Let’s Eliminate “Culture” from Social Science (er, Disciplines)

Joel Mokyr, in his new book A Culture of Growth, says on p.8

Culture means various things to different people, and to begin, we need to clarify the concept and our use of it. Given the rather astonishing popularity of the concept of culture in the social sciences and the humanities and the mind-boggling number of definitions employed. . .

What follows from this is that social scientists should not use the term “culture” and instead replace it with a word or phrase that is less loaded with alternative definitions and connotations. Mokyr goes on to explain what he means by culture, pointing out that it is similar to a definition that can be found in Boyd and Richerson’s book Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Mokyr offers

Culture is a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behavior, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and that are shared by some subset of society.

My recommendation would be to replace the term “culture” with the phrase “socially communicated knowledge and behavior.” I think it is pretty obvious that a large subset of what we know is socially communicated through conversation, writing, teaching, on-the-job training, and such. A large subset of our behavior also is socially communicated. We imitate prestigious people. We obey authorities. We covet praise and fear being shamed by friends, family, and strangers.

I am not saying that everyone should define culture as “socially communicated knowledge and behavior.” Other people may wish to define it differently. Rather, I am suggest that Mokyr and others who use the term “culture” as he does should instead use the phrase “socially communicated knowledge and behavior.”

If you want to say that economic growth and development are affected by culture, some people will be inclined to resist. But if you say that economic growth and development are affected by socially communicated knowledge and behavior, my guess is that you will have pretty much everyone on your side immediately. If you say that the market is an institution that contributes to culture, again some people will resist. But if you say that the market is an institution that contributes to socially communicated knowledge and behavior, people will be ready to listen to your account of that process.

In short, the best way to get “culture” appreciated as an important factor in economics and other social sciences disciplines is to stop using the term “culture.”

6 thoughts on “Let’s Eliminate “Culture” from Social Science (er, Disciplines)

  1. I got my copy in the mail yesterday. Arnold, did you have trouble reading it because of the type? I have not seen such small type in a book in years.

  2. I thought it was my eyes! Seriously, I went out and bought stronger glasses because I was squinting so much reading this book (just past half done).

    But back to Kling’s point… I would push back. The point of Mokyr and McCloskey’s and others cultural explanations is not just that growth is affected by “socially communicated knowledge and behavior”, it is that our mindsets, or frameworks or paradigms are essential. The focus is more on beliefs, values and intellectual frameworks rather than the nuts and bolts content implied by “knowledge and behavior”. Note that McCloskey avoids using the term “culture” in her bourgeois explanations, while Mokyr embraces it with explanatory caveats.

    I find Mokyr, McCloskey and even the institutionalists like North agree more than they disagree. They come across like the blind men trying to describe an elephant — each accentuating different aspects of the same creature.

  3. Hmmm…. at first glance I think Mokyr’s definition is more useful than yours. The problem with “knowledge and behavior” is that it implies these things can be taught (or, if you wish, imposed imperialistically). “Beliefs, values and preferences” does a better job of conveying just how useless interventions are likely to be.

  4. I agree that in scholarship the word culture should be dropped in favor of your more precise descriptive phrase. Mostly because the word takes on distinct meanings in different context to include artistic motifs.

    However, the very fact that it would ease widespread agreement or open-mindedness reveals the real problem. Everyone can agree to something at a certain level of abstraction or generality, but the devil’s in the details.

    And as with the nature-nurture debate, there is a lot politically at stake in the choice between optimistic or bounded accounts of human nature that is implied by the details of what important variables culture affects on the one hand, and in which cases one cannot find any compelling evidence against a cultural null hypothesis on the other.

  5. If economic growth and development are materially affected by “culture” (or whatever word or definitional phrase you want to use in place of “culture”), doesn’t it follow that the immigration into a society of masses of people from sharply different cultures (that have generated less wealth economic development up till now), combined with a reigning ideology in the receiving society that encourages immigrants and their descendants retain the culture the immigrants brought with them and to demand special rights against the receiving society, might eventually have a deleterious effect on the receiving society’s economic growth and development?

    Just asking.

  6. ‘Tabooing certain words’ is a great trick to avoid whole classes of spurious disagreements.

    The need or desire to re-define common words is something I run into all the time developing software. Nearly every app, and every software library one might use, now comes with its own terminology, almost all of which are regular words with new definitions. It’s annoying that some feel the need to use terminology clustered around a central thematic metaphor and shoehorn all of the other terms needed into that one metaphor (and often doing so badly).

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