Mapping Cultural Schemas: From Theory to Method

Abstract

A growing body of research in sociology uses the concept of cultural schemas to explain how culture influences beliefs and actions. However, this work often relies on belief or attitude measures gleaned from survey data as indicators of schemas, failing to measure the cognitive associations that constitute schemas. In this article, we propose a concept-association-based approach for collecting data about individuals’ schematic associations, and a corresponding method for modeling concept network representations of shared cultural schemas. We use this method to examine differences between liberal and conservative schemas of poverty in the United States, uncovering patterns of associations expected based on previous research. Examining the structure of schematic associations provides novel insights to long-standing empirical questions regarding partisan attitudes toward poverty. Our method yields a clearer picture of what poverty means for liberals and conservatives, revealing how different concepts related to poverty indeed mean fundamentally different things for these two groups. Finally, we show that differences in schema structure are predictive of individuals’ policy preferences.

Mapping Organizational Culture Schemas Based on Correlational Class Analysis: A Tutorial

“…Schemas or shared meanings are complex structures of mental representations (Goldberg, 2011), either innate or acquired through experience and acculturation (Zerubavel, 1997), which organize knowledge about reality (Strauss & Quinn, 1997). They play a key role in cultural analysis because individuals' world experiences are understood through them (DiMaggio, 1997;Hunzaker & Valentino, 2019). Thinking about culture as schemas leads individuals to imagine that although culture is embodied by individual cognitive structures, it also reflects socialization and information exchange processes at the collective sphere, whose meanings tend to be shared.…”

“…Assumingly, the CCA application can be useful for three reasons. First, although research about shared meaning schemas has gained prominence in cultural studies (Hunzaker & Valentino, 2019;Rawlings & Childress, 2019), it has been ignored in organizational studies, despite the acknowledgment that organizational culture manifests itself through shared schemas (Harris, 1994;Miranda et al, 2015). Second, the method introduced in the current study Elementally, from a cultural perspective, the meaning of things -events, objects, and experiences -refers to how the subjects interpret them, attributing quality and significance to their experience.…”

“…The fundamental matter about such consensual approaches to organizational culture lies in the fact that they suffer from conceptual and methodological issues. In conceptual terms, it is necessary emphasizing that organizational actors who share the same meaning schema do not necessarily have the same opinion about something (Goldberg, 2011;Hunzaker & Valentino, 2019). Sharing cultural schemas means that individuals agree with judgment criteria, even if their opinions are different from each other (Rawlings & Childress, 2019).…”

“…Boutyline and Vaisey (2017) have pointed out a series of formalization and accuracy issues in RCA, which led Boutyline (2017) to develop an improved method capable of capturing meaning schemas based on the correlation between respondents' choices. This method, which is called correlational class analysis (CCA), has already been used in different fields such as public opinion (Barbet, 2020;Daenekindt, Koster, & Van der Waal, 2017;Hunzaker & Valentino, 2019) and consumption of cultural products (Daenekindt, 2019;Rawlings & Childress, 2019). Although RCA and CCA were developed to capture cultural schemas, the management literature in the field lacks empirical studies focused on using these methods to map organizational culture schemas.…”

Culture Beneath Discourse: A Conceptual Model for Analyzing Nondeclarative Cultural Knowledge

“…"religion as irrelevant") (Edgell and Hull 2017, p. 305). Despite the fact that schemas are a part of nondeclarative personal culture (Wood et al 2019), specific demographic groups are theorized as having shared schemas, based on analyses of interpersonal patterns (Hunzaker and Valentino 2019). And others describe schemas as "objective in the sense of being shared, publicly available understandings" (Blair-Loy 2001, p. 689) or forms of public culture strategically used to influence others (de Laat and Baumann 2016).…”