18 Comments on Maths, small children and neural pathways – ‘proving cultural theory’

Indy on Fri, 16th Jan 2009 6:58 pm


I certainly think the terminology isn’t helping.

For example, you say: “Egalitarian – I’ll do what the group says”
I think that conflicts a bit with the other ways the word “egalitarian” is used in general communication. Hofstede labels a similar concept as “collectivist”?

As an aside, the terminology in Michael Thompson’s article around markets is a bit fuzzy as well. Theoretical markets may provide equality of opportunity/symmetrical transactions, but very, very few real markets do so.
Thus, it might be useful to consider if there’s another way to name that axis.

Popularising the Four Cultures « Fourcultures on Sat, 17th Jan 2009 3:23 am


[...] chief political strategy advisor in the UK, is popularising grid/group cultural theory on his blog – and provoking an interesting discussion. Go [...]

Fourcultures on Sun, 18th Jan 2009 4:23 am


Although it would be very interesting to see this kind of neurological research take place, I question whether there can be a neurological basis for cultural theory’s core categories – because the individual human is not the locus of these. Grid-group cultural theory is a social theory, not a psychological theory. In other words, CT’s solidarities take place between people, not inside them. So individual brains are not intrinsically wired to one or another solidarity. People can switch between them at will, as in Matthew’s example of people queueing or else jumping the queue. What’s important is the ability to defect from the dominant solidarity to another. It would be interesting to research this process, which would presumably be a different kind of neurological study. CT is (at least partly) about decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. When we don’t know the future outcome, we make up stories about it, using a plural, but limited set of competing scripts: the four cultural solidarities. These could alternatively be depicted as repertoire of strategies for action. Is there an analogy to be made with the Stag Hunt of game theory? In this game one is not intrinsically a stag hunter or a hare hunter, but the optimal strategy emerges in relation to what others are doing. In the same way that in the stag hunt more than one strategy is at Nash equilibrium (unlike the Prisoner’s Dilemma), so in CT, more than one strategy may be viable.
Despite my reservations, Psychological research into Cultural theory has been taking place. The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School is a good place to look [http://culturalcognition.net/]. You could also check out the Fourcultures website for a more popularist, non-academic approach [http://fourcultures.wordpress.com]
Another possibly fruitful line of research might be to investigate the relationship between CT and the adaptive cycles of ‘social-ecological systems’ described by Gunderson and Holling (2001) in their book ‘Panarchy’, at the Resilience Alliance website and elsewhere. This group is doing good work on the empirical basis of adaptive cycles, but has up till now recognised that the four stages of the adaptive cycle, growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal, are still heuristic – a tool for thought – rather than empirically proven. [http://www.resalliance.org/570.php] Michael Thompson specifically links his work with that of Holling, but the relationship between the two typologies, tantalising as it is, remains largely unexplored.

Michael Thompson on Sun, 18th Jan 2009 2:06 pm


Thank you for all your reactions! Let me add a few of myself.

Yes, clumsy solutions are rare but that rarity is not inevitable. In
other words, we are currently finding our way to only a fraction of
the clumsy solutions that we could find our way to. There is ample
evidence for this in our Clumsy Sols book. Nepal, for instance was
locked into horrendously expensive electricity for as long as the
hierarchical solidarity was hegemonic but then found its way to the
much better solutions once the other voices had forced their way in.
The same happened with forestry, the hierarchical actors asserting
that “By the year 2000 there will be no accessible forests left in
Nepal” (World Bank). Mercifully, forest management became clumsified a
couple or so decades ago, with the result that it is now possible to
wander through luxuriant community forests after just two hours brisk
walk from the centre of Kathmandu.

Of course, if there happens not to be a clumsy solution to some
particular problem then you will not find your way to it (as Yogi
Berra might have said), and we do need to be fatalistic with regard to
those situations. However, in the great majority of situations where
we currently do not have clumsy solutions it is because not all the
voices enjoy both access and responsiveness.
Further, the earlier on in the process those conditions are satisfied
the smoother the transition to the clumsy solution will be. In the
Arsenal case, the egalitarian voice forced its way in very early on,
and in a way that made it difficult for the other voices not to be
responsive. With Heathrow’s third runway, the third voice has long
been excluded, as is evident from the failure, throughout the process,
to consider behavioural change (people flying less, that is, as part
of a major effort to reduce their carbon footprints). Ironically, the
elegant solution has now been forced though at a moment when major
behavioural change seems to be actually happening – passenger numbers
have fallen substantially, and not just because of the recession;
people are increasingly switching to train and/or to traveling less.

Steven Lukes wants “solidaristic” instead of “egalitarian” Well, yes,
the egalitarian way of organising is indeed solidaristic but so too,
each in its distinctive way are the other ways of organising. So calling one way solidaristic is to imply that the others are not. Proponents of rational decision theory, for instance, are implying that those who arrive at their decisions by
processes that do not accord with that heory are irrational, and those
who generate scenarios, one of which they label “sustainable”, are
likewise implying that the other scenarios (often labelled “business
as usual” and maybe “control freak’s delight”, are UNsustainable!
Marxists, of course, are doing something similar when they speak of
“false consciousness”. Cultural theorists are careful to avoid all
that by speaking of plural rationalities, contradictory certainties
and so on. Also, since Durkheim long ago set us on the right road by
talking of “forms of social solidarity”, we should follow that lead
not turn out back on it.

All the best,

Mike

matthewtaylor on Sun, 18th Jan 2009 2:44 pm


Thanks for this. And for the interesting links which I will follow up. I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I was looking for a neurological basis for a personality type favouring one type of rationality. Instead, what meant was that each of the four/five types are obervable neural pathways. So, when we ‘choose’ our response to a problem it reflects our personality and predispostion, the nature of the problem and the dynamic of competing rationalities. We all tend, as I have said in other posts, to adopt different ratonalities in dfferent parts of our lives. My question is whether the options open to us relate to observable neural pathways. In other words is there something in our brain that makes these four/five option the only options?

Thanks

Marco Verweij on Sun, 18th Jan 2009 5:35 pm


I think that there is still quite a long way to go before we can make any triumphant –and precise– claims of ‘ubiquity’. But a number of considerations have strengthened my intuition that these four ways of life are quite fundamental. First, as I mentioned before (and many people have noted of course), social scientists are forever reinventing parts of this particular wheel. (Just one example among so many: the recent differentiation of ‘social capital’ in ‘bonding’, ‘bridging’ and ‘linking’ social capital). Second, in various game-theoretical experiments (undertaken without any knowledge of cultural theory) it has been found that when people start to interact, then over time quite different behavioural strategies spontaneously emerge among the players – strategies that come quite closely to the ways of organizing and behaving captured by cultural theory. (Funnily enough, these closely resemble the types of reactions Mark Nowacki finds among small children – see Matthew’s earlier entry). Third, if you read the standard books in the field of biology on cooperation and conflict within animal species (such as Lee Dugatkin’s ‘Cooperation among Animals from 1997), then you again find the very same patterns. From an evolutionary perspective (which usually holds that, in the famous phrase, ‘nature is a tinkerer not an inventor’), it would be very strange to assume that while all other animals can only interact (with animals from their own species) in four or five elementary patterns, we can do so in many more ways. To me, it seems more plausible to assume that what distinguishes people from other animals is that we are better able to reflect on, compare, combine and replace the same ways of organizing/reacting/behaving/feeling in a greater number of social domains. Last, whenever I do detailed empirical research, I find that these four patterns (and combinations thereof) jump out at me. (By now, this may of course be a serious case of ‘theoretical deformation’, of course – but I do not think so, as I often feel the urgent desire to do some research without using cultural theory). But, of course, lots of hard work still needs to be undertaken before we can test, or perhaps even accurately formulate, such ideas. I very much hope that at a workshop at the Konrad Lorenz Center in Vienna in the summer of ’10 it will be possible to take a few additional steps. And I of course very much look forward to the RSA/UCL research.

Marco Verweij on Sun, 18th Jan 2009 5:38 pm


Though I agree that it is important to have an accessible, simple terminology –and to apply it well (I think Indy is right to point out that markets come in all four flavours)– I do not believe that this is an important hindrance to becoming accepted into the academic mainstream. In the 1950s and 1960s, ‘Parsonian’ sociology ruled supreme in the social sciences in general and at Harvard in particular – even though it had the most obscure terminology ever invented on this planet. And obscure terminology has also not exactly stopped postmodernism/structuralism… One factor that helps theories become influential is if they support one particular ideology/political bias. Rational choice-theory, at least in the beginning, had a very strong libertarian bias, for instance. And post-structuralism a radically egalitarian one. Cultural theory, in supporting opposing biases, cannot benefit in that way. Another factor that I believe is holding the theory back is that the social sciences have become too insulated – from both natural scientists and from people who work outside of academia. As a result, social science has too often become an esoteric, self-referential enterprise, in which evermore complicated-sounding, but not very insightful, concepts are accumulated. Cultural theory –with its apparent simplicity- goes very much against the grain. In my experience, three groups of people tend to like the approach: students (especially undergrads – who are not yet trained to believe that it is interesting to discuss all too arcane matters), natural scientists (who know an elegant theory when they see one) and policy-makers, journalists, teachers and other citizens (who can often see that the theory describes their own experiences relatively accurately). Perhaps cultural theory will only become more influential in academia when the walls now separating the social sciences from the natural sciences and other parts of social life have become a bit more porous. But perhaps there is another way. The famous conclusion to Max Planck’s autobiography is: ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it’. The missing link in this statement is teaching… To those who have made it to the end of this message: sorry for having been so ultra-long! (Now I do plead professional deformation).

Richard on Sun, 18th Jan 2009 10:43 pm


Don’t take this the wrong way, because I have been very interested in everything I have read so far about culture theory… …and I know there are problems with Popper… but reading this blog entry put me very much in mind of his classic essay on science and pseudo-science:
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/critical_thinking/Science_pseudo_falsifiability.html

The evidence for cultural theory, as you have presented it here seems worryingly thin.
I can’t comment on the computer models in detail but it does not seem especially remarkable to me, on the face of it, that some properties of lifelike behaviour can be found, by those primed to see such patterns, in certain instantations of computer programs with a sufficient number of variables. Especially as we know how easily complex patterns can emerge from models with surprisingly few variables (all that chaos theory malarkey)…

Similarly some might see confirmation bias at work in your identification of real-world examples. Is this Mark Nowacki interested in cultural theory? Even if not, why are cultural theorists interested in his work in particular? What if your primary school child was to say “Let’s give the candy to Thomas, he is unhappy today because his pet dog died yesterday.” I’m sure you could reassure me that this child is in fact an egalitarian, just on a wider perspective than the typical egalitarian response. Or perhaps the child is a heirarchist at the time, thinking of a teacher’s instruction to be nice to Thomas. No matter, I’m sure it’s not an important point with respect to the theory…
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

As for the evidence from neuroscience, this sounds more of an aspiration than a current reality. Here I reveal my psychologist’s conceit, but to my mind this is probably the only sort of evidence I would be comfortable with. To my mind, if cultural theory has value, it would be as a possible description of discrete or semi-discrete neural subsytems representing the varieties of human motivations. There has been some discussion of how cultural theory might come to be widely accepted/used. I think the most likely way, or at least the easiest, would be for it to be displaced by a more complete scientific picture of the way the human brain works… This model of human motivation when it emerges might well be structurally similar to cultural theory’s model of the social world, but I can’t see that it would be descended from it. (Though, I should state, I am excited by this research to be conducted at UCL.)

I hope I haven’t come across as wantonly abrasive or difficult. I find cultural theory very attractive… that’s what makes me uncomfortable. And if I’ve got myself confused somewhere, do someone set me straight!

Matt Grist on Mon, 19th Jan 2009 11:24 am


I’m not sure that if cultural theory categories emerge from social interaction that means they are not evolved/hard-wired capacities. For the brain is evolved to function the way it does as embedded within complex social networks (amongst other things, to make decisions which hold in balance complex coalitions and alliances – see the theory of the social brain by evolutionary pscychologist Robin Dunbar – sorry, no web reference).

Here’s another thought, there seems to be so far in this discussion the assumption that a single activity/decision is either an example of one type of organisational stance or the other, but not one or more at once. A person can take the different stances at different times, but not different stances at the same time, it seems. Why is this? When I decide to ride my bike in London, I am being at once an egalitarian (solidarity with other non-polluting low-carbon cyclists), individualist (relying on myself and my own skills to survive the traffic and get to work on time), fatalist (‘oh well, if I get flattened by a lorry then my time has come’), and hierarchist (if someone overtakes me on a crappy mountain bike I feel duty-bound to reassert my own place in the cycling pecking order). Why can’t I be all these stances at the same time, just like a mood (for example) can be multifaceted?

Marco Verweij on Mon, 19th Jan 2009 8:44 pm


In reply to Richard: I fully agree with you that a few experiments here and there, several compatible-looking results from the study of animal social complexity and a bit of mathematical modeling do not add up too much evidence. But I do not think anyone has ever seriously made that claim. These are at best some encouraging signs suggesting that cultural theorists may be on the right path. (By the way, his experiments with school children convinced Mark Nowacki to become a cultural theorist). For me, as a political scientist, the main empirical evidence for this approach can be found in the great many studies that confirm that these four ways of organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations are at play in a great variety of political and social domains. (For a 2005 overview of cultural theory-publications see: http://ponderingmind.org/cultural_theory/cultural-theory-bibliography/. Since then, many more empirical studies have been published). Of course, one could argue that all these authors suffer from a serious bout of confirmation bias. But perhaps one has to be a wee bit careful with making such a claim – just because a particular theory gets confirmed a lot, does not necessarily mean that this is because those who apply it suffer from any bias. Another explanation might be that the theory is right… (To the extent that confirmation bias operates at a social level, it is of course entirely compatible with cultural theory.).

I also agree with you that a theory always needs to be falsifiable. Cultural theory comes pretty much straight from the work of Durkheim and was of course pioneered by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky – all of whom were very strong believers in a strict scientific method. But I do believe that the theory is falsifiable. Saying that whenever people begin to interact, they will over time develop four distinct ways of behaving and reasoning appear that are all based on particular ways of organizing social relations is a very peculiar –and falsifiable- thing to say. (In fact, usually critics argue that they find it very easy to think of 5, 6, 12, etc, ways of behaving.) Also arguing that whenever collective decision-making is based on a single of these four rationalities it self-destructs –as we do in the Clumsy Solutions book– is an entirely falsifiable hypothesis. (And I could think others).
But, of course, as Matthew states as well, there is still a long way to go – I think you are right on that front as well. But anything else would be boring. Cheers, Marco

Marco Verweij on Mon, 19th Jan 2009 8:51 pm


In response to Matt: it’s an intriguing thought, but perhaps one would have to be a bit careful not to make the approach non-falsifiable (which might perhaps be a risk of your formulation; I am not sure). In cultural theory it is often stressed (at least nowadays) that people and organizations are active in many different social domains. What you are suggesting, I think, is that they do often do so simultaneously. That might make sense. I will have to think about that one…

matthewtaylor on Tue, 20th Jan 2009 10:18 am


Hi Richard – many thanks for posting. As I have a full time day job running the RSA, I can’t adequately respond to all the fascinating points in your contribution, and those from Marco and others. However, I am delighted that these comment pages are provoking such an interesting discussion.

I agree with you that cultural theory is far from proven – and indeed it is not clear that it ever could be. Having said that, as someone who leans towards pragmatist philosophy, I recall the immortal words of George Box that ‘most models are wrong but some are useful’. I hope you will forgive a football analogy (I only use these when my team has just won!). For me, cultural theory offers an insight into the regularities (not ‘rules’) of the game. So, in football, there are basic components – the defence, the midfield and the attack – played out in competition with another team. From this, expert analysts and coaches can make certain predictions about the pattern of play. So, for example, if a 4-5-1 formation plays a 4-4-2, the former will rely on fluidity and movement to support the lone striker, while the latter will be more zonal, seeking to move the ball up to the front two. Football is much simpler (and has fewer variables) than social problem solving so the tactical advantages that can be gained from such insights are minor, as almost everyone understands them.

However, fortunately for cultural theory, we are much less scientific about social problem solving. Going back to my football metaphor, policy makers may play 5 upfront, but promise they won’t concede goals, or play 8 across the back, but claim they can win a stunning victory. That’s why, cultural theory, by suggesting that its regularities provide a potentially powerful tool in spotting what may be fundamentally wrong with an approach, can also suggest what may be more likely to succeed.

Finally, in response to Matt’s posting, I think the distinction here is between individual behaviour (which cultural theory doesn’t claim to explain) and social problem solving. Cultural theory may not be able to explain why you cycle as you do, but were you to be seeking a solution with others to the problems of inner city cycling, it would predict that its 4 paradigms would soon be on display.

And now back to cultural theory …. | Matthew Taylor's blog on Thu, 22nd Jan 2009 5:42 pm


[...] been having a lively and thoughtful conversation about CT on the comment pages of the site. In response to today’s blog, I would love to hear some [...]

meika on Mon, 26th Jan 2009 12:17 am


@Marco Verweij “Cultural theory, in supporting opposing biases, cannot benefit in that way.”

Yes, I’ve found this to be the case. On terminology, as a way to get around the impacts of a rejection to join any particular football team (so that “yes, football is the winner today”) would be to emphasize the word “appreciation” somehow within the terminology. I came to gridgroup through the Sage publication Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste 1996 by Mary Douglas and that was the word that stuck with me all through the neo-con culture wars of the last decade. They made it hard work, but I stuck with it and refused to join the any side.

RE: confusion between the micropersonal hard-wires of preference and the macrosocial fluidity of their negotiation, and the maths, the data…

It’s possible, of course, it is another one of those feedback cycles (if not at this level of chat a hermeneutical circle) built on the iteration of individual decisions, which make that patterns emerge from the chaos, at both the individual, and at social levels into four gridgroup strange attractors or rejectors, which on recognition by the individual/s become selective symbols by which they reject more or less uniformly, and so build various social stabilities, which then harden into rigidity, and so via topdown command tumble back into chaos, a multi-dimensional and recursively primordial soup. And all within a fitness landscape for each social group, each band wandering across savannahs, pastorals arcadias and outback stations, such that some groups help their members have more surviving offspring, and the groups that cannot cycle between various gridgroups as the landscape changes, disappear. A gridgroup is a bias for a particular niche construction, however the search for stability leads to change, and another gridgroup may provide better fitness in the now changed landscape (From tsunami, volcanoes & famine, to ozone holes, global warming, global financial crises).

Yes, chaos and complexity theories are important I suspect in framing gridgroup if it is to move away from an astrological Formalism, (no doubt with fuzzy logic informing views of personal decision making).

I would add that within an evolutionary context a focus on niche construction would help here too, as animals tend to have only one niche per species (they are biased to move a certain specialized way) and we seem able to negotiate more than one. Whatever we learned to become hunter-gatherers and so do more than one thing at the same time, has expanded exponentially into something we call the economy on the one hand and society on the other. The gridgroup antagonistically defined process of thoght styles describes a way we are able to maintain a pool of responses and kackhandedly swap between them as occasions require. It’s a ‘winner take a lot for a bit’ game. And is why you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

matthewtaylor on Tue, 27th Jan 2009 8:35 am


Thanks Meika, a really fascinating comment. The goal I would like to set is a framework for understanding the regularities of human ‘decision making’ (by which I don’t just mean conscious decision making) which is at least credible in terms of neuroscience, behavioural economics, developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, game theory and sociology. This kind of holisitic account is the goal of the first stage of our social brain project (see the RSA web site). In realtion to your point about other species we are hopng to partner Marco and Michael in a cultural thepry conference next year included in the papers for which may be a study of chimpanzee politics.

Thanks for reading

Catherine Lee on Tue, 3rd Feb 2009 8:00 pm


Hi Matthew, I noticed you were looking for the cite on Alan’s work. I used to do some research for him and asked him for the ref. It is: Iacoboni, M., Lieberman, M. D., Knowlton, B. J., Molnar-Szakacs, I., Moritz, M., Throop, C. J., & Fiske, A. P. 2004. Watching social interactions produces dorsomedial prefrontal and medial parietal BOLD fMRI signal increases compared to a resting baseline. NeuroImage 21:1167–1173. PDF. I can email it to you, if you would like. You should also check out: http://www.rmt.ucla.edu. His relational models theory is similar to CT, but his categories overlap a bit.

matthewtaylor on Thu, 5th Feb 2009 11:42 am


Thanks Catherine, very kind of you to come back to me

I think I did get find this although I have to admit I craved a layman’s summary, in particular explaining the relationship between Fiske’s and CT’s categories.

Matthew

Cathy Lee on Mon, 20th Apr 2009 5:27 pm


Hi Matthew,

Please accept my most sincere apologies for the ridiculously long delay in reply. I was busy trying to sort myself out (figuring out how I am going to get where I want to be career-wise), and I also have a profound respect for Alan and wanted to be absolutely certain that I portrayed his Relational Models Theory (RMT) in an accurate light (there are many interesting things about his research that I failed to mention dut doing so would have made this “comment” even longer!). Although I helped him run some pilot studies before, I was an undergraduate then and it’s been a while since I’ve looked at his RMT in detail. I didn’t have time until recently to meet with him and discuss a few of his different papers (I am now also a member of his RMT lab group). What I am passing to you is the “cliff notes” version of his paper with Marco Iacoboni and my own comparative analysis of RMT with Cultural Theory, which you will hopefully find useful.

So, let’s start with his paper on how watching social interactions produces dorsomedial prefrontal and medial parietal BOLD fMRI signal increases compared to a resting baseline. The problem with conducting fMRI studies is that most areas of the human brain are active almost all of the time. fMRIs have a lot have a lot of “noise,” and the differences you see between different states are frequently very minor. You need to run the same stimuli 15 or 20 times just to verify data. The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and medial parietal cortex together form what is termed the “default state” of the brain because these areas are more active when the brain is at rest than when a person is performing an overt task. Few fMRI research has consistently demonstrated an increase of activity in the default state of the brain.

The most common approach to fMRI studies is to have a control and the experimental task. The differences between the experimental task are compared with the control, which typically involves a task different from the experiment. What isn’t done often is comparing the brain’s default state/when you are doing nothing. Since most areas of the brain are active, Marco Iacoboni, Alan Fiske and others figured the best way to examine the social brain through fMRIs was by noticing when and where areas deactivate and by using this as the control.

Alan Fiske and the other researchers designed multiple 10-15 minute film clips with professional actors and editing that demonstrated authority-ranking and communal sharing. What they found when they ran these authority-ranking/communal sharing stimuli was significant increased activity in those areas that typically deactivate when tasks, like drinking water or picking up a pencil, are performed. Alan originally thought he would see four different areas of the brain light up, but the actual differences between authority-ranking and communal sharing were minor (they didn’t test all four models because it too expensive). Nonetheless, what Alan Fiske, Marco Iacoboni and other researchers demonstrated, in effect, six months and $25,000 later, was that the default state of the brain is used to process social relations. In other words, when our brain is not engaged in various overt tasks, it is scanning/trying to make sense of our social relations. This is further substantiated by tests that reveal the default state of the brain as “deactivated” even when subjects stared at people.

Now the main difference between the typology of Alan’s RMT and Cultural Theory is that RMT excludes fatalism. I spoke to him about this in the past, but he does not consider fatalism one of his cognitive “mods” that facilitate social relationships.

Autonomy/the hermit exists as null relations/asocial interactions, but this is dismissed and not explored in great detail (see page 19-20 of his roughly 500 page book, Structures of Social Life). To quote Alan, “People may simply disregard the existence of other people as social partners, acting toward others as if they were merely animate organisms, like ants or rats, or taking no account of them at all.” Yet what Alan proposes is a rather extreme view of autonomy, which does not take a lot into account, including how hermits manage their needs-and-resources by pushing both ever downward. If you talk to Mike (I always ask him a lot of questions about hermits), he can tell you about Milarepa, the Tibertan hermit, who was not (initially) averse to accepting food from his visitors as long as they did not exert any sort of power or influence over him. One day, however, he found himself “fighting” for a last bit of meat with a maggot and was ashamed for taking the meat away from the maggot. He thus swore to subsist only on nettles (this is why he is often portrayed with green skin). If you want to find out how Milarepa dies, ask Mike. He tells the story of Milarepa much better—and if you’re lucky, he might even quote bits of Milarepa’s famous songs! Of course, leaving out autonomy or “transitional niche” also reduces the richness of typology and the dynamic quality of theory.

Okay, going back to where the two typologies diverge, in RMT, Market Pricing and Equality Matching are quite similar, with the primary difference being that MP involves a voluntary, negotiated exchange with money, whereas EQ is more about turn-taking and quid pro quo reciprocity.

With respect to theoretical differences, RMT does not address what makes cultures (or a way of life) viable or discuss the dynamics/relationship between different models. RMT highlights the positive aspects of the four different ways of coordinating social relations and does not delve into conflict and why people within the same culture and ability to use all four social models (AR, CS, EM, MP) disagree with one another. CT distinguishes between perception/cultural biases, behavioral strategies, and social relations. Each analytically distinct level reinforces and reproduces the others. In CT, there is a symbiotic but not necessarily synergistic dynamic, where each solidarity is constantly justifying and bolstering itself while undermining the others—a dynamic not recognized in RMT.

With RMT, people all have structured psychological proclivities, ingrained in their repertoire through Baldwinian evolution, but these proclivities are useless without feedback we receive from the environment. To activate cultural coordination devices of AR, MP, CS, and EM, we need to link it with cultural paradigms (preos)/culturally acquired knowledge. How, for instance, can we know how to interact with the Queen using the AR model if we are not aware of what behavior is appropriate within that particular culture… That we should not prostate ourselves on the floor and instead politely bow or curtsy? People from many cultures were shocked when Queen and Michelle Obama did not adhere to the standard AR model. The only way it was deemed “acceptable” in the papers was by highlighting how the queen gave her implicit permission by reaching out to Michelle first.

Ummm, do forgive me for rambling on, and if I repeated some things you already knew about CT. By the way, I absolutely love what you are doing with RSA. I signed up for the RSA’s podcast and have been listening to all the lectures. Thank you very much for making them available in such an easy-to-download and user-friendly format! I was listening to Lord Smith’s speech the other day and was amused at how perfectly he fit into the hierarchical solidarity! Both Mike and Dipak Gyawali, the former water minister of Nepal and veteran Cultural Theorist, would probably protest Lord Smith’s proposition to build the world’s largest carbon capture and storage device. Dipak sums it up perfectly in his chapter in Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World, “Hype and Hydro (and at last some hope) in the Himalaya.”

“In describing technology choices that are prone to surprises, Michael Thompson identifies four technical and four social indicators of inflexibility. The technical indicators are: large scale, long lead-time, capital intensive, and requiring major infrastructure needs early on. The corresponding four organizational indicators are: ‘single mission’ outfits, closure to criticism, hype (as in ‘if we don’t cover the Himalaya with trees, Bangladesh will sink forever beneath the waves’), and hubris (often in the form of overconfidence as to what the future holds, or the categorical certainty that ‘there is no alternative’).” (pg 17)

Again, sorry for the long note, but this is what result of a build-up of all I wanted to tell you! Truthfully, there are many other posts of yours that I have read and thoroughly enjoyed and still intend to respond to (hopefully bot three months late again!)!

Cathy

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!