CULTURE
 
Culture generally refers to the totality of all learned social
behavior of a given group, and provides not only "systems of
standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting"
(Goodenough, 1981: 110), but includes the rules and symbols of
interpretation and discourse as well.  

The MEANING of culture includes not only social behavior, but 
the guiding framework by which cultural members understand their, and
others', behavior.  To speak of culture as a monolithic and invariant 
"thing" glosses over the cultural work required to produce the repetitive
meanings, invoke interpretive tools, and recreate a semblance of
ordered social existence.  Cultures are produced both by the
experiences of everyday interaction and by specialized
culture-producing organizations (Collins, 1979: 60).  In prisons,
for example, the cultural work of staff and prisoners, and the
formal and informal structure imposed by state and administrative
personnel combine to create rules and resources for the
communicative processes that form the basis of prison culture.
 
Culture also includes the material and symbolic artifacts of
behavior, such as belief systems (views of crime), conceptual
machinery for ordering social arrangments (beliefs about
punishment), and pre-existing structural (prisons as formal
organizations) and material (stone walls and bars) attributes, or
what Marx has called the means and mode of production, upon which
cultural meanings are re-created and maintained.  However,
because culture is not uniformly shared not understood with equal
competence by members, the concept of culture itself assumes
several forms.
 
Culture is a "collective fiction" (Clifford, 1988: 106) to the
extent that it is a shared fabrication with meanings that, while
seemingly constant, are in fact ambiguous, tentative, changing,
and may vary dramatically between groups.  To overcome this
problem of diverse conceptual meanings, the synthetic approach
adopted by Van Maanen and Barley (1985), although broad, provides
the basis for the meaning used here:
 
     In crude relief, culture can be understood as a set of
     solutions devised by a group of people to meet specific
     problems posed by situations they face in common. . .This
     notion of culture as a living, historical product of group
     problem solving allows an approach to cultural study that is
     applicable to any group, be it a society, a neighborhood, a
     family, a dance band, or an organization and its segments
     (Van Maanen and Barley, 1985: 33).
 
Culture, then, is the socially established set of public codes,
the syntax and lexicon, that guide the symbolic conventions of
"reality construction" of ordering and legitimating everday
roles, priorities and operating procedures (Berger and Luckmann,
1967: 99).  This definition incorporates both the interactional
and structural components of culture, and requires analysis of of
how a shared social existence becomes translated into patterned
behavior.

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