3.4: Cultural Variation and Change

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Differentiate between high culture, pop culture, and counterculture
• Describe the role of innovation and globalization in cultural change
• Describe the shifting nature of American ideologies over time

It may seem obvious that there are a cultural differences between various societies in the world. After all, we can easily see that people vary from one society to the next. It’s natural to think that a young woman from a village in rural Kenya in Eastern Africa would have a different view of the world from a young woman from urban Mumbai, India—one of the most populated cities in the world.

Additionally, each culture has its own internal variations. Sometimes the differences between cultures are not as large as the differences within cultures. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote about cultural capital, which consists of material goods, non-material attitudes, and knowledge that are specific to a certain economic class. Bourdieu grouped cultural capital into three categories: embodied (a regional dialect, or a beauty regimen), objectified (material possessions like a phone or car), and institutionalized (formal labels like professional credentials). In the U.S., some group culture into three categories as well: high, low, and pop (short for "popular").

High and Popular Culture

Can you identify the Chief Financial Officers of three major corporations? How about the name of the servers at three local bars? How many books do you own? How many social media profiles do you have? Is your family listed on the Social Register^©? Have you ever heard of the Social Register^©? In each pair, one type of knowledge is considered high culture and the other low culture.

This could be considered stereotyping by economic class rather than by race or gender, but sociologists use the term "high" culture to describe the pattern of cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in the highest or elite class segments of a society. People often associate high culture with intellectualism, political power, and social prestige. In America's capitalist economy, high culture also tends to be associated with wealth. Events considered high culture can be expensive, formal, and exclusive – attending a ballet, seeing an opera, listening to a live symphony performance, or attending a prestigious Ivy-league university. 

The term popular culture refers to the pattern of mainstream cultural experiences and attitudes that exist in the lower and middle classes. Popular culture events might include a rock concent, a football game, or a blockbuster comic book action movie.  Hip hop music, video games, and reality television are also pieces of popular culture. Pop culture is accessible to most people in America, and is expressed and spread via social media and commercial outlets such as television, Hollywood, the music industry, shopping malls, and corporate-run websites. You can share a discussion of favorite sports teams with a new coworker, or comment on a Netflix show when making small talk in line at the grocery store. But if you tried to launch into a deep discussion on the classical Greek play Antigone, few members of U.S. society today would be familiar with it. Although high culture may be considered by some as superior to popular culture, the lines between high culture and popular culture can vary over time and place. Shakespearean plays, considered to be popular culture in England when they were written, are now part of American society’s high culture. Five hundred years from now, will our descendants consider Dancing with the Stars as fine performance art?

Subculture and Counterculture

Figure 3.8 Cosplayers are a distinct subculture (a smaller cultural group within the larger culture) in the United States. And within the larger subculture are subgroups, such as this one emulating D.C. Comics characters. (Credit: Pat Loika)

A subculture is just what it sounds like—a smaller cultural group within a larger culture. People of a subculture are part of the larger culture, but also share a specific additional identity within a smaller group with its own distinct beliefs, values, and norms.

Thousands of subcultures exist within the America today. Ethnic and racial groups share the language, food, and customs of their heritage. Other subcultures are formed through shared experiences. Biker culture revolves around an interest in motorcycles. Some subcultures are formed by people who possess traits or preferences that differ from the majority of a society’s population. The body modification community embraces aesthetic additions to the human body, such as tattoos, piercings, and certain forms of plastic surgery. But even as members of a subculture band together, they generally still identify with and participate in the larger mainstream culture of their society.

Sociologists distinguish subcultures from countercultures, which reject some of the larger culture’s norms and values. While subcultures may have their own unique cultural elements, these are generally not inconsistent with mainstream norms and values, which allows subcultures to operate relatively smoothly within the larger society.  In contrast, countercultures might actively defy larger society by developing their own set of rules and norms to live by that contradict mainstream cultural elements, sometimes even going so far as to create their own actual communities that operate separately from the wider society. Counterculture members are ‘against’ the dominant ruling culture, and want to live by their own values. Subculture members may want to change some superficial things, but generally follow established rules and norms.

Cults, a word derived from culture, are one good example of a counterculture groups. The group “Yearning for Zion” (YFZ) in Eldorado, Texas, existed quietly outside of culture and public awareness, until its leader was accused of statutory rape and underage marriage. The group's formal norms clashed too severely to be tolerated by US law, and in 2008, authorities raided the compound and removed more than two hundred women and children from the property. Many cults claim to be spiritual movements, often attempting to establish themselves as a religion. On rare occasions, they may succeed - when each of the three Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) began long ago, they were treated as cults, and suffered much oppression because of it.

Cultural Change

Cultures continually change because new items are added to material culture every day and in turn, meanings are assigned to them (non-material), which affects other cultural components. For example, a new technology, such as railroads or smartphones, might introduce new ways of traveling or communicating. New ideas, such as flash mobs or crowdfunding, enter a culture . Sociologists identify two broad categories of change as innovation (meaning new) and diffusion (to spread out). Material cultural change happens when new items are discovered or invented or enter a culture as a result of globalization.

Innovation: Discovery and Invention

An innovation refers to an object or concept’s initial appearance in society—it is innovative because it is new. Innovations are discovered or invented. Discoveries make known previously unknown but existing aspects of reality. In 1610, when Galileo looked through his telescope and discovered Saturn, the planet was already there, but until then, no one had known about it. When Christopher Columbus encountered Hispaniola, the island was, of course, already well known to its inhabitants. However, his discovery was new knowledge for Europeans, and it opened the way to changes in European culture, as well as to the cultures of the discovered lands. For example, new foods such as potatoes and tomatoes transformed the European diet, and horses brought from Europe changed hunting practices of Great Plains Native Americans.

Inventions result when something new is formed from existing objects or concepts—when things are put together in an entirely new manner. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, electric appliances were invented at an astonishing pace. Cars, airplanes, vacuum cleaners, lamps, radios, telephones, and televisions were all new inventions. Inventions may shape a culture by replacing older ways of carrying out tasks, being integrated into current practices, or creating new activities. Their adoption reflects (and may shape) cultural values, and their use may introduce new norms and practices.

Consider the rise of mobile phones. As more and more people began carrying these devices, phone conversations no longer were restricted to homes, offices, and phone booths. People on trains, in restaurants, and in other public places became annoyed by listening to one-sided conversations. New norms and behaviors were needed for cell phone use. Some people pushed for the idea that those who are out in the world should pay attention to their companions and surroundings. Fortunately, technology found a workaround: texting, which enables quiet communication surpassed phone conversations as the primary way to communicate anywhere, everywhere.

When the pace of innovation increases, it can lead to generation gaps. Technological gadgets that catch on quickly with one generation are sometimes dismissed by an older generation that is skeptical or struggles to adopt them. The older generation might tune into a musician performing on public television while the younger generation prefers a livestream. A culture’s objects and ideas can cause not just generational but cultural gaps. Material culture tends to diffuse more quickly than nonmaterial culture; technology can spread through society in a matter of months, but it can take generations for the ideas and beliefs of society to change including methods for researching or learning information (e.g., library versus Internet search).

Figure 3.9 Technology Adoption Lifecycle — Sociologist Everett Rogers (1962) developed a model of the diffusion of innovations. As consumers gradually adopt a new innovation, the item grows toward 100 percent usage, or complete saturation within a society. This graph is frequently used in business, sales, technology, and cultural innovations. It can be used to describe how quickly different groups adopt (or begin using) a new technology or a new slang word, but note it is just a framework: not every innovation follows this exact pattern, but it provides a good foundation for discussion and prediction. (Graph attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license)

Coined by sociologist William F. Ogburn (1957), the term cultural lag refers to the time that passes between the introduction of a new item of material culture and its social acceptance. Cultural lag can cause tangible problems. The infrastructure of American roads and power grids, built a hundred years ago or more, is having trouble supporting today’s more heavily populated and fast-paced life. Yet there is a lag in conceptualizing solutions to infrastructure problems. Municipalities struggle with traffic control, increased air pollution, and limited electricity generation, which are all symptoms of culture lag. Although people are becoming aware of the consequences, overuse, or lack of resources, addressing these needs takes time.

Ideological Change in America

Cultural change is not merely a matter of new gadgets or shifting etiquette; it is often driven by the evolution of ideology. American political ideology has never been static. From the nation’s founding to the present, ideological systems in the United States have developed in response to evolving material conditions, power struggles, economic transformations, and social movements. Ideology—understood as a system of beliefs and values that shapes how people interpret facts and justify the use of power—both constrains and legitimates political authority. Tracing the historical development of American ideology reveals the ongoing tension between ideals of freedom and equality and the realities of power and exclusion.

Classical Liberalism and the American Revolution

The ideological foundation of the United States was laid in the late 1700s with the American founding fathers' adoption of classical liberalism, a philosophy that emphasized individual liberty, rational thought, and limited government. This particular set of ideas was developed by a variety of philosophers in the Enlightenment era in European history, who rejected the "Dark Age" ideology of traditional aristocratic feudalism that dominated medieval Europe. Enlightenment thinkers argued that political authority should rest on reason and the consent of the governed, rather than on the "divine" right of kings who claimed that God had mandated them to rule.  Instead of being subject to a king's whims, Enlightenment thinkers argued that individuals possessed certain natural rights as human beings, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of whatever political rights a government might say they did or didn't have.

Classical liberal values emphasized the importance of private property, free market competition, and a small and non-intrusive government whose legitimacy flowed from the consent of the people, also known as popular sovereignty. The claim in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” reflects this ideological commitment, yet the contradiction between the aspirational value of universal equality, and the reality of of slavery, reveals an early ideological fault line. This reminds us that cultural systems are not required to be logically consistent, and can often contain contradictory or paradoxical ideas.

Manifest Destiny and Frontier Ideology

In the early 1800s century, American ideology developed to accommodate the USA's ambitions for territorial expansion. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny emerged in the 1820s, asserting that the United States was uniquely destined to expand westward across the North American continent, "from sea to shining sea." This belief echoed earlier arguments about "divine rights" that the Enlightenment thinkers had reacted against, and rested on ethnocentric assumptions about American moral superiority. To the American pioneers of that era, this justified the displacement and killing of many Indigenous tribal peoples who were ideologically framed as godless barbarians. This period also reshaped democratic ideology through Jacksonian democracy, named after frontiersman and military leader Andrew Jackson.  Sacrificing blood, sweat, and tears to settle the West, pioneers like Jackson took a dim view of the East coast aristocratic elite that ran the government, who they saw as soft and pampered compared to the rugged heroes who were venturing into the Wild West with little support or resources, and "lifting themselves up by their bootstraps" to create a life for themselves out of nothing, and yet having no political power back East.  So Jackson entered politics, and fought to grant suffrage (voting rights) to these Western settlers, expanding political participation from just the wealthy land-owing elites of the 13 original colonies to also include poor Western frontiersmen.  While this was a substantial expansion of voting rights to the lower classes, it generally included only settlers who were white men, with political participation continuing to exclude women, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans.

Industrial Revolution and Civil War

By the mid-1800s, new industrial technology was dramatically altering the American political economy. A fundamental ideological conflict developed between the Northern and Southern states that pitted them against each other in the competition to shape the governance of the rapidly expanding Western region. Material conditions in the more urban North were shifting fast, as cities rapidly industrialized under the leadership of Republicans. Northern cultural beliefs were being changed by industrial labor though, and factory workers began to view slavery as devaluing the status of manual labor, and undermining honest competition in the labor market. Northerners began to interpret slavery as an immoral vice, and the Republican party began calls to abolish the practice.  Meanwhile, the Democrats leading the Southern states had heavily invested in an agricultural business model that relied on slave labor.  Slavery was not merely an economic system to them, but also a cultural social order based on a moralized racial hierarchy in which whites deserved to be on top, and Africans were treated as sub-human chattel, or livestock. A bloody war was fought over such ideological disagreements, between the Northern Union army and the Southern Confederate army.  Ultimately, the Union defeated the Confederacy, and under President Lincoln the institution of slavery was dismantled during the post-war period. 

The Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras

Immediately following the Civil War, in what became known as the Reconstruction era, federal troops from the North occupied the Southern states.  Lincoln's Republican administration coerced the Southern Democrats into begrudgingly changing their laws and restructuring their agrarian economy.  However, the next presidential election of the newly re-unified U.S.A. was extremely close, and could have lead to a de-stablizing of the fragile peace, and even more war.  But the Southern Democrats had a solition. They offered the Northern Republicans a deal: the Democrats would concede the presidential election, and give the White House to the Republican candidate without a fight, if he would promise to pull the occupying Northern troops back out of the Southern states, and no longer use the federal government to police civil rights issues within states.  The Republicans took the deal, which became known as the Compromise of 1877.  This deal effectively ended the Reconstruction era, and ushered in what became known as the Jim Crow era, when many Southern states, freed from federal interference, began passing legislation designed to suppress voting (and other rights) for African Americans.  In order to avoid running afoul of new federal laws that prohibited race-based rights restrictions, "Jim Crow" laws were cleverly written to target African Americans without ever explicitly mentioning race.  Southern legislators instead imposed restrictions on voting, for example, based on literacy tests or poll taxes rather than race.  They knew full well that their newly freed black citizens had literally just been slaves, for many generations... so they had no money of course, and they had been legally barred from ever getting any sort of education, so they were mostly illiterate too.  This meant that although black Americans were now technically citizens, and were a majority of the population in many areas, they still had essentially no political influence.

Partisan Realignment and Modern Liberalism

By the early 1900s, industrialization was intensifying at a frenetic pace in the North, and spreading to the West and even the South.  Industrial capitalism was producing more things, faster, and this was beginning to exaggerate the natural boom-and-bust economic cycles of capitalism.  Before long, this triggered an unprecedented recession that became known as the Great Depression. In response to catastrophic economic collapse, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced "the New Deal," a set of policies that marked the emergence of a new ideology known as modern liberalism. Unlike classical liberalism, modern liberalism embraced an expanded role for government, asserting that the state had a responsibility to promote the general welfare of the population through social safety nets, and labor protections against exploitative "robber barons" and unregulated business monopolies.

This period also produced a major partisan realignment.  Several decades had passed since the abolition of slavery, so the abolitionist faction of the Republican party had faded away after Lincoln accomplished their mission, leaving mostly pro-business interests to shape the party's policy platform going forward.  Meanwhile, the Democratic party had shifted from a focus on agrarian landed elites (who had lost badly to the industrial business elites) to a focus on laborers and the "common man."  But there was also a demographic shift that President Roosevelt noticed: many African Americans had grown frustrated with the Jim Crow South, where they still faced lingering racism, segregation, and persecution.  They had begun moving to Northern states in large numbers, in a trend that became known as the Great Migration.  Roosevelt saw this as an opportunity, reasoning that in the Northern states, without those pesky Jim Crow laws preventing them from voting, there was suddenly a huge new block of potential voters in the system that could change the political calculus, and swing an election!  Although most African Americans still had a favorable view of the Republican party as the "party of Lincoln" that had freed them from slavery, it had been almost a half century since they did anything substantial for black voters.  Roosevelt made the Democratic party more appealing with federal programs like the Works Progress Administration that created jobs for laid off workers, offering employment and economic stability to black as well as white working class voters.  Roosevelt also offered African Americans a voice, forming a "Black Cabinet" of advisors that made black voters feel included in the new Democratic coalition in a concrete way.  All of this was not appreciated by the Southern wing of the Democratic party (also known as the “Dixiecrats”), many of whom defected toward the Republican Party since they now focused on business interests and longer championed civil rights for minority populations. Ideology thus reorganized party coalitions around class, race, and the proper role and scope of government.

Modern Conservatism and NeoLiberalism

The tumultuous events of World War II reduced Americans' sense of partisan opposition, and brought a sense of unity to American culture.  But after the war, American ideological developments became entangled with global geo-politics, as we entered into a Cold War against our former allies in the Soviet Union.  The U.S.A. positioned itself as a beacon of democracy and individual rights and liberties, standing in opposition to the U.S.S.R.'s collectivist communism.  The two rival ideologies vied for dominance in the new world order that was emerging out of the chaos of world war, competing to develop scientific and economic advancements, and to shape the governments and economies of other developing and rebuilding nations.  But the U.S.S.R. saw an opportunity in America's continuing racial tension - Soviet media called attention to the inequality, segregation, and oppression still going on in the Jim Crow South.  Soviet politicians argued that such realities undermined any claims to moral superiority made by U.S. politicians talking about rights and democracy.  This prompted a renewal of federal engagement with civil rights issues, which had not occurred since prior to the Compromise of 1877.  President Eisenhower used federal troops to enforce the de-segregation of schools during the 1950s, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, and policies and programs combating racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination continued to be developed through the 1970s. 

By the 1980s, however, it was clear the U.S.S.R. was losing the Cold War, and was close to collapse.  Ideological momentum in the U.S.A. shifted again, and President Reagan's administration ushered in modern conservatism. This ideology focused on small government and free markets, much like classical liberalism - but also blended in a preference for globalized capitalism that could enable more efficient business flows via international markets (in itself, this is another ideology called neoliberalism).  Modern conservativism also adds an emphasis on traditional religious morality and individual meritocracy, that grew out of a cultural reaction to all the changes of the civil rights era.  Conservative religious groups worried that traditional family values were threatened by legalized abortion, cultural acceptance of diverse sexual orientations, and the secularization of public schools.  Programs aimed at benefiting the general welfare of the public were framed as encouraging moral failure, and undermining the need to develop individual responsibility and a strong work ethic.

Globalization and the Information Revolution

In the 1990s and into the 2000s, both major parties (Democrats and Republicans) embraced neoliberalism on economic issues, though they still differed on social and moral issues.  But both parties advocated for globalization and deregulation of industry, leading many American companies to distribute their operations around the globe in the most efficient way. This lead to a de-industrialization of the U.S. economy, with most factory work becoming "outsourced" to other countries where labor was cheaper.  This meant that a large number of what had been good-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector disappeared from the economy, to be replaced mostly with lower paying jobs in the service sector.  Before this happened, most American families were considered middle class, but middle class is no longer the majority as millions found themselves dropping down a rung on the class ladder, to the working class. 

The American economy was shifting from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism, where investors prioritize shareholder value over product quality.  The Great Recession in 2008 exposed the vulnerabilities of this system, fueling populist anger across the political spectrum. The TEA Party movement (an acronym for Taxed Enough Already) revitalized libertarian economic ideas among conservatives (libertarianism is another ideology, that focuses heavily on the value of individual liberty, where any policy that deprives an individual of the right to make their own choices is considered bad) and would eventually give rise to the more nationalist (but still populist) MAGA faction of the Republican party, while the populist OWS (Occupy Wall Street) progressive movement joined the “big tent” Democratic coalition that already included labor, racial justice, environmentalist, and LGBT+ advocacy groups.

In the midst of all this, the Information Revolution was taking off.  From the internet becoming mainstream in the 2000s, to social media dominating pop culture in the 2010s, and now the rise of generative artificial intelligence in the 2020's, technology is transforming ideology at an accelerated pace. Despite unprecedented access to information, many Americans today are finding it hard to process.  In theory, we could be the most informed citizens in the history of the world, but in reality the constant barrage of information can feel overwhelming, and leads us to tune most if it out as unwelcome noise.  

Modern algorithmic feeds automatically filter out any information we don't like.  Ironically, although we have more access than ever to an amazing variety of perspectives from journalists, philosophers, and other experts, most Americans only ever see content their algorithm predicts they're already going to agree with. So, everything we see serves to reinforce our existing beliefs, seemingly providing each of us with a never-ending supply of evidence that WE are RIGHT.  We rarely see any other point of view that might challenge our pre-existing beliefs, or help us empathize with the "other" side. But the folks on the other side are having the same experience, in reverse - they're bombarded with a never-ending tide of evidence that THEY are right, and WE are wrong. Without ever having a chance to seriously consider the evidence for the other side, we naturally conclude that THEY must crazy, stupid, or downright evil to believe that stuff!  And this has caused political polarization to increase significantly in recent decades, raising fundamental questions about how much disagreement a civil society can tolerate. 

Our government was designed as a democratic republic, a style of government where civil dialogue and public debate were intended to be a healthy way to negotiate differences of opinion over complex policy issues.  Politics has been described as "the art of compromise," and compromise is supposed to keep the whole system stable, so that no single interest group or party could gain too much power over the others. But too much polarization means that Americans at both "poles" (or extreme ends) of the spectrum are losing the ability to see the perspective of the other side at all, and becoming unwilling to compromise. Understanding this shift is essential for making sense of contemporary debates within the longer historical context of belief, power, and political economy.