Sociological Forum, Vol. 19, No. 3, September 2004 ( C  2004) Speaking Together, Thinking Together? Exploring Metaphor and Cognition in a Shipyard Union Dispute 1 Gabriel Ignatow 2 Social scientists recognize that discourses are structured by historical and so- cial processes, but only rarely make the case that discourses have internal coherence due to processes of individual and social cognition. Where social scientists have argued for internal structuring, however, they have disagreed over how language and cognition interact for (1) individuals, (2) dyads, and (3) social groups. Using semantic sequence and metaphor analysis, I ana- lyze transcripts of a series of meetings of Scottish shipyard workers in order to investigate cognitive schemas structuring the workers’ discourse. Results show how individuals’ schemas shaped their participation in their group’s dis- course. Possible future uses of the analytic method developed in this paper are discussed. KEY WORDS: culture; cognition; metaphor; schemas. INTRODUCTION The idea of cultural coherence, once a topic of intense debate in schol- arship on culture (Smelser, 1992), is now only rarely addressed explicitly. Where culture is defined broadly, as more or less the beliefs, ideas, and practices characteristic of some social group, the argument that cultures are internally coherent when viewed from a high level of analysis is rarely made. Instead, comparative cultural sociologists, linguists, and others have 1 This is a revision of a paper presented at the 96th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Anaheim, CA, August 2001. 2 Department of Sociology, Ko¸ c University, Rumelifeneri Yolu 34450, Sariyer, Istanbul, Turkey; e-mail: gignatow@ku.edu.tr; ignatow@stanfordalumni.org. 405 0884-8971/04/0900-0405/0 C  2004 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.