Culture, Structure, Or Choice?: Essays in the Interpretation of the British Experience

Paul Warwick

ian. 2007 · Algora Publishing

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This study takes aim at a burgeoning dissensus in the social sciences, a dissensus over nothing less than the manner in which social, economic and political phenomena are to be explained. Until about the mid-l970s, there was broad acceptance in Western sociology and political science of a perspective that may be termed culturalist; without ignoring the importance of structures or institutions, it highlighted the role of shared cultural norms and values in determining behavior in given societies. The proliferation of area studies programs was but one manifestation of the great popularity of this trend. Marxist interpretations existed, of course, but they tended to be relegated to the lunatic fringe of social science: they were regarded as overly simplified, highly dogmatic and fundamentally biased toward the political cause of socialism or communism. Some rational-choice theory had been developed by that time, but it, too, was seen as fringe material in most fields except economics. In any case, the more realistic of its conclusions could be readily absorbed by exploiting the underlying elasticity of the culturalist paradigm. A great deal has changed since that time. Marxist theories have become ever more provocative, stimulating and politically acceptable; rational-choice theory is now a major growth area in several of the social sciences, not the least of which is my own field of political science. In contrast, the culturalist perspective, far from absorbing the valid points of the other two paradigms, has come increasingly under attack for the vapidity of its concepts, the inability to test its hypotheses and the lack of generality of its theoretical formulations. As one rational-choice theorist put it, culture is simply too squishy to be of use in causal analysis.