groups, as well as how people interpret and live through such meanings themselves’ (p. 2). In four chapters, complemented by a rich introduction and conclusion, the authors’ aim is to give a considerable overview of existing work that deals with the measurement of meaning, discuss methodological decisions underlying this work, and give a prospect to the future of the measurement of meaning. The book’s aim is well achieved, as the authors, with their various disciplinary backgrounds, provide a broad and diverse selection and description of existing work. Furthermore, in one chapter, the summaries of existing work are supplemented by in-depth interviews conducted with the authors of selected research projects, namely Ann Mische, Ronald Breiger, Paul DiMaggio and Robin Wagner-Pacifici, each of them outstanding scholars with significant contributions to (cultural) sociology. What is particularly interesting about the interviews is that readers gain new insights into how methodological decisions were made and which challenges the authors faced when they conducted their research projects.
The first chapter of the book focuses on ‘the measurement of cultural processes and patterns that can be observed in individuals’ (p. 21). In this context, the authors describe existing approaches that aim to measure culture based on what and how people think, talk and act. Although this is a complex area of research, the authors succeed in creating an exciting journey through this territory, which provides deep insights without getting lost in detail. They start by providing a brief historical outline on the measurement of thinking, talking and acting by roaming through the work of prominent scholars such as Karl Mannheim, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Charles Wright Mills and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, they describe more recent methodological approaches for each area. They categorize and discuss established approaches to measure people’s cognition. Next, the authors describe prominent work that aims at measuring ambitions, ideals and desires in what people say as well as the stories they construct about the social world. Finally, the authors discuss work that measures how culture is manifested in human behaviour by investigating their actions and the practices they acquire. Regarding the applied research methods, the selected works are quite diverse, ranging from in-depth interviews to large-scale surveys or participant ethnography.
The second chapter considers how culture manifests in and is shaped by objects, such as clothing, documents, or tools, rather than individuals. They start by asking, ‘What do clothes’ meanings say about human dignity, social inclusion, or racial hatred? And, more generally, how do we, as social scientists, study objects’ meanings? What makes these meanings, and their objects, cultural?’ (p. 59). To address these questions, the authors define how objects can be understood from a cultural sociological perspective and clarify the aspects and dimensions of objects that can be measured to analyse their cultural meanings. Subsequently, they discuss measurement choices and challenges of existing approaches that aim to measure the role of cultural meanings in the production and consumption of objects. In this context, they address important questions, such as how researchers can adequately measure the novelty of objects or how the role of object creators’ identities in the meaning-making process may be captured.
With the third chapter, the authors highlight that culture ‘not only is constitutive of persons and things, but also shapes our relations with one another’ (p. 94). Again, by starting with brief historical outlines, they discuss approaches to measure how meanings are created within interpersonal relations, such as social interactions, social networks and social fields, and how meanings shape these relations in turn. They present recent work in which, for example, scholars analysed recordings of conversations or communication on Facebook and studied the influence of cultural meanings in everyday interactions. Following this, they discuss how culture and social networks co-constitute each other through the meanings embedded in relations and how tools of social network analysis can be used for profound analyses of cultural processes. Finally, the authors discuss approaches to measure how the construction and diffusion of meanings are influenced by social forces beyond social interactions and networks, namely, social fields. To this end, the authors discuss empirical work that draws on a more power- and practice-oriented perspective as well as work based on an institutional perspective.
Following the review of work ‘from an individual’s acts of meaning-making through the artifacts they make and the relationships they sustain’ (p. 128), the authors again change their focus in the fourth chapter. Here, they discuss the pivots and choices behind three prominent research projects and interviewed their authors to get an ‘insider’s peek’ (p. 129) into the process of research on meaning construction. For example, the chapter depicts how the collaboration between sociologist Paul DiMaggio and computer scientist David Blei began, which resulted in one of the first sociological applications of the now-popular topic modeling technique (e.g. DiMaggio, Nag, & Blei, 2013). Equally interesting is the narrative of how the collaboration between Breiger, Mohr and Wagner-Pacifici (e.g. Mohr, Wagner-Pacifici, Breiger, & Bogdanov, 2013) occurred. Robin Wagner-Pacifici collected a large dataset of National Security Strategy text documents. Known methods of discourse analysis seemed unable to tease out all the interesting facets of the text corpus. In this case, it was primarily the varied interests and backgrounds of the three authors, who had been involved with the project for nearly a decade, that led to a creative methodological solution based on natural language processing to measure actors, actions and scenes in the documents. Again, the diverse selection of projects is compelling and gives the reader a deeper insight into different qualitative and quantitative methods based on various data sources. From this, readers can learn, on the one hand, how fruitful collaborations may occur over time, and on the other hand, what potential concerns may arise for their own research projects in this area.
The book closes with a rich conclusion in which the authors not only summarize the previous chapters but also discuss methodological concerns, which become clear by considering previous work, and the future of measuring culture. This includes the authors’ acknowledgement that two crucial factors of cultural meanings are often missed in current work: potentiality as the ‘latent qualities that might lie dormant in individuals, objects, or relationships, which may or may not be activated and which lead to an array of possible outcomes’ (p. 163) and absence as ‘the empty spaces of relationships, networks, and fields, as well as what is left unsaid and unthought’ (p. 164).
The future of the field of cultural sociology is seen in the many tools that are emerging as part of the computational social sciences. The advantage of tools such as topic modeling, word embeddings, or automatic image detection is not only seen in the increased computing power that allows the processing of large amounts of data; the authors also highlight the tools’ ability to identify latent but significant cultural patterns that are often hidden from the human eye. At this point, a more detailed discussion of different ways in which innovative methods may be linked with traditional approaches to measuring meaning in the future would have been desirable. In fact, various researchers have put a lot of effort into combining the existing knowledge on measurement as summarized in this book and new computational tools with the aim of creating better methods for analysing meaning. For example, Kozlowski, Taddy and Evans (2019) impressively demonstrated how word embeddings can be used to capture the degree to which cultural dimensions, such as class and gender, are latently carried by words within texts. In another example, Goldenstein and Poschmann (2019) propose a methodological framework that combines the automatic detection of grammar structures with the identification of latent semantic themes to draw maps that help reconstruct the meaning development of concepts such as corporate responsibility. Despite the many opportunities that arise from novel tools, the authors emphasize the important hermeneutic role of researchers when they state that the ‘results produced by an algorithm should never be the end game of research: instead, these results should provoke further interpretive analysis’ (p. 171).
Although this book addresses the field of cultural sociology, I consider it highly relevant to the field of organization studies. Indeed, some of the works reviewed in the book are related to organizational phenomena or theories used in organization studies. This is not surprising, considering the importance attributed to the influence of social and cultural meanings on organizations in various theoretical traditions.
For instance, a core argument of institutional theory is that organizations’ adoption of specific structures and practices is influenced by cultural meanings legitimized within their environments. However, empirical studies that apply institutional theory have been criticized for paying little attention to this aspect, so that scholars asked, ‘Why has meaning disappeared from institutional theory?’ (Suddaby, 2010, p. 15). As an answer to this question, it is often stated that institutional analysis lacks an appropriate methodology to measure culture and meaning. Measuring Culture, however, can provide an important methodological backing for this strand of research by showing how meanings can be measured at different levels (e.g. individuals, teams, organizations and industries) and in different entities (e.g. persons, relationships and objects). Further, the book provides important recommendations on what methodological choices and potential challenges should be considered.
Another prominent example is the research focusing on the importance of everyday life in organizations, with a particular emphasis on organizational culture and communities (e.g. the special issue by Weeks, Ailon & Brannen, 2017). A central insight of this stream is that details of everyday organizational life are interesting research objects that have the potential to contribute to a better understanding of entire organizations. Such details may include members’ clothing, photos on corporate websites, or tools used in meetings. The authors of Measuring Culture share a similar perspective in acknowledging that not only people and their behaviour but also such objects ‘can carry great social and political significance’ (p. 58). Particularly, the second chapter focused on meanings in objects helps scholars to better understand how materiality in organizations comprises and reinforces culture.
Overall, I highly recommend the book to any scholar interested in how cultural meanings influence organizations from within and without, and how these influences can be measured, either qualitatively or quantitatively.