Stephen Vaisey

This is a short essay I wrote recently for the newsletter of the ASA section-in-formation on Altruism and Social Solidarity.

New cultural approaches to the study of poverty treat “culture” as providing the means for action and neglect the classical concern with motives for action. The author argues that though this paradigm shift has led to many important and interesting discoveries, it has also created blind spots that prevent a more complete understanding of how culture shapes action. After showing that values, attitudes, and other motive concepts have been unfairly excluded from the new cultural pantheon, the author uses the empirical example of educational continuation to show that poor and non-poor youth differ in their educational aspirations and that these differences can predict school continuation six years later. The findings are interpreted with an eye toward synthesizing “old” and “new” approaches to the study of culture and socioeconomic disadvantage. (Forthcoming in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.)

This article presents a new model of culture in action. Although most sociologists who study culture emphasize its role in post hoc sense making, sociologists of religion and social psychologists tend to focus on the role beliefs play in motivation. The dual-process model integrates justificatory and motivational approaches by distinguishing between “discursive” and “practical” modes of culture and cognition. The author uses panel data from the National Study of Youth and Religion to illustrate the model’s usefulness. Consistent with its predictions, he finds that though respondents cannot articulate clear principles of moral judgment, their choice from a list of moral-cultural scripts strongly predicts later behavior.

Most sociological research assumes that the composition of social networks exerts a causal influence on individual beliefs. Network theory and research has failed to consider adequately the possibility that internalized cultural worldviews might have independent effects on the composition of personal networks. Drawing on a synthetic, “dual process” theory of cultural bias and using longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, this paper shows that worldviews play a significant role in the changing network composition of young people over a three-year period. These effects are robust to the influence of other structural factors, including prior network composition and behavioral homophily, and are substantially larger than prior network and homophily effects. Furthermore, there is little evidence that network characteristics play a strong proximate role in shaping worldview. This suggests that internalized cultural dispositions play an important role in shaping the interpersonal environment and that the dynamic link between culture and social structure needs to be reconsidered. (Co-authored with Omar Lizardo.)

Driven by the popularity of social capital theories, the concept of community is enjoying renaissance in sociology. Yet much research in this area relies on exclusively structural” thinking, attributing group identification to mechanisms such as the arrangement of physical space, power relations, or high investment requirements. Often neglected is a strand of theory that attributes gemeinschaft to shared moral order and culture. Using data from the Urban Communes Project, this article directly tests the influence of both structural and cultural mechanisms in producing the experience of community. Although the results show that both structural and cultural mechanisms are positively correlated with gemeinschaft, they also confirm the existence of shared moral order as the most likely proximate mechanism for creating community in these groups. Analyses using fuzzy-set techniques illustrate how culture and structure combine to sustain—or inhibit—the experience of community.

The cultural turn has been one of the major shifts in sociology over the last two decades. Though nearly everyone now agrees that culture matters, how it matters is not terribly clear. What, exactly, is culture supposed to do? In this essay, I articulate two ideal-typical--though often implicit--ways most sociologists have thought about culture's role in action. Although no single sociologist or piece of research fully embodies either ideal type, I believe they are real tendencies in the field that have real consequences for how research is designed, undertaken, and understood. After outlining these approaches, I subject them to an engagement with cognitive science. This is not out a desire for reductionism but, as I will show, because a crucial difference between these perspectives is their implicit model of how human beings perceive, acquire, store, retrieve, and act on the symbolic information that surrounds them every day. This exercise will lead to the conclusion that both perspectives are incomplete and will point toward a synthetic approach that can shed new light on how culture matters for action.

Much research on adolescent deviance has supported a theory of social control, asserting that the lack of ties to institutions (such as school and parents) increases an adolescent's likelihood of using illicit substances. Researchers in this tradition often posit religion as one among many sources of norm enforcement. Yet religion may impact adolescents' behavior more directly through its ability to create beliefs and identities that are incompatible with illegal substance use. This paper uses a nationally representative, longitudinal data set of adolescents, the National Study
of Youth and Religion, to examine the influence of traditional measures of social control, religious social control, and a new measure of religious salience on the probability of adolescents' first marijuana use. Results demonstrate that religious salience is more predictive of this initiation than are measures of involvement with religious organizations and several common social control indicators. We also find substantial interactions between different forms of religiosity. In the conclusion, we consider broader implications for understanding religion's influence on deviance. (Co-authored with Kyle Longest.)