Mohr and Rawlings: September 28, 2010 1 “Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn” John W. Mohr 1 and Craig Rawlings 2 Last Version — September, 2010 v.02 (9/28/10) Paper prepared for The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology. Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald Jacobs, and Philip Smith Word Count 21,405 (Text, 18,966; References, 2,439) 1. Introduction: “The business of pinning numbers on things – which is what we mean by measurement – has become a pandemic activity in modern science and human affairs. The attitude seems to be: if it exists, measure it. Impelled by this spirit, we have taken the measure of many things formally considered to lie beyond the bounds of quantification. In the process we have scandalized the conservatives, created occasional chaos, and stirred a ferment that holds rich promise for the better ordering of knowledge” (S. S. Stevens, 1959) 3 In this essay we review some of the ways that formal models have been used to study culture in the social sciences. We make use of two distinctions. We talk about the kinds of modeling projects that happened before as compared to those that happened after the sweep of 1 Dept. of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Email: mohr@soc.ucsb.edu. 2 Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice, Stanford University. Email: craigr@stanford.edu. 3 From an essay that Stevens contributed to a volume of papers initially presented at a 1956 symposium on “Measurement” sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1959, p. 18). Stevens was the Harvard psychologist who invented the canonical measurement scales (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio). He was one of a cohort of practitioner/theorists who developed many of the conventions for formal analysis in the modern social sciences. He was also, like many in this cohort, very reflexive about the process. As he wrote some years earlier, “The stature of a science is commonly measured by the degree to which it makes use of mathematics. Yet mathematics is not itself a science, in any empirical sense, but a formal, logical, symbolic system – a game of signs and rules” (Stevens, 1951, p. 1). We say more about these issues below.