watsonsbasement:Documents:Y2005-2006:Current Papers:Soc of Culture Handbook:Drafts:Assembly Drafts:2009-10 Oct Work:Post-1st Submission:2009-10 FMC D2-30c.doc 1/25/10 1 ‘Formal Models of Culture’ John W. Mohr and Craig Rawlings (5457 Words) Forthcoming in A Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by Laura Grindstaff, John Hall and Ming-cheng Lo. Routledge. 1. Introduction. By our accounting, a formal model of culture is, first of all, an output from a quantitative study of collected data that seeks to describe, explain, interpret or otherwise represent some feature or aspect or content of culture. As a model, the output has been transformed into a summary or a representation (in reduced form) of the data that purports to be analogous (in some fashion) to the phenomena under consideration. Thus it is precisely the use of quantitative methods, or the formal analysis of data, which is the distinguishing criterion for inclusion in the present classification. In this essay we trace some of the broad contours of change in the history of culture modeling. We simplify this task in two ways. First, we focus on just one case, American sociology in its first century or so of professional formation. Second, we highlight just one difference, distinguishing interpretative from non-interpretative intents. Thus in the history presented here we look separately at models of culture that have explicitly hermeneutic goals in contrast to those that don’t. Practitioners of the former sort want to use formal tools to make interpretations, to unlock useful readings of texts. Those of the latter persuasion usually seek robust measures of cultural forms that can be fitted onto other explanatory frames. Our goal is to describe some major changes in how culture has been modeled by social scientists over the last century or so, but we will also say something about the enduring frictions between qualitative and quantitative styles of social scientific research. Thus, in the final section of the essay we take up the question of how these two different modalities of knowledge production have been linked in the history of American sociology and we offer a preliminary interpretation of what this articulation structure says about the recurrent ‘Methods Wars.’ We conclude with a few thoughts about the applicability of these ideas to other disciplines, to other national intellectual milieus, and some other possible futures for the formal modeling of culture. 2. Two Ways to Know