A toolkit for analyzing corporate cultural toolkits § Klaus Weber * Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208-2001, USA Available online 27 October 2005 Abstract The cultural and discursive underpinning of industries and markets has received growing attention in recent years. I use Ann Swidler’s conceptualization of culture as toolkit, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as the starting point to further this enterprise. The article illustrates a strategy for measuring and comparing the cultural toolkits in use by different actors in a larger field. The strategy allows quantitative comparisons of similarity at the level of large comprehensive toolkits instead of selective elements or inferred deeper dimensions. It also takes into account the embeddedness of actors’ cultural toolkits in the structures of larger social fields and the specificity of toolkits to communication contexts. While this analytic strategy is potentially applicable to any actor’s toolkit in a recurring communication context, I use as an illustration the repertoires that different corporations in the pharmaceutical industry employ to account for their activities in their annual reports. # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The cultural and discursive underpinning of central industry and market processes has received renewed interest in recent years. One prominent approach in this area draws on a long tradition of comparative research, evoking ‘‘deep dimensions’’ of national cultures to explain differences in patterns of economic activity (Biggart and Guille ´n, 1999; Dobbin, 1994; Guille ´n, 1994). Note, however, that this approach locates culture in social and political formations outside the market or industry in question. Others have taken a different route and studied cultural aspects within general market and industry processes. This research generally focuses on specific aspects of culture, such as role of classification and categorization systems in processes of rivalry and valuation (Porac and Rosa, 1996; Zuckerman, 1999), the use of discourse in negotiating identities www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic Poetics 33 (2005) 227–252 § Paper prepared for Poetics special issue on culture and classification in markets. * Tel.: +1 847 491 2201. E-mail address: klausweber@northwestern.edu. 0304-422X/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2005.09.011