Culture, or The Meaning of Meaning Making

The Oxford Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism
Wayne H. Brekhus (ed.) et al.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.001.0001
Published: 2021 Online ISBN: 9780190082178 Print ISBN: 9780190082161
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/37090/chapter/323190670 by Bodleian Law Library user on 04 December 2023

CHAPTER
Culture, or the Meaning of Meaning Making 

Michael Ian Borer
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190082161.013.11
Published: 11 August 2021
Abstract
The exploration and investigation of culture is nothing short of complex since the term itself is used in
many ways by both academics and lay publics. Symbolic interactionists and “fellow travelers” tend to
approach the study of culture from the position of those who experience and practice it. That is, they
focus on the cultural context of practices and interaction and often do so by illuminating the activities
of individuals and groups in everyday life. The meanings that people give to their actions and
interactions are of utmost importance for scholars interested in the culture as a social forces and a
shared collection of beliefs and practices.
Keywords: meaning, meaning making, context, everyday life, practice

Subject: Social Theory, Sociology
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
Introduction
It has become customary at the end of each year for various publications, as well as individuals with a social
media account, to look back upon the last twelve months and list their favorite movies, albums, books, and
so on. The dictionary industry—a sort of gatekeeper and promoter of language’s lasting stability and
consistent emergence—gets in on the game too by naming the “word of the year.” In 2014, the Oxford
English Dictionary chose “vape,” catching the early buzz of the rising use of e-cigarettes, while
Dictionary.com chose “exposure” to connect to other social health issues like the Ebola virus. Merriam-
Webster took a more staid approach by declaring CULTURE the word of the year. What they meant by
“culture” had a lot to do with various generic collectivities.
“Culture is a word that we seem to be relying on more and more. It allows us to identify and isolate an idea,
issue, or group with seriousness,” Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster, said in a
statement. “And it’s e cient: we talk about the ‘culture’ of a group rather than saying ‘the typical habits,
attitudes, and behaviors’ of that group.” The types of “groups”—in quotes because these are more like
aggregates than people working together or convening face-to-face—they have in mind are: pop culture,
celebrity culture, consumer culture, military culture, culture wars, cultural clashes, company culture,
startup culture, cultures of violence, cultures of silence, drug culture, Western culture, surf culture, high
culture, teenage culture, culture shocks, police culture, the NFL’s culture, media culture, and hookup
culture. Can such a broad term as culture retain any analytic meaning if it can encompass so many things?
Perhaps the fact that culture holds these things together in ways that we can then separate and explore
them as di erent entities means it does have analytic, and presumably vernacular, value and fortitude.

I will not attempt to de ne culture here beyond some purposely vague notion of collectivities and their
meaningful practices and expressions. A useful starting point for our discussion of symbolic interactionism
(SI) and cultural sociology (CS) is Raymond Williams’s seminal work Keywords (1985:87), where he notes
that culture is one of the most complicated words in the language. Once connected to agriculture, it was a
“noun of process” synonymous with tending to or cultivating something. We will address the paradox of
culture as noun and verb further below, but we have already seen the di erences. Clearly, the term can be
de ned from a single disciplinary view. Merriam-Webster seemed to ride the familiar anthropological
de nition of culture as “[that] complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom,
and any other capabilities and habits acquired by [humans] as a member of society” (Eagleton 2000:34).
Despite its breadth, Terry Eagleton notes that this de nition presumes that “[c]ulture is just everything
which is not genetically transmissible” (ibid.:35). As something that is transmittable, it is something that
moves whereby the various cultures listed above should be recognized as exible and emergent rather than
simply as static or hermetically sealed entities. And this is precisely where SI comes into play; to focus on
the practices and performances of meaning making that make a “meso level” structure like culture connect
the macro and the micro as a simultaneously mutable and durable entity.
From Code to Context
Whether we are exploring and investigating groups (Fine and Hallet 2014), communities (Fine and Van den
Scott 2011; Gardner 2020), organizations (McGinty 2014), subcultures (Williams 2011), or scenes (Irwin
1977; Kotarba, Fackler, and Nowotny 2009; Borer 2019)—or the actions of individuals within those
designated collectivities—the focus for both SI and CS is on meaning and meaning making. David Maines
(2000:578) tells us, with a nod to Herbert Blumer (1969), that meaning “is at best a sensitizing concept …
[whereby] most sociologists draw from a general social behavioristic framework to direct attention to
shared or common responses, signi cations, intentions, and goals, and, in general, the interpretive and
representational process that underlie human conduct.” We should qualify that “most sociologists” in
Maines’s statement might be more accurate if he speci ed which kinds of sociologists, since some have
altogether failed to put culture at the forefront of their analyses. In fact, even those whose work exists under
the umbrella of SofC are only interested in culture and meaning as epiphenomenal, as dependent upon the
supposedly more powerful and in uential social forces of politics and economics (see Borer 2006;
Grindsta 2008).
The focus on meaning, then, is arguably the main di erence between CS and SofC. The latter often reduces
culture to a “dependent variable” with society as the “independent variable,” as if culture were merely
reactionary in predictable ways. We can see this most often in the “production of culture” culture
1
perspective ushered by “neo-institutionalists” like Paul DiMaggio and Richard Peterson. Though they
share similar interests and subjects of inquiry (e.g., the arts) with the mid-twentieth century neo-Marxian
Frankfurt School, the production-of-culture folks are less politically aligned or motivated (Peterson and
Anand 2004). Still, both perspectives start from elsewhere to show the e ects of other forces, like the
market, on culture in its limited forms. For example, typical SofC studies examine the “gate-keeping” of
elites and their “sacred” museums (DiMaggio 1982; 1996; Glynn et al. 1996), music industries (Peterson
1994; Lena and Peterson, 2008), or publishing houses (Childress 2017). These are the studies of Culture with
a big “C” or Kultur with a capital “K” as their German forebears would have it: dependent and determined.
Those who embrace the relatively newer “school” of CS, instead, view society as already and unrelentingly
cultural. Indeed, the social is in very signi cant ways culturally constituted to the point that Christian Smith
(2003:66) argues that what most sociological theories “badly miss is the necessity for any good sociology to
be a deeply and thoroughly cultural sociology—despite all the messiness and indeterminacy that entails.”
Such recognition of “messiness and indeterminacy” aligns perfectly with seminal interactionist George

Herbert Mead’s idea about the processes of emerging meanings and their corresponding actions. “The
doctrine of emergence,” writes Mead, “asks us to believe that the present is always in some sense novel,
abrupt, something which is not completely determined by the past out of which it arose” (1932:16). The past
does not determine the present, or the future, because of individuals’ relative amounts of agency. That is,
humans have the ability to makes choices that a ect their present and future lives, though, to paraphrase
Karl Marx, they do so under conditions they have not chosen themselves. We have to play the cards we are
given regardless of how good or bad the hand may be. How we choose to play those cards is another matter.
Card games, like other organized leisure activities, have rules that must be followed. Social life is similar in
many respects. Cultural sociologists are interested in the meanings of those rules and how they a ect the
actions of both rule followers and rule breakers. We can liken such rules to “shared meaning structures” and
thereby focus on the ways they foster expectations and conventions for everyday communication and
behavior (see Karp et al. 2016:21–22). For Je rey Alexander (2003) and his fellow supporters of the “Strong
Program in Cultural Sociology,” the goal of cultural analysis is to provide the best map of the meaning
structures that social actors rely on to navigate through their social worlds. The Strong Program approaches
culture as an “independent variable” capable of “shaping actions and institutions, providing inputs every
bit as vital as more material or instrumental forces” (Alexander and Smith 2003:12). By arguing for culture’s
relative autonomy, the Strong Program recognizes that culture is not de ned by social life, but rather that
culture itself takes part in, and is ever responsible for, de ning it.
If we take seriously the idea that the world does not come pre-interpreted, then we cannot decide in advance
which features of social life will be meaningful to individuals, groups, and populations. The key categories
of sociological analysis (e.g., race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion) are important and
meaningful, but we cannot decide in advance how they will be meaningful, or how they will be combined
with other categories of meaningfulness. Alexander and others (see Eyerman 2004; Reed 2011) engage in a
“structural hermeneutics” to explore speci c meaning structures in order to understand how the di erent
elements of meaning t together. As such, they tend to take a relatively macro perspective to investigate the
overarching symbolic system under which people live while simultaneously recognizing the in uence of
cultural codes on action.
When exploring the dynamics of American civil society, for example, Alexander and Philip Smith (1993)
turned toward the “internal symbolic logic” of that particular meaning structure. Drawing liberally from
Emile Durkheim, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes among others across multiple disciplines, they
identify a binary code of sacred and profane ideals that cut civil discourse into two camps: democratic and
counter-democratic. They address how each side of the code a ects actors, social relationships, and
institutions in the ways they operate through a seemingly secular version of the sacred and profane or, put
di erently, the not-so-rational discourse of politics in social life. Alexander and Smith (ibid.:196) write:
We argue that culture should be conceived as a system of symbolic codes which specify the good
and the evil. Conceptualizing culture in this way allows it causal autonomy—by virtue of its
internal semio-logics—and also a ords the possibility for generalizing from and between speci c
localities and historical contexts. Yet, at the same time, our formulation allows for individual
action and social-structural factors to be included in the analytical frame.
From their point of view, both macro and micro considerations are in uenced by the presumed relative
autonomy of culture. Again, to use the game metaphor, players can make their own moves but only within
the con nes of what is allowed by the game. As such, the game’s meaning structures take precedent over the
ways individuals uphold, or seek to upend, such structures.
Though the Strong Program purports to attend to “individual action” and agency, studies under its

umbrella often remain at a high level of abstraction. With too much emphasis on structure, social actors
themselves can get lost in the analysis. Perhaps that is why an ethnographic void exists within the Strong
Program. And maybe that is why symbolic interactionists have not fully engaged with their work. And
perhaps that is why Gary Alan Fine announced and has promulgated a version of SI-friendly cultural
sociology that gets closer to the inner workings of small groups and individuals without getting caught in
the rei ed quagmire of so-called overarching social structures.
With tongue playfully planted in cheek yet with “vital purpose,” Fine’s “Puny Program of Cultural
Sociology” is de ned by a move toward a “sociology of the local” that honors the legacy and continued
persistence of grounded and peopled ethnographic studies (2010:359). As a means for avoiding too much
theoretical abstraction, the local context of any speci c study becomes a key “variable” for understanding
meaning-making processes. This involves a conceptual move from studying symbolic codes to studying
emergent practices as they take place within and adhere to local cultural norms. The emphasis, then, is less
on the product of cultural actions within particular codes than with the “processual how” of codes, which
themselves are constructed and then maintained or deconstructed.
The emphasis on process is a cornerstone of SI, as depicted by Herbert Blumer’s claim that “Human social
interaction is more like a cauldron than a stamping machine, more in the nature of a dynamic, ongoing
development than a static repetition. It represents human life in process” (Blumer 2004:38). And the newer
realm of cultural sociology—Strong, Puny, or otherwise—is primarily concerned with, as Lyn Spillman
(2002:5) notes, “the processes of meaning-making.” Explicitly paying attention to process allows us to
move from the local to make more generalizable statements about human behavior and meaning making.
Meanings of situations and scenes are not created anew through each interaction. They are based on shared
histories that foster expected behaviors and actions from participants’ roles. Fine writes:
Since every act constitutes and is constituted by a local context, particularity is universal. If
everything is situated, that situated quality becomes a feature of social organization. However,
simultaneously a situated context shapes the evaluation and interpretation of action. Put another
way, the local provides a stage for action and creates a lens by which participants typify groups or
gatherings, establishing boundaries. As a result, the local is both a material reality and a form of
collective representation. Action is always generated in response to other actions within a local
scene as well as to the local meaning of that scene. (2010:356)
Though local contexts are a ected by external forces and, in e ect, other local contexts (see Borer 2019),
everyday life is lived through the local as a stage for individual and collective action and participation. Such
practices emerge within the context of interaction between participants and are often based on a “group
style” that, as Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman note, both depends on and creates rules for group
membership, responsibilities, and speech norms (2003:739). In their comparative study of suburban
environmental activists and rural bar patrons, they conclude that “one cannot fully understand a group’s
shared culture in an everyday setting without understanding the group’s style” (ibid.:737).
Taking the local context seriously makes the “generalized other” more tangible and empirical and, in e ect,
grounds studies of culture in real spaces and places with real people interacting with others. For example, in
Jooyoung Lee’s study of an improvisational freestyle hip hop collective (2016), he observes the ways that
young Black males in a particular setting in South Central Los Angeles created music as a way to get away
from the stress and distress of their daily lives. Here, the local urban context is especially important because
“in areas like South Central LA … young people grow up in neighborhoods that constrain the scope of their
peer groups. The specter of gang violence and restrictive gang injunctions makes it di cult for young
people to move freely and make friends across neighborhoods” (2016:4). The speci c context, then, of the

Project Blowed—where members can participate in the playful wordplay and dance moves of hip hop—
becomes the case to explore where and how culture is learned, created, and practiced. But Lee’s analysis
does not just stay within the geographical context of his study. He extends his analysis beyond the group to
address a more universalized experience of angst that drives many of the youth he studied who were trying
to turn their hobby into a career. He calls this “existential urgency,” a condition felt as “a person’s
diminishing time to achieve life and career goals” (ibid.:7). Such a condition is likely not unique to these
particular persons and thereby extends beyond the group Lee studied to be generalized across settings.
To respect both the unique particularities of group and the universal human process are the crux of SI-
friendly culture studies. Comparative ethnographic studies are rare, but possible. And they help solidify
those practices that span across speci c local culture. Richard Ocejo (2017) achieves this by staying in one
geographic location—New York City—but looks at four di erent occupations. These jobs, which were once
mainstays of the working class, now don the honori c labels of “craft” or “artisanal” in the so-called new
service economy: bartenders, booze makers, barbers, and butchers. Ocejo nds that, for the sake of meeting
the ideal of authenticity, “the art of doing these jobs means learning how to follow, bend, and sometimes
break a set of rules that their occupational community follows and enforces” (ibid.:180). Through these
emergent practices, participants in these occupations have given new and updated meaning to their jobs for
themselves but also for their respective clientele. They all engage in acts of “service teaching” to provide the
visceral knowledge for their consumers to appreciate the crafted cocktails, whiskeys, hairdos, and unknown
strips of meat o ered to them.
In his study of music festivals, Jonathan Wynn (2015) conducted a comparative ethnography that brought
him to three di erent cities: Austin, TX; Nashville, TN; and Newport, RI. This allowed him to focus on how
various groups in particular settings engaged in “festivalization” as a means for creating and promoting
their respective local cultures. Instead of taking a view from above, Wynn analyzes the festivals and their
ancillary events as “occasions” and provides a nuanced reading of Go man’s seminal work on interaction
orders. Here, Wynn follows Fine’s lead in addressing the meso level of social life by recognizing it as the key
link between the smaller occasions of interaction—within festivals and the occasions (like the festivals
themselves)—that depend on the ways that groups “varyingly consume, distribute, and take advantage of
resources through heightened moments of sociality” (ibid.:258). This builds upon Anselm Strauss’s central
argument that all social orders are in some respects negotiated orders (1978). The negotiation process
happens at the meso level within and between groups and organizations. According to David Maines
(1982:267), focusing on the negotiated order of the meso structure provides “important insights into how
social orders are maintained, how they change, and how structural limitations interact with the capacity of
humans to reconstruct their worlds creatively.” As such, we might do well to say that, for symbolic
interactionists, the study of culture is essentially the study meso-level negotiated orders. At its root, SI
concerned with “how people do things together” (Becker:1986). Culture—as a process of meaning making
—is that thing that they are doing together.
Culture in and of Everyday Life
As matter of inquiry, “everyday life” is at the heart of symbolic interactionist studies. In fact, examining
what we do on a daily basis—from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed and even while we sleep—
provides us with an awfully large amount of situations that are negotiated by individuals within particular
settings. In the introduction to their edited volume Popular Culture in Everyday Life, Dennis Waskul and
Phillip Vannini (2016:9) write:

The study of everyday life, both within sociology and cultural studies, is a strong, dynamic, and
captivating research eld with long and rich theoretical traditions. From its outset symbolic
interaction has played a central role in the development of this eld by allowing researchers to
examine ordinary and mundane topics, aby allowing them to take a unique methodological and
theoretical approach to the pragmatics of day-to-day life.
Waskul and Vannini collected almost thirty essays that encompass a whole spectrum of practices, though, of
course, not exhaustive due to the almost in nite possibility of everyday cultural acts. “From play and
hobbies to texting and exercising, from enjoying food and drink to dressing oneself in the morning, rom
going to the bathroom to interacting with ones pets, from watching a TV show to updating one’s Facebook
pro le” (ibid.:8), we see everyday life in action. Of note, each of the essays begins with a verb (e.g.,
watching, sharing, playing, consuming) rather than a noun, once again showing how culture moves, shifts,
sways, and bends through everyday interactions.
In their review of critical works on the sociology of everyday life, Peter Adler, Patricia Adler, and Andrea
Fontana comment: “Naturally occurring interaction is the foundation of all understanding of society.
Describing and analyzing the character and implications of everyday life interaction should thus serve as
both the beginning and end point of sociology” (1987:219). This is not to suggest that sociologists should
give up the study of social structure in favor of the study of human interaction. In fact, this is where culture
—as a binding mechanism—comes into play because social structures are created and sustained through
everyday interactions. Writing well before the advent of either SI or CS, German social philosopher Georg
Simmel concluded one of his essays on human interaction with the following mandate:
One will no longer be able to consider as unworthy of attention the delicate, invisible threads that
are spun from one person to another if one wishes to understand the web of society according to its
productive, form-giving forces—this web of which sociology hitherto was largely concerned with
describing the nal nished pattern of its uppermost phenomenal stratum. ([1907] 1997:120)
These “delicate, invisible threads” are precisely the objects of inquiry that sociologists who recognize the
foundational aspects of everyday life attempt to make visible. We can detect these threads by focusing on
the “form-giving forces” that individuals enact and rely upon to makes sense of their interactions,
encounters, and experiences with others.
Though so much of everyday life is constituted by mundane behavior that might fall under the realm of the
involuntary and habitual, the unexpected can shock us by revealing the “delicate, invisible threads” of our
taken-for-granted connectedness. In her study of celebrating sightings, Kerry Ferris (2004) addresses what
happens when the ordinary and the extraordinary collide. The paradox of celebrity encounters is that fans
know way more about the celebrities than celebrities know about them, making this an unusual type of
“stranger interaction” (Lo and 1998). Even though they are serendipitous and unexpected, Ferris found
that public celebrity sighing adhere to a relatively stable moral order. She notes that the “the intersection of
fame and mundanity … generates its own values [and shows] that the moral order of celebrity sightings
appears informal, spontaneous, and naturally occurring, but it is clearly patterned, and its patterns are
visible in participants’ accounts” (2004:242).
Interaction patterns of celebrity sighting are established by two main cultural practices: “recognition work”
and “response work.” When someone sees a celebrity, they rst need to verify if that person is who they
think they are. “Recognition work” is necessary because the extraordinary (i.e., the celebrity) has thrown
the expected routine out of whack for the mundane observer. They work to identify the celebrity, primarily
based on information they have learned or gained from popular media sources like a sense of familiarity or a
signature smirk. Once they have con rmed that the celebrity is who they think they are, the observer enters

the phase of “response work” when debating about what to do next. The key tactics include “staying cool”
(i.e., acting as if the famous person is just like anyone else), approaching the celebrity as their “biggest fan,”
and, if the celebrity looks as if they want the attention of others, disregarding the celebrity’s presence
because they are in violation of the taken-for-granted moral order.
Both extraordinary and ordinary physical objects and other nonhumans can play roles in shaping the culture
and moral order of everyday life. According to Colin Jerolmack and Iddo Tavory, these things in uence
expectations and interactions as mediators of meaning. Relying on their own respective works, they
highlight Jerolmack’s study of “pigeon yers” (2009, 2013) to show how the totemic quality of pigeons
provided a sense of identity and an interactional sphere for men who breed domestic pigeons in New York
City. Participants in this culture enact their distinct social world with one another and with their birds.
Jerolmack shows how each yer’s interactions with his pigeons aroused an awareness of himself as part of
the collective by eliciting both real and imagined social ties through interactions. Shared customs dictated
certain acts, like breeding, whereby each participant internalized the attitudes of the group and aimed to
foster pigeons that aligned with the standards of his peers. Moreover, the men campaigned for status at
“the pet shop” based on their birds’ abilities to “look good” and “ y nice.” The personal feeling of
satisfaction that each man had from their birds’ respective appearances and performances resulted from
invoking membership in a group of “pigeon yers” who valued these aesthetics and imbued respect on
those who achieved them (Jerolmack 2013:107). The pigeons were not simply emblems of pre-given social
arrangements or meanings. Instead, they helped shape the patterns of belonging, identity, and membership
onto the culture of pigeon breeders, yers, and those who judged both pigeons and their owners.
Nonhuman objects can also mold everyday interactions. Expanding on Go man’s idea of “interactional
hooks,” Tavory (2010) found that Orthodox Jewish men who wore yarmulkes (skullcaps) were often “called
upon” as Jews as they walked through their neighborhood. That is, random anonymous people in the bus
station, for example, asked them on an almost daily basis about their religious beliefs. Other Orthodox Jews
often nodded to them, and, on a rare occasion, someone would shout an anti-Semitic slur. They told Tavory
that they often forgot that they were wearing the yarmulke. Orthodox men constantly wore it as a habitual,
nonre exive aspect of their daily appearance. Instead of just signifying their group memberships, the
yarmulke provided strangers with a stable social identi cation for interaction and constrained the Jewish
men’s abilities to enact other parts of their person identities.
Sticking to the realm of religion, Nancy Ammerman (2014) argues for the study of religion in everyday life
under the guise of “lived religion.” Combatting sociology’s Protestant legacy of confounding religion with
belief as well as the religious studies that focus solely on “sacred texts,” Ammerman and others (McGuire
2008; Bender 2010) have established an SI-informed paradigm where they “look for the material, embodied
aspects of religion as they occur in everyday life, in addition to listening for how people explain themselves.
It includes both the experiences of the body and the mind” (Ammerman 2014:190). Such practices and
narratives can be found within both marginal and institutionalized “spiritual tribes,” so that scholars can
see how religion and spirituality merge, like celebrity encounters, the extraordinary and mundane. A key
sight for such insights is the everyday workplace. At rst glance work is the place of rational mundanity.
But, as Ammerman tells us from the stories people told her, there are ways that some sacralize their
occupations. “Listening to stories about work made very clear that there is a great deal more going on
everyday than merely an economic exchange of labor for monetary reward” (ibid.:197). This line of thinking
can help solidify the roles that culture—religion here being an explicit manifestation—plays in everyday
lives.
Conclusion

The notion that people assign meaning to the things around them and act accordingly is a basic tenet of SI.
The same can be said about the sociological study of culture and cultures, especially CS. What CS helps us
focus on are the wider contexts of everyday interactions and practices including the shared histories of
inhabited institutions. It reminds us that meanings are not created anew in and through every situation.
People, places, and things often come pre-labeled, so to speak, by someone else. It also helps us move from
studying the meanings of things to the study of things that are meaningful. This distinction is akin to the
one that anthropologist Cli ord Geertz makes about blinks and winks (see Geertz 1973). A blink is
involuntary action, so much so that we hardly recognize how many times we blink while talking to someone
or reading this chapter for that matter. Winks, on the other, are voluntary and intentional. They convey a
meaning between the winker and their intended audience.
We can push Geertz’s argument further by saying that some intentional acts are more meaningful than
others. And those based on the actions and interactions of collectivities beyond and into, as Geertz says, the
web of meaning. As such, culturally oriented scholars nd themselves looking at the expressive side of
humanity and the processes by which a person, place, or thing becomes meaningful, sometime to the point
of consecration. Where do we nd the meaningful, one might ask. The perhaps too glib answer is
everywhere. The less glib answer points us to the people, places, and things that people hold dear and hope
to be near. SI and CS provide scholars with the tools to seek out what other seek out; that is, we care what
other people care about, the good, the bad, the ugly, and all that fall in between.
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Note
1 It is interesting to note that, early in his career, DiMaggio was interested in the ways institutions work but then became
one of the leading scholars of cognitive sociology and its relationship to culture.

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