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▲ White and black colors have symbolic meaning—with phrases like “blackballed from the club” or “black sheep of the family” indicating negative judgment associated with blackness. Research shows that teams wearing black are called for more fouls than teams wearing white.
© Courtesy of Hanover College
When grouped together, material and nonmaterial components form cultural patterns. People’s lives are organized around these patterns. For example, family life includes patterns of courtship, marriage, child-rearing, and care of the elderly.
We have seen that material artifacts and nonmaterial beliefs, values, norms, and language compose the basic components of culture. Next, we explore the theoretical explanations for culture.
Society, Culture, and Our Social World
Whether people eat termite eggs, fish eggs, or chicken eggs, societies always have a culture, and culture is always linked to a society. Culture provides guidelines for behaviors and actions at each level of society, from the global system to the individual family. The social world model at the beginning of the chapter, with its concentric circles, represents the micro to macro levels of society. Smaller social units such as a school operate within a larger community that is also part of a region and the country. The culture determines what takes place in each of these units. There is a social unit—or structural “hardware”—and a culture—or “software”—at each level.
Microcultures: Micro-Level Analysis
Micro-level analysis focuses on social interactions in small groups. Groups of people, if those people meet with regularity and have some common interests or purpose, will develop insider language, jokes, symbols, and ways of interacting that may differ from other groups in which those same people participate. The social unit at this level of analysis only affects a portion of one’s daily life (a bowling league, a book group, or a poker club) or shapes a limited time period of one’s life (such as a Greek organization, Boy Scout troop, or a soccer team for 8-year-old girls). The social unit at the meso or macro level affects larger groups or societies and has more long-term impacts. So a microculture is a culture that develops at the micro level in groups or organizations and affects only a segment of one’s life or influences a limited period of one’s life. Other classic examples from sociology include a street gang, a college sorority, and a business office.
▲ Hospitals provide one example of a microculture. Hospital employees share terminology, rules of interaction, and values regarding objectifying human body parts so that the patient is not sexualized.
© iStock.com/sturti
Hospitals are communities of people who share a microculture. People in different-colored uniforms scurry around carrying out their designated tasks, part of the division of labor in the organization; each uniform has symbolic significance indicating positions at the hospital. Hospital workers interact among themselves to attain goals of patient care. They have a common in-group vocabulary, a shared set of values, a hierarchy of positions with roles and behaviors for each position, and a guiding system of regulations for the organization—all of which shape interactions during the hours when each member works in the hospital. Yet the hospital microculture may have little relevance to the rest of the employees’ everyday lives. Microcultures may survive over time, with individuals coming in and leaving as workers and patients, but in a complex society, no one lives his or her entire life within a microculture. The values, rules, and specialized language used by the hospital staff continue as one shift ends and other medical personnel enter and sustain that microculture. Outside that microculture, a different set of norms takes over.
Every organization, club, and association is a social group and therefore must have a culture (a microculture) with its own set of rules and expectations. Schools develop their own unique cultures and traditions; as students graduate and move out of that microculture, others move into it and perpetuate the microculture. However, some microcultures exist for a limited period of time or for a special purpose. A summer camp microculture may develop but exists only for that summer. The following summer, a different culture may evolve because of new counselors and campers. A girls’ softball team may develop its own cheers, jokes, insider slang, and values regarding competition or what it means to be a good sport, but next year, the girls may be realigned into different teams, and the transitory culture of the previous year will change. In contrast to microcultures, subcultures continue across a person’s life span.
Subcultures and Countercultures: Meso-Level Analysis
A subculture is smaller than the nation but, unlike a microculture, is large enough to support people throughout the life span (Dowd 2017; Gordon 1970). Many ethnic groups within the larger society have their own subcultures with their own sets of conventions and expectations. Picture a person, perhaps yourself, who is African Canadian, Chinese Canadian, or Hispanic Canadian, living within an ethnic community that provides food, worship, and many other resources. Despite unique cultural traits, that person is still a Canadian, living within the national laws, norms, and way of life. It is just that the person’s life has guidelines from the subculture in addition to the dominant culture of the society.
Because the social unit, such as the ethnic groups mentioned earlier, plays a more long-term and pervasive role in the life span of group members than a summer camp or a sorority (microcultures), we analyze subcultures at the meso level. (Table 3.5 illustrates the connection between the social units at each level and the type of culture at that level.)
▼ Table 3.5
Note that many of the categories into which we group people are not subcultures. For example, redheads, left-handed people, tall people, individuals who read People magazine, people who are single, visitors to Chicago, and Netflix watchers do not make up subcultures because they do not interact as social units or share a common way of life. A motorcycle gang, a college fraternity, and a summer camp are also not subcultures because they affect only a segment of one’s life (Gordon 1970; Yablonski 1959).
In the United States, subcultures include ethnic groups, such as Mexican American and Korean American; restricted religious groups, such as the Orthodox Jews in New York City; and social class groups, including the elite upper class on the East and West Coasts of the United States. The superwealthy have networks, exclusive clubs, and the Social Register, which lists the names and phone numbers of the elite, so they can maintain contact with one another. They have a culture of opulence that differs from middle-class culture, and this culture is part of their experience throughout their lives.
▲ Subcultures, such as the Orthodox Jewish faith community, impact their members throughout life—from infancy to death. Here, an Orthodox Jewish boy prepares to pray according to Jewish law by wrapping the leather strap of his tefillin around his arm and a tallit (prayer shawl) around his shoulders.
© iStock.com/Diane Diedrich
Many societies have subcultures based on ethnicity or religion or other historical characteristics, but broad-based subcultures with extensive social networks can emerge in other ways as well. Perhaps the most fascinating is
