Page 100 - Cultural Theory

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••• Giddens and Cultural Analysis •••

they are rarely able to state the rules that they are following. When people successfully
learn how to speak Japanese, how to drive a car, how to cook a meal, how to vote in
an election, how to work in an office, and so on, the rules that comprise these skills
are embedded in their minds and bodies as specific skills, capacities, and dispositions
that are likely to be available for conscious recall and codification only in partial and
distorted forms.
Giddens develops this view through a social psychology that he derives from the
ideas of the symbolic interactionists and from Weber’s account of subjectivity, to
which he adds insights from psychoanalysis and from Foucault’s explorations into
subjectivity and discourse. Central to this is the relationship between what he calls
practical consciousness and discursive consciousness. Practical consciousness oper-
ates unreflectively through trial and error to build up routine patterns of action. It is
the means through which motivating forces are organized into routines and habits
of action that allow people to pursue their wants and desires in unproblematic ways
without the need to constantly make decisions over action alternatives. Habits of
action rest on persisting dispositions or tendencies that embody the structural rules
that make the action possible. They are the product of those socialized dispositions
that Bourdieu (1972) has analysed through his concept of the habitus. Indeed, much
confusion would have been avoided if Giddens had used the word habitus, rather
than the word structure.
Actors do, however, reflect on their actions in order to evaluate their success. This
allows their actions to become matters for the discursive consciousness through
which they ‘account’ for their actions by invoking the ‘reasons’ that led to them.
Through this reflexive rationalization of action, actors attempt to formulate discur-
sive interpretations of the rules that have shaped their actions. In doing so, they may
be able to make their actions the objects of rational investigation and control. It is
rarely the case, however, that they will attain a full and accurate discursive knowl-
edge of the actual rules that inform their actions. The legal statutes, books of gram-
mar, written rules for games, guides to etiquette, and so on that are produced
discursively do not contain true rules: they are interpretations and codifications of
the procedural rules that inhere in the skills, capacities, and dispositions exercised by
the actors. They are, in this sense, analogous to the theoretical models produced by
sociological investigators in their sociological discourse.
Giddens’ formulation of this position is strikingly close to that of Garfinkel (1967),
whose ‘ethnomethodology’ is explicitly concerned with the rule-like ‘methods’ used
by people in generating and accounting for actions. Culture, in the sense of ‘struc-
ture’, comprises the tacit, taken-for-granted stock of knowledge that Schütz and
Luckmann (1973) saw as providing the typifications and definitions that underpin
the expectations through which routine everyday actions are organized.
This view of culture leads Giddens to understand social change differently from
many other sociologists. Observable changes in the patterns of social actions and
social systems have to be seen as resulting from rule change. By speaking grammati-
cally, the speakers of a language contribute to the reproduction of its rules of gram-
mar, and by speaking in innovative ‘non-grammatical’ ways, they contribute to the

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