Wuthnow, Robert

Robert Wuthnow (b. 1946), an American sociologist, is best known as a highly prolific, empirically oriented cultural sociologist and a sociologist of religion who has, along the way, created a novel theory of cultural change to use in his empirical investigations. Wuthnow received his BA from the University of Kansas and his PhD in sociology from University of California, Berkeley, in 1975 with a dissertation supervised by Charles Glock and Robert Bellah. He joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1976 and has been there ever since.

Like Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Merton, Wuthnow is a social theorist whose theories arise from and serve his empirical research into social life. For example, of Wuthnow's 22 published books, 9 edited volumes, and over 160 articles, few are devoted to sociological theory per se but are primarily devoted to topics in the sociology of religion and culture.

However, his theories have been influential because they provide tools for empirical investigations in the recently popular field of cultural sociology. Wuthnow's only purely theoretical book is Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (1987). The 730-page Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment and European Socialism (1989), apparently written at approximately the same time, is a detailed empirical study demonstrating his theory of cultural change.

Wuthnow is probably best known for the controversial proposal in these books to, in his words, go “beyond the problem of meaning” in cultural sociology. The dominant form of cultural analysis in the social sciences is what Wuthnow calls the “subjective” approach, where the analyst focuses on the beliefs, attitudes, opinions, or values of the individual. The point in this type of research is to figure out what is inside the person's head, and many readily accessible methods—such as opinion surveys—appear to be available for use. The problem of meaning is central in this tradition: What symbols “mean” to the individual is the central question.

According to Wuthnow, the primary problem with the subjective tradition is that we can never know what is really inside of people's heads—what people really think. We have access only to what they say, write, or do, from which we infer these inner states. Why not just use what we can observe and forget about the inner states of consciousness? Wuthnow's proposal is to stop investigating meaning and instead look at the patterns of observable symbolic codes such as words, movements, and texts. With this method, “Data are more readily observable kinds of behavior rather than being locked away in people's private ruminations” (1987:56). This results in a form of cultural structuralism, not unlike an analysis of Michel Foucault. We can, for example, identify the structure of codes in Protestant discourse—perhaps that the symbols “friend” and “Jesus” are more closely related in the more highly individualistic evangelicalism than in mainline Protestantism. While this does not tell us the “meaning” of these terms for any one Protestant, it is observable and can be correlated with observable action.

Where do these symbolic patterns come from? The relationship of culture to social structure is one of the original debates in sociological theory, and this is the other distinctive contribution of Wuthnow to social theory. Where, for example, did the set of symbols called “the discourse of the Protestant reformation” come from? His theory is premised on the insight that all symbols are explicitly produced by actors in particular environments; they do not somehow rise like ether from structural relationships. There are three stages of this cultural production. First, innumerable symbols are produced by innumerable people, a stage Wuthnow calls “cultural production.” For example, Martin Luther was not the only person producing ideas during his life, but many others were as well. The next stage, “selection,” explains why Luther's ideas become known. Some ideas are selected over others because they are able to obtain resources from the environment to be produced more broadly because they articulate with that environment. The final stage is “institutionalization,” where routinized mechanisms are put into place for the continued production of the discourse. Publishing houses are set up, schools founded, denominations created—all devoted to the promotion of certain cultural symbols. Some cultural systems—like science—are so deeply institutionalized, with so many interlocking institutions devoted to their propagation, that we think of them as “reality.” A critical part of Wuthnow's analysis is to ask why a particular cultural producer obtained the resources to institutionalize their preferred symbols.

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