675175

2016
ASRXXX10.1177/0003122416675175American Sociological ReviewLizardo

American Sociological Review

Improving Cultural Analysis: 2017, Vol. 82(1) 88­–115

© American Sociological
Association 2016
Considering Personal Culture DOI: 10.1177/0003122416675175
journals.sagepub.com/home/asr

in its Declarative and

Nondeclarative Modes

Omar Lizardoa

Abstract
While influential across a wide variety of subfields, cultural analysis in sociology continues
to be hampered by coarse-grained conceptualizations of the different modes in which culture
becomes personal, as well as the process via which persons acquire and use different forms
of culture. In this article, I argue that persons acquire and use culture in two analytically
and empirically distinct forms, which I label declarative and nondeclarative. The mode of
cultural acquisition depends on the dynamics of exposure and encoding, and modulates the
process of cultural accessibility, activation, and use. Cultural knowledge about one domain
may be redundantly represented in both declarative and nondeclarative forms, each linked
via analytically separable pathways to corresponding public cultural forms and ultimately to
substantive outcomes. I outline how the new theoretical vocabulary, theoretical model, and
analytic distinctions that I propose can be used to resolve contradictions and improve our
understanding of outstanding substantive issues in empirically oriented subfields that have
recently incorporated cultural processes as a core explanatory resource.

The past two and a half decades have seen a
virtual explosion of interest in culture among
sociologists, first as a delimited topic of anal-
ysis (“the sociology of culture”) and more
recently as a general resource for explanation
(“cultural sociology”). In this sense, cultural
sociologists can proclaim with confidence
that their work stands “at the crossroads of
the discipline” (Jacobs and Spillman 2005),
helping to inform the research of scholars in
virtually every substantive area of sociology
(DiMaggio 1997; Patterson 2014; Sewell
2005). Yet, despite its widespread influence,
cultural analysis in sociology is limited, and
thus prevented from fulfilling its putative
discipline-unifying role, in at least two impor-
tant respects.1
First, sociologists generally have an
impoverished understanding of how analyti-
cally and empirically distinct forms of culture
are acquired and used by persons. Instead,
one-size-fits-all proposals, deploying the
term “culture” as a generic (and thus ambigu-
ous) category of analysis, seem to be the rule
rather than the exception (Alexander 2003;
Swidler 2001a). Second, even when incipient
analytic distinctions are made (Sewell 1992;
Swidler 2001b), we find partial, insufficiently
developed, and sometimes empirically inade-
quate conceptualizations of how different
kinds of cultural elements relate to one
another (Patterson 2014). One of the primary
a
University of Notre Dame
Corresponding Author:
Omar Lizardo, Department of Sociology,
University of Notre Dame, 810 Flanner Hall,
Notre Dame, IN, 46556
E-mail: olizardo@nd.edu
Lizardo 89
goals of this article is to provide a coherent
analytic and empirical basis for the distinc-
tion between different forms of culture and to
provide the first steps toward a model of how
the distinct modalities of culture interrelate to
produce the empirical phenomena of interest
to sociologists.
A roadblock to reaching this goal is that,
under the most influential approaches, the
implicit, or nondeclarative aspects of culture
(phenomenologically opaque and not open to
linguistic articulation) are usually conceptual-
ized as being inherently intertwined with, or
as being of secondary analytic importance in
relation to, its explicit or declarative facets
(phenomenologically transparent and elicited
as linguistic reports). That is, knowledge
“how” is not properly differentiated from
knowledge “that” (Ryle 2002:25–26). In the
modal case, linguistically articulated forms of
culture are presumed to be of more inherent
substantive interest than “how” knowledge,
or at least of being capable of serving as a
relatively unproblematic point of access to
the latter (Jerolmack and Khan 2014).
My argument in what follows is that a seri-
ous consideration of the distinction between
declarative and nondeclarative culture (at the
personal level), and both from the way culture is
manifest in public (extra-personal) form (Strauss
and Quinn 1997), is a requirement for effective
cultural analysis on analytic and empirical
grounds. I will show that having an adequate
conceptualization of both the analytically rele-
vant differences between cultural elements as
well as the multifaceted relations that these ele-
ments enter into, helps resolve a host of empiri-
cal issues that would otherwise remain shrouded
in ambiguity, confusion, and paradox.
Having stated my positive goals, allow me
to clarify what I do not intend to do here. First,
my aim is not to formulate another grand
approach to cultural analysis, in the vein of
classical normativist functionalism (e.g., Par-
sons 1951) or “the strong program” (e.g.,
Alexander 2003). Nor is it my goal to displace
influential contemporary approaches to the
culture/action linkage (e.g., Swidler 2001a;
Vaisey 2009), or to provide a full-fledged
defense and exegesis of previous work that
emphasizes the tacit bases of action (e.g.,
Bourdieu 1990). Instead, my goals are more
modest but not necessarily less programmatic.
My aim is to provide a flexible (but princi-
pled) conceptual vocabulary that cultural ana-
lysts may draw upon regardless of underlying
persuasion or commitment to any specific
program. The conceptual toolbox should then
be used to qualify, sharpen, and extend the
quality of theorizing focused on cultural pro-
cesses across diverse empirical settings.2
Naturally, the distinctions I propose are
not completely neutral as to how the concepts
of “culture” and “action” are conceptualized,
and while the argument attempts to be ecune-
mical it is not neutral as to conceptualization.
My own thinking on these issues has been
most strongly influenced by the line of work
known as “practice theory,” which is most
clearly articulated in the work of Pierre
Bourdieu (1990) and Ann Swidler (2001b).
While acknowledging these influences, the
approach I propose is neither a reproduction
nor a retranslation of Bourdieusian or Swidle-
rian insights into a different set of theoretical
terms. In the case of Bourdieu, one problem
with even attempting such a recasting is that
he saw the project of cultural explanation in
social science, available to him mainly in the
form of mid-twentieth structuralist and sym-
bolic anthropology, as a dead end (Bourdieu
1973). This stance led him to develop a
counter-project in which the concept of cul-
ture entered only as a topic to be accounted
for but never as an analytic resource for
explanation (Lizardo 2011). This required the
development of a somewhat idiosyncratic,
and in many ways unwieldy, theoretical
vocabulary—one that has never been coher-
ently incorporated into Anglophone cultural
analysis (e.g., Alexander 2003; Sewell 1992;
Swidler 2001b). Furthermore, Bourdieu’s
ambivalence in relation to the culture concept
essentially meant he made little effort to pro-
vide an empirically defensible account of
how persons acquire and use culture in con-
text, outside of some suggestive, but ulti-
mately elliptical, allusions.
90 American Sociological Review 82(1)
In contrast to this stance, the approach
developed here remains fully committed to a
robust notion of culture as an analytic resource
for explanation (Sewell 2005). Accordingly, I
attempt to integrate the practice-theoretical
insight that a lot of what functions as culture
remains in the tacit dimension, never rising to
the level of discourse, with the empirical fact
that a lot of what gets referred to as “culture”
presents itself to the analyst in the form of
explicit talk and discourse (e.g., Swidler
2001a). To that end, I draw on recent interdis-
ciplinary work on the enculturation process to
provide a principled account of how we may
be able to pull off this feat, an account that
should be usable by social scientists commit-
ted to the project of cultural explanation. This
reformulation has several analytic advantages
over previous synthetic attempts, whether of
Bourdieusian provenance or not, including
the fact that it does not require either the
adoption of an idiosyncratic terminology
(opting instead for terms with wide currency
in social science) or all-out commitment to a
delimited theoretical system or program.
To showcase the substantive payoff of the
approach I propose, I take contemporary stud-
ies of the role of culture in the reproduction of
inequality as paradigmatic test cases for con-
ceptual clarification. I do this with full knowl-
edge that this is precisely the area that may be
thought of as having been settled by practice-
inspired models, such as that developed in the
early work of Bourdieu and Passeron (1990)
and the cottage industry of work that grew
around the concept of cultural capital follow-
ing this intervention. My intent here is neither
to replicate nor displace the insights generated
by these lines of work, nor to develop a
generic model linking culture, institutions,
and the reproduction of power. Instead, my
aim is to show that we can do better cultural
theory and provide more compelling, convinc-
ing, and generative modes of cultural explana-
tion when the right set of distinctions is made
and we focus on the right kind of processes.
To that end, I chose primarily empirically
driven efforts in the study of culture and ine-
quality in the United States as my main
source of material. This has two additional
analytic and substantive advantages. First,
this is an area where a consideration of cul-
tural processes, after a long period of self-
imposed banishment (Patterson 2014), have
re-emerged with a renewed vigor, but where
the ultimate substantive implications of this
cultural turn remain to be fully demonstrated
(Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014). Second,
culture and inequality studies is an area where
empirical researchers are forced to deal with
fundamental issues in cultural theory that,
while superficially presenting themselves as
purely empirical debates, can be directly
traced to analytic choices affecting how cul-
ture is (or is not) brought in as an explanatory
factor in the first place. The synthetic benefits
that can accrue from moving to the frame-
work I propose are thus most evident here.
We will see how substantive issues that
would otherwise be accounted for using
incompatible or globally incoherent theoreti-
cal vocabularies, or segregated into seem-
ingly competing forms of cultural explanation,
can be brought under a coherent conceptual
umbrella. I also show how the analytic vocab-
ulary I develop provides a way to avoid hav-
ing to engage in strained acts of intellectual
gerrymandering, in which cultural explana-
tions are deployed for a selective range of
cases and arbitrarily foreclosed for others
(Skrentny 2008), or in which equally arbitrary
distinctions between culture and not-culture
(e.g., structure) have to be brought in through
the backdoor (Hays 1994). Both of these
issues continue to serve as obstacles to effec-
tive cultural analysis in the field.
A Theory of
Enculturation
With these preliminary considerations out of
the way, I begin by providing a theoretically
informed account of the enculturation process
that connects analytically distinct ways in
which persons internalize culture to processes
of cultural activation and use.
The theory of enculturation that I propose
is grounded in approaches to the study of
Lizardo 91
culture in action with a strong basis in the
interdisciplinary study of human cognition or
“cognitive social science” (e.g., DiMaggio
1997; Patterson 2014; Strauss and Quinn
1997; Vaisey 2009). The analytic advantage
of a cognitively grounded conception of the
enculturation process comes from its capacity
to link distinct pathways and mechanisms of
cultural exposure and transmission to correla-
tively distinct ways culture comes to be stored
in long-term memory (Smith and DeCoster
2000).
Following cognitively motivated theories
of cultural meaning, I conceive of encultura-
tion as a process of internalization of experi-
ential patterns encountered in the world via a
developmental learning process (Tomasello
1999). Internalization, in turn, can be thought
of as the modification (e.g., strengthening or
weakening of links) of neural pathways con-
stitutive of memory consolidation processes
(Changeux 1997), entailing the encoding and
storage of cultural knowledge in functionally
and physiologically distinct memory systems
(Whitehouse 1996). When subject to an inter-
nalization process, culture becomes a (rela-
tively) enduring part of a person’s knowledge
repertoire (Lizardo and Strand 2010).
A key insight of recent work on memory
systems is that different forms of knowledge
are differentially encoded such that they are
dissociable. That is, even when it comes to
the same domain, knowledge encoded in one
form may be lost but other forms may be
retained. Even when both forms are present,
one knowledge structure may be activated
without implying the necessary activation of
the other form. The mode of cultural encod-
ing is connected to cognitive process, because
the way that culture is accessed, retrieved,
and ultimately used is systematically influ-
enced by the format in which it is encoded in
the first place.
Declarative and Nondeclarative
Pathways of Cultural Acquisition
Declarative culture. A key premise of the
model to be proposed is that, in its personal
state, culture may take two empirically and
analytically distinct forms. On the one hand,
persons may acquire explicit, symbolically
mediated culture via a relatively small num-
ber of exposures, with the limiting case being
one-shot, long-term storage in “flashbulb”
memories (Whitehouse 1996). Memory for
this type of culture is consolidated via fast-
binding neural mechanisms (given the rela-
tively low number of exposures necessary for
acquisition) in a declarative memory system
(Smith and DeCoster 2000). Encoded in this
form, culture may also be accessed and
deployed in the same explicit, symbolically
mediated format (Kolers and Smythe 1979). I
refer to this type of culture as declarative cul-
ture (Patterson 2014:10).
The primary symbolic medium via which
persons are exposed to declarative culture is
spoken or written language (Tomasello 1999),
although other public non-linguistic symbolic
systems (e.g., audio-visual codes, iconic sym-
bols, ritual performance) may also serve as a
conduit for the transmission and internaliza-
tion of declarative culture. Most forms of
declarative culture therefore consist of “know-
thats” stored in a semantic memory system
(Martin and Chao 2001), with declarative
know-thats constituting (lay or folk) knowl-
edge in the phenomenological sense (Berger
and Luckmann 1966). Semantic knowledge is
usually impersonal and thus mainly stated as
propositions about the world, at varying
degrees of abstraction, without explicit refer-
ence to individual experience (e.g., “in the
United States, doing well in school leads to
better jobs”). For instance, when political sci-
entists query persons as to whether they know
who their congressional representative is
(Zaller 1992), they are trying to access declar-
ative culture in the political domain stored in
semantic memory (i.e., political knowledge).
In the same way, when sociologists ask per-
sons to report what national or world events
are especially significant (Schuman and Scott
1989), they are trying to access mnemonic
knowledge stored in autobiographically sig-
nificant semantic forms.
As is the case of the “collected memories”
reported by large segments of the population,
declarative culture is distinctive in that it is
92 American Sociological Review 82(1)
capable of retaining a high degree of fine-
grained detail in relation to the original encod-
ing experience. Declarative culture is also
“intentional”: it is about (points to) entities,
persons, events, objects, happenings, and
experiences in the world (Searle 1983). The
term “world” should be understood in the phe-
nomenological sense to include, in addition to
the commonsense world of the here-and-now,
imaginary, presumed, possible, theoretical,
previously experienced, counterfactual, or
temporally and spatially distal “worlds”
(Schutz 1967). In addition to being inten-
tional, declarative culture has the potential to
be phenomenologically transparent, in the
sense of being open to inspection via reflec-
tive cognitive acts (Heiskala 2011). Persons
not only “know” declarative culture, but upon
reflection, may also “know that they know it.”
Declarative culture is normally accessed,
and thus put to use, in a deliberate (slow),
linear fashion (as in the construction of life
narratives or motivational justifications), and
in the case of declarative culture used for such
tasks as reasoning, evaluation, judgment, and
categorization. In these cases, persons are
aware of applying explicit criteria or rules
(Sloman 1996). This may involve chaining
together a series of cultural chunks to produce
a judgment (e.g., working out the reasoning
steps that lead to a given conclusion). Exam-
ples of such judgments are evaluating an
action as proper or improper using explicit
ethical rules or deciding that a given token
belongs to a certain type using overt assign-
ment criteria (Margolis 1987:73). Persons
also use declarative culture when producing
justifications for their public stances and
commitments, spinning out vocabularies of
motive (Mills 1940) and generating post hoc
justificatory rationalizations for their actions
(Vaisey 2009). Declarative culture is also
elicited when persons report their normative
commitments and aspirations or when they
deliberate about different courses of action
and future projects (Mische 2009).
Nondeclarative culture. On the other
hand, persons may acquire culture via a “slow
learning” pathway in the form of implicit,
durable, cognitive-emotive associations, bod-
ily comportments, and perceptual and motor
skills built from repeated long-term exposure
to consistent patterns of experience (Bourdieu
1990; Cohen and Leung 2009; Wacquant
2004). This culture retains very little of the
detail of each of the exposure episodes, keep-
ing only the experiential structure that is com-
mon across each episode. The resulting
knowledge produced by the slow encultura-
tion process is not structured according to
semantic or logical links among explicit sym-
bolic elements. Instead, this variant of the
enculturation process leaves behind recurrent
linkages based on patterns of physical and
perceptual similarity and spatial and temporal
contiguity (Strauss and Quinn 1997). Ulti-
mately, this culture is stored for later use in a
nondeclarative memory system; accordingly,
I refer to this type of culture as nondeclarative
culture (Patterson 2014:11).
The acquisition and internalization of non-
declarative culture differs from declarative
culture in both the mode of exposure and the
mode of encoding. This means that the latter
differs from the former in how it is put to use.
First, in terms of the mode exposure, persons
can acquire nondeclarative culture only via
slow learning (habituation and enskillment)
processes after a (relatively) large number of
repeated encodings; this is different from
declarative culture, which may be acquired
via fast memory binding even after a single
experience (Smith and DeCoster 2000). Sec-
ond, nondeclarative culture may be internal-
ized (and later elicited), without explicit
symbolic mediation, directly via experiential
correlations or manipulation of the body
(Cohen and Leung 2009). This differs from
declarative culture, which requires some form
of symbolically (e.g., linguistically) mediated
interaction to be internalized (Strauss and
Quinn 1997).3 Third, nondeclarative culture
is not stored in a format that is akin to exter-
nal symbols (Kolers and Smythe 1979).
Instead, nondeclarative culture is stored in the
form of a complex multimodal and multidi-
mensional network of associations between a
Lizardo 93
large number of subsymbolic elements, each
of which has a close link to experience
(Strauss and Quinn 1997).
The underlying neural imagery is that of
Hebbian learning: when two neurons (or neu-
ronal systems) fire together they wire together,
and the more often they fire together the
stronger the link becomes and the slower it
decays over time. The underlying cognitive
imagery is that of connectionist models and
knowledge accessibility via “spreading acti-
vation” and “soft constraint satisfaction” in a
network of cognitive associations (Kunda and
Thagard 1996). Finally, nondeclarative cul-
ture has the potential to be accessed and
deployed, ultimately affecting action, cogni-
tion, emotion, and judgment via fast (non-
reflective, intention-independent) pathways
(Strack and Deutsch 2004).
Skill acquisition is the prototypical exam-
ple of nondeclarative enculturation (see Wac-
quant 2004), although the same mechanism is
behind the acquisition of the “implicit associa-
tions” and “implicit attitudes” that have
become the bread and butter of social and
cognitive psychology for the past two decades
(Shepherd 2011). In the same way, the extrac-
tion of an implicit categorical schema from a
large number of exposures to category mem-
bers, allowing persons to classify via “family
resemblance” rather than the application of
explicit rules, is made possible through nonde-
clarative structures acquired via slow inter-
nalization processes (Rosch and Mervis 1975).
Once acquired, nondeclarative culture sub-
sists as a resource to be applied to action situ-
ations that bear a structured similarity to
those in which the relevant associations were
formed. Persons thus deploy nondeclarative
culture “online” and in real time, as a result of
perceiving an environmental prompt or open-
ing that requires a response (e.g., categorizing
a person by gender and race when encounter-
ing them for the first time). This is in contrast
to declarative culture, which, due to its encod-
ing as (relatively) context-free representa-
tions, can also be used for “offline” processes
of reasoning, planning, imagining, anticipat-
ing, remembering, justifying, and narrating
outside the action contexts under which it was
initially acquired. Because nondeclarative
culture has an underlying associationist basis,
it is usually deployed online in a fast (effort-
less) mode; this is in contrast to declarative
culture, which usually requires relatively high
levels of attention, motivation, and cognitive
capacity (e.g., activation and temporary reten-
tion in a short-term memory store) to be
deployed (Strack and Deutsch 2004).
Public Culture, Declarative Culture,
and Nondeclarative Culture
In this section, I link the analytic distinction
between declarative and nondeclarative cul-
ture with the higher-order distinction between
culture made manifest at the level of the indi-
vidual, namely personal culture, and culture
externalized in the form of public symbols,
discourses, and institutions, that is, public
culture (Patterson 2014; Strauss and Quinn
1997).4 This is meant to combat the often-
noted tendency to use the term “culture” in
unqualified, undifferentiated, generic, and
ultimately analytically unproductive ways,
thus obscuring the relation between different
cultural elements.
The resulting cross-classification is shown
in Figure 1, a diagram modeled after similar
branching depictions in the literature on mem-
ory systems (e.g., Squire 2004). The first
branch splits the public and personal facets of
culture. At the second level, the rightmost
branch splits the declarative and nondeclara-
tive forms of culture at the personal level. We
could imagine further splits along the declara-
tive and nondeclarative leaves (and further
splits in types of public culture, such as sym-
bolic versus material), but I stop at two levels
for the sake of simplicity, economy of presen-
tation, and relevance to the present argument.5
The classification outlined in Figure 1
clarifies something that is usually not explic-
itly articulated in existing formulations. As
Figure 2 shows, any attempt at cultural analy-
sis must consider, either implicitly or explic-
itly, at least three sets of relations between
cultural elements. Recent theoretical efforts
94 American Sociological Review 82(1)

Figure 1. Branching Diagram Depicting the Distinction between Declarative Culture,

Nondeclarative Culture, and Public Culture

Figure 2. “Cultural Triangle” Depicting Three Sets of Relations among Cultural Elements

have been characterized by a tendency to
privilege only one set of dyadic considera-
tions at a time. While there is nothing wrong
in principle with a strong argument for the
substantive primacy of any one set of rela-
tions depicted, these arguments have to be
made in the context of a careful consideration
of the full set of relations as a whole. Mini-
mizing or excluding one set of relations from
explanatory primacy is an argument that has
to be made explicitly, taking into considera-
tion both analytic warrant and empirical ade-
quacy. Otherwise, we end up in a situation in
which analysts are not even clear on what
they actually disagree on, and are speaking
past one another as each emphasizes their
preferred set of relations without articulating
this clearly (see, e.g., Swidler 2008; Vaisey
2008).
For instance, proposals such as Vaisey’s
(2009) dual process model are primarily con-
cerned with the (a) relation of declarative and
nondeclarative cultural elements at the per-
sonal level. This type of account (strategi-
cally) deemphasizes the public/personal
interface (Swidler 2008). The most explicitly
Lizardo 95

Table 1. Relation between Public, Declarative, and Nondeclarative Forms of Culture in

Classical and Contemporary Cultural Theory

Declarative Nondeclarative Public

Declarative Normativist Functionalism Strong Program
   
Nondeclarative Dual Process Strong Practice Theory
   
Public Toolkit Theory Semiotic Practice Theory  

Note: Perspectives in gray shaded cells presuppose a strong coupling between row and column
categories; unshaded cells presuppose a weak coupling.

elaborated aspect of Swidler’s (2001a) sometimes making an ambiguous nod toward

“toolkit” approach, on the other hand, is con-
cerned with the (b) relation between the
declarative commitments reported by her
informants and public codes and institutions.
Her analysis, however, only partially theo-
rizes (although it strongly nods toward) the
nondeclarative/public linkage, especially in
pointing to the role of “cultured competences”
and skills in relation to external cultural scaf-
folds (Lizardo and Strand 2010). Finally,
most forms of practice theory, from Bourdieu
(1990), to Sewell (2005), to Biernacki (1995),
to the “cultured competences” aspects of
Swidler’s toolkit model, concern themselves
with the (c) relation between hard to articu-
late commitments (in the form of cultural
practices) and public culture, whether this
latter element is conceived as “fields” (in
Bourdieu), “semiotic structures” (in Sewell),
systems of accounting and production (in
Biernacki), or “codes, contexts, and institu-
tions” (in Swidler). As noted at the outset,
however, these variants of practice theory
falter when it comes to offering a coherent
formulation of how declarative commitments
link to action within fields independently of
nondeclarative practices, and in specifying
the within-person dynamics governing the
relation between declarative and nondeclara-
tive knowledge (on this last score, see
Leschziner and Green 2013).
Further complexities (and misunderstand-
ings) emerge because any one of the three sets
of relations may be characterized as a form of
weak or strong coupling, with different ana-
lysts emphasizing one side of this polarity or
both sides. Three sets of relations between
cultural elements, each with a bipolar struc-
ture, results in six analytic possibilities. These
are depicted in Table 1. The table cross-clas-
sifies each of the three forms of culture
against one another, ignoring the reflexive
(diagonal) cells. Shaded cells (upper triangle)
depict approaches that are concerned with
theorizing strong coupling; unshaded cells
(lower triangle) list approaches primarily
concerned with theorizing weak coupling.6
The table makes clear that extant theoretical
perspectives in cultural analysis are con-
cerned with either the interface between per-
sonal culture (in either its declarative or
nondeclarative forms) and public culture, or
the within-person relation between different
forms of culture. In addition, theorists may be
concerned with theorizing either decoupling
or coupling phenomena across these different
forms of culture.
Accordingly, Vaisey’s (2009) dual process
model is best thought of as emphasizing the
weak coupling between the two different
forms of personal culture. One part of
Swidler’s (2001a, 2001b) most recent articu-
lation of the toolkit perspective deals with the
weak coupling between declarative commit-
ments at the personal level and institutions at
the public level.7 Practice theory shows up in
two guises, depending on whether the analyst
emphasizes weak or strong coupling between
nondeclarative and public culture (Patterson
2014).8 Some forms of “semiotic practice
theory,” evident in the work of analysts such
as Biernacki (1995), emphasize the weak
96 American Sociological Review 82(1)
coupling between unarticulated techniques
embedded in material practices and explicitly
institutionalized systems of commensura-
tion.9 To the extent that Swidler’s appeal to
“cultured capacities” and “strategies of
action” can be read as a nod toward nonde-
clarative culture, the toolkit approach can also
be considered a theory concerned with the
weak coupling relation between nondeclara-
tive culture and public cultural codes; as a
form of semiotic practice theory, this weak
coupling approach has been endorsed by
Sewell (2005).
In Bourdieu (1990) and related work, ren-
dered under the label “strong practice theory,”
the emphasis is on the strong coupling (e.g.,
ontological complicity) between nondeclara-
tive skills and cognitive structures at the per-
sonal level and the public contours of fields
and institutions at the public level (Lizardo
and Strand 2010). The “strong program” of
cultural analysis (e.g., Alexander 2003)
emphasizes the (obviously) strong coupling
between declarative discursive commitments
at the personal level and public cultural codes.
This strategy is also followed by most forms
of “culturalist” analysis in cognitive sociol-
ogy (Brekhus 2007). Eliasoph and Lichter-
man (2003) respond to various empirical
inadequacies in such strong programs by pro-
posing their own weak coupling account
between public culture and declarative dis-
course (a form of semiotic practice theory). In
their formulation, the semantics of public
codes may fail to match the declarative impli-
cations drawn by persons in context, because
this link is mediated via the (interactive)
deployment of a form of nondeclarative cul-
ture that they refer to as “group style.”
Sewell’s (2005) version of semiotic practice
theory, like Swidler’s, can be considered a
more ambiguous argument, as he offers a
contingency theory in which, depending on
circumstances, we may observe either strong
or weak coupling between nondeclarative
cultural practices and public semiotic struc-
tures.10 Finally, the normativist-functionalist
theory of action (Parsons 1951), against
which the original version of the toolkit argu-
ment was initially forged (Swidler 1986), is
characterized by the much maligned proposal
of a strong coupling (almost fusion) between
declarative commitments (e.g., values) and
nondeclarative culture (e.g., need disposi-
tions) at the personal level (Swidler 2001b).11
The fact that we can locate most schools or
proposals in contemporary cultural analysis
today within a space defined by such a decep-
tively simple set of distinctions speaks to the
face validity of the proposed classification. In
essence, the proposed set of distinctions
makes analytically clear what previous ana-
lysts have rendered in obtuse, incomplete,
and confusing ways. Of course, with parsi-
mony comes some level of analytic aggrega-
tion. Note that this organizing portrayal of
current strands of cultural analysis as revolv-
ing around three sets of relations is premised
on the simplifying assumption of a single
unitary analytic category referred to as “pub-
lic culture.” While this is sufficient for our
analytic purposes, it is important to point out
that it is insufficient for any compelling
attempt to apply the scheme to concrete
empirical cases, since most analysts (implic-
itly or explicitly) distinguish between differ-
ent facets of public culture (e.g., Eliasoph and
Lichterman 2003; Swidler 2001a). However,
it is also important to keep in mind that any
conceptual disaggregation of public culture
into more than one facet (as suggested by
Sewell [2005] or Patterson [2014]) would
increase the analytic burden to a considera-
tion of a larger set of relations between cul-
tural elements and runs the risk of introducing
unjustifiable levels of analytic complexity.
For instance, if an analyst were to distin-
guish between facets of public culture that
themselves happen to be objectifications of
personal culture in its declarative mode (e.g.,
textual materials, codified rules) and those
that come closer to objectifications of nonde-
clarative skills and competences (e.g., mate-
rial culture, artifacts, implicit rules), then the
analyst would be forced to consider six rela-
tions among cultural elements. Some rela-
tions cut across the public/personal divide
while remaining in the same mode (e.g., the
relation between declarative culture at the
personal level and the implicit component of
Lizardo 97
public culture and institutions), some require
a consideration of cross-mode relations
among elements at the same level (e.g.,
implicit and explicit facets of public culture;
as in Geertz 1973), and another set requires a
consideration of relations between elements
that cut across both location and mode bound-
aries (e.g., the relation between nondeclara-
tive competences at the personal level and the
explicit facet of institutions).
The Relationship between Declarative
and Nondeclarative Culture
Having clarified how extant approaches in
cultural analysis fit into the set of analytic
distinctions that I propose, in this section, I
provide a reconstruction of the theoretically
crucial (a) relation depicted in Figure 2. Most
cultural analysts have devoted sustained
attention to the relationship between personal
culture (in either its declarative or nonde-
clarative forms) and how it relates to public
culture (the (b) and (c) relations). However,
contemporary cultural theory continues to
suffer from a lack of clear theorizing of the
within-person relationship between declara-
tive and nondeclarative culture (Strauss and
Quinn 1997), with Vaisey’s (2009) dual pro-
cess proposal having done a lot to bring atten-
tion to this issue. The key problem here is that
Vaisey’s memorable formulation of this link-
age, built around the “warring systems” per-
spective proposed in Haidt’s (2012:46)
Platonic imagery of the struggle between the
nondeclarative “elephant” and the declarative
“rider,” may have led to more confusion than
enlightenment. The key analytic issue here is
the unwarranted presumption that the process
via which nondeclarative culture is put to use
is characterized by involuntary “hot” or
“emotive” cognition, whereas the process of
declarative cultural use is characterized by
“cold” cognition under voluntary control.
In what follows, I develop a model of the
relationship between declarative and nonde-
clarative culture that goes beyond the limita-
tions of the warring systems formulation and
separates issues of cultural acquisition from
issues of cultural process and cultural use. My
basic proposal is that rather than being the
result of a tug of war between cognitive and
emotive systems, weak coupling (dissocia-
tion) between declarative and nondeclarative
commitments at the personal level emerges as
a natural outcome of the dual enculturation
pathways detailed earlier. To make this insight
productive, I introduce a novel theoretical
vocabulary useful for understanding these
processes. In this way, my argument can be
read as a reformulated case for the weak
within-person coupling of declarative and
nondeclarative culture, in which both facets
of personal culture are conceived as equally
worthy of the labels “cultural” and “cogni-
tive” without implying any strong hiatus
between these two statuses. The wager is that
after having secured an understanding of the
origins and consequences of weak coupling
between the declarative and nondeclarative
dimensions of personal culture (relation (a) in
Figure 2), we will be in a better position to
theorize how both relate to public systems of
cultural symbols, codes, and institutions (rela-
tions (b) and (c)).
Correspondence, Redundancy,
and Dissociation
The correspondence principle. A mis-
leading premise in contemporary cultural
theory has been to presume there is a single
way in which persons encode knowledge in
long-term memory: namely, in quasi-linguistic
format.12 This linguistic fallacy is misleading
to the extent that it prompts analysts to elide
the nondeclarative/declarative distinction and
fail to consider their interrelation. It is also
methodologically harmful to the extent that it
fosters the practice of analyzing textual
responses, or even creative readings of non-
verbal cues provided by co-presence (e.g.,
Pugh 2013), as giving unproblematic access
to nondeclarative culture-in-use (Jerolmack
and Khan 2014).
I propose that we substitute the single-
encoding premise with the principle of corre-
spondence between the mode of exposure and
the mode of encoding, such that culture
becomes personal in a format that matches how
98 American Sociological Review 82(1)
it is encountered in the world without having to
be transduced into a common code (Ignatow
2007). This implies that cultural knowledge
encountered in explicit forms and internalized
via fast-binding pathways after a small number
of exposures will be encoded as declarative
culture, whereas cultural knowledge encoun-
tered in experiential, multimodal forms inter-
nalized as embodied skills and implicit
associations via slow-learning pathways will be
encoded as nondeclarative culture.
Redundant encoding and dissocia-
tion. The fact that encultured persons tend to
have access to cultural knowledge about the
same domain in declarative and nondeclarative
formats follows from the correspondence prin-
ciple. Rather than restricting themselves to
mapping cultural knowledge about a given
domain in single-purpose formats, persons
appear to follow the principle of redundant
encoding (Karmiloff-Smith 1995). This fol-
lows naturally from the existence of multiple
pathways to enculturation at the personal level,
resulting in distinct, or dissociable, modes of
familiarity with any given domain. Dissocia-
bility implies a weak coupling between the
different forms of personal culture.
The notions of redundant encoding and
dissociation are not obscure or mysterious. In
fact, most cultural analysts are at least implic-
itly familiar with the phenomenon of redun-
dant encoding and dissociation in the case of
skill acquisition (Wacquant 2004). The basic
observation is that novices rely on explicit
rules and strategies when they are beginning
to acquire a skill (a declarative form of cul-
tural knowledge), but they are able to dis-
pense with this form of representation once
the skill has become embodied and can be
deployed automatically (Dreyfus 2004). Of
primary importance is the observation that
rule-based declarative knowledge about the
skill does not disappear when the nondeclara-
tive competence is perfected. Instead, both
exist as redundant personal representations of
cultural knowledge in that domain, but only
one of them (the nondeclarative encoding) is
central for the production of skilled action. Of
course, once a person becomes an expert, she
may draw on the declarative representation of
the skill for purposes of teaching or serving as
a role model for a novice (Holland 1992). The
two forms are potentially dissociable, in the
sense that the declarative representation can
be lost, replaced, modified, or elaborated,
without necessarily interfering with the non-
representational competence.
The redundant nature of personal culture
carries important implications for how we
conceptualize the connection between culture
and action. As outlined earlier, different expe-
riential histories at the personal level result in
distinct modes of encoding of cultural knowl-
edge. The mode of encoding determines the
type of settings in which personal knowledge
will be activated. The context of activation
modulates the way that knowledge is
accessed, which in turn constrains how this
cultural knowledge may be used. In this way,
the mode of exposure has an indirect effect
(via encoding) on the way that cultural knowl-
edge is actually implicated in the structuring
of everyday action.
For instance, persons may have a very nar-
row exposure to a domain of experience
because this exposure is primarily textual or
linguistic, relying on fast-binding memory
mechanisms requiring only a small number of
exposures. This personal culture will thus be
encoded in explicit form mediated by public
symbols. This (largely semantic) knowledge
then becomes available to persons in a form
that matches the one in which it was origi-
nally presented (as declarative discourse) but
not in other forms (as skillful practice). Per-
sons usually evince semantic knowledge of a
given domain by the production of offline
declarations related to that domain, which can
be characterized as its form of expertise (Col-
lins and Evans 2008). Most importantly, this
is also how declarative culture becomes avail-
able for analysts when they elicit it in a
default setting that mirrors its conditions of
acquisition and use (Eliasoph and Lichterman
2003:743). The capacity to produce these
declarations does not imply that persons also
have the nondeclarative knowledge useful for
Lizardo 99
the production of online performances neces-
sary to navigate that same domain.
This implies that, depending on the exist-
ence of overlapping histories of familiarity
with a domain, knowledge may be encoded in
formats that allow for the retrieval and use of
declarative knowledge, or in ways that are
keyed to the elicitation of nondeclarative cul-
ture and thus resist this sort of redescription
into discursive form. More commonly, per-
sonal culture will be encoded in overlapping
formats. This is especially likely in institu-
tional domains within which individuals have
had sufficiently rich experiential history. These
distinct modalities of personal culture may be
layered by order of acquisition if the person is
exposed to distinct ways of encoding knowl-
edge about a given domain over time. That is,
the existence of a given form of encoding does
not determine whether some other form will
also be present or absent. Only the specific his-
tory of enculturation in a given domain deter-
mines the form of encoding of personal culture.
Persons may not only know more than they can
tell (Polanyi 1966); they may also be able to
tell more than they know how (Jerolmack and
Khan 2014; Swidler 2001a).
Implications
To summarize, a key substantive implication
of the theoretical proposal I outlined is that
the two main forms in which personal culture
presents itself to the analyst at the personal
level—culture as declarative know-that and
culture as nondeclarative know-how—are
partially (and in many cases completely) dis-
sociable. Persons can display declarative abil-
ities to produce knowledge about (public)
culture that they do not know how to use
(Collins and Evans 2008; Swidler 2001a), or
they may possess implicit cultural skills with
no publicly accessible declarative counterpart
(Bourdieu 1990; Polanyi 1966).
This does not imply that there is an
unbridgeable phenomenological or practical
hiatus between the two modalities of personal
culture. Instead, as cognitive scientist Annette
Karmiloff-Smith (1995) notes, nondeclara-
tive culture could be “representationally
redescribed” into declarative formats, and
social scientists can use methods that facili-
tate this redescription (McDonnell 2014).
However, this labor of redescription not only
requires motivation, inclination, effort, and
opportunity (all facilitated by external condi-
tions), it also entails a partial removal of the
features of nondeclarative culture that render
it close to action. In this sense, redescription
should not be mistaken for the one-to-one
translation of nondeclarative culture into
declarative forms, nor for a pristine mirroring
or mapping of one form of culture via the
other.
In this way, the mechanisms of redundancy
and structured dissociation at the personal
level open up two distinct (ideal-typical) ways
in which declarative and nondeclarative cul-
ture may relate to the world of public culture.
One possibility is that persons may behavio-
rally master, via the slow-learning pathway, a
set of nondeclarative cultured capacities keyed
to action that allows them to skillfully navi-
gate, reproduce, and even modify, via the
same acquired patterns, objectified cultural
realms (relation (c) in Figure 1). However,
when there is routine access and use of this
nondeclarative cultural knowledge, individu-
als may not possess the skills, motivation, or
habitual inclination to produce declarative
(meta) knowledge about this mastery. Here we
find a substantial store of nondeclarative cul-
ture without the accompanying declarative
knowledge about it; cultural know-how is not
available for redescription as explicit verbal
statements and which does not relate to the
world of public culture via the usual referen-
tial relations. This is culture that persons know
how to use, but which lacks reflective phe-
nomenological transparency (Heiskala 2011);
that is, persons are unable to report that they
know how to use this culture (a fact that might
be obvious to an outside observer). This type
of non-verbalizable culture may come to
acquire objective phenomenological validity
as simply “the way that things are.” Geertz
(1975) and Swidler refer to this as “common
sense,” and Bourdieu (1990) calls it “doxa”:
nondeclarative knowledge so taken for granted
that it never rises to conscious awareness, and
100 American Sociological Review 82(1)
when it does, it is in the form of (practically
useless and generally self-contradictory) tau-
tologies or pithy (seemingly self-evident) ver-
bal formulae.
We can also envision a different (and ana-
lytically crucial) relationship between public
and personal culture: the case in which per-
sons are able to produce declarative “knowl-
edge that” without a corresponding set of
nondeclarative capacities allowing them to
produce skillful performances in context
(Collins and Evans 2008). Because of experi-
ential and ontogenetic limits on the develop-
ment of nondeclarative culture (e.g., the
repeated exposure constraint), this state of
affairs is in fact the norm when it comes to the
majority of personal knowledge about public
culture (relation (b) in Figure 1). Here, we
encounter a situation in which culture that is
external to persons, and which persons may
be quite capable of reporting knowing about,
is not really implicated in their everyday
activities, exhibiting what an outside observer
may note as a loose coupling in relation to
action (Swidler 2001a). Persons may have
developed the declarative capacity to produce
talk about this culture and to orient them-
selves to the objective existence of this cul-
ture (e.g., they know that it exists, they orient
their strategies of action around this knowl-
edge, and they even might know that other
persons can use this culture proficiently), but
this knowledge is not stored or encoded for
themselves as “how” knowledge.
The payoff of theorizing the mechanisms
governing the relationship between different
forms of culture at the personal level becomes
evident once we consider the possibility that
whether we find strong or weak coupling
between these elements may depend on how
both interface with public culture. For
instance, Harding (2007) shows that the exist-
ence of a multiplicity of possibly conflicting
behavioral codes at the level of public culture
facilitates dissociation at the personal level
between declarative commitments and nonde-
clarative cultural practices. This is an instance
in which dissociation emerges as a byproduct
of heterogeneity at the level of public culture.
If semiotic practice theorists are right, and
such heterogeneity, contestation, and multi-
plicity at the level of semiotic codes is the
rule rather than the exception (Sewell 2005),
then weak coupling at the personal level is
overdetermined both by routine dynamics of
cultural acquisition and by vicissitudes of
linkage across the personal/public interface
under high variability regimes.
Finally, it is a basic premise of contempo-
rary cultural theory to deny that culture can be
systematic at the personal level (Swidler
2001a). While this may be an eminently rea-
sonable proposal (DiMaggio 1997), analysts
seldom propose a principled account for why
this is the modal case. The theory of corre-
spondence between exposure and encoding
does this in a principled way. Rather than
being organized into corresponding within-
person systems whereby the presence of one
modality of personal culture implies the pres-
ence of another modality, personal culture is
linked to experience and has no inherent sys-
tematic ordering, although the environment
may be organized (e.g., via public institution-
alization processes) to elicit such ordering
(Martin 2010). Talk of institutional domains
(e.g., art, politics, religion) as “cultural sys-
tems” (e.g., Geertz 1973) is misleading to the
extent that the systematic nature of a cultural
domain is seen as inherent in the nature of
public symbols as such and separated from
the relevant experiential contexts and from a
concrete history of acquisition. Accordingly,
a systematic experiential history may produce
systematic traces at the personal level, but an
unsystematic, haphazard one will not lead to
such traces.
Shedding Light on
Substantive Issues
Given the relatively abstract nature of the
foregoing discussion, in what follows I pro-
vide a concrete exemplification of the ana-
lytic gains that can come from deploying the
theoretical vocabulary developed here to
make sense of some outstanding empirical
and substantive problems in the fields of
Lizardo 101
racial stratification and education, and culture
and inequality studies. These are subfields
that borrow cultural theory to shed light on
their own empirical problems (Carter 2005;
Lamont and Small 2008; Lareau 2011; Liu
and Xie 2016; Skrentny 2008; Small, Hard-
ing, and Lamont 2010). We will see that vari-
ous explanatory puzzles emerge here due to
borrowing precisely the sort of cultural theory
that deploys one-size-fits-all conceptions of
cultural acquisition and use. These puzzles
dissolve, and substantive insight is achieved,
once we consistently apply the distinctions
formulated and theorized in the preceding
sections.
Ethnoracial Inequality in Educational
Outcomes
The achievement-aspiration “paradox.”
Attempts to incorporate culture into our under-
standing of ethnoracial inequality in educa-
tional outcomes in the United States have
suffered analytically due to a penchant to use
the term “culture” almost exclusively to refer
to declarative discourses, relegating (with
some notable exceptions) nondeclarative com-
petences to the status of an extra-cultural fac-
tor. This is in spite of the fact that these carry
the bulk of the explanatory weight at the end
of the day (e.g., Ainsworth-Darnell and
Downey 1998; Harris and Robinson 2007;
Hsin and Xie 2014). This has led to the prolif-
eration of explanatory “paradoxes” (Downey
2008; Farkas, Lleras, and Maczuga 2002; Kao
and Thompson 2003), rising skepticism that
culture “matters” for understanding large-
scale group differences in educational out-
comes (Harris 2006; Tyson, Darity, and
Castellino 2005), and selective usages of “cul-
tural” explanations for an arbitrary range of
cases (Hsin and Xie 2014; Liu and Xie 2016;
Zhou and Lee 2014). In spite of this, a consid-
eration of the vicissitudes of cultural explana-
tion in the educational stratification literature
holds several important lessons that all cul-
tural analysts would be wise to heed.
The basic empirical mystery has now
acquired the status of a canonical finding in
the educational stratification literature: in
spite of having comparable aspirations and
subjective assessments of their academic
competence, substantial gaps exist in achieve-
ment and the likelihood of making educa-
tional transitions for black and Hispanic
youths in comparison to white youths in the
United States. Conversely, in spite of having
relatively modest aspirations and self-assessments
of competence, Asian American youth (on
average) outperform white youth (Kao 2000;
Kao and Tienda 1998).
The gap between declarative commitments
and on-the-ground performance for minority
youth is puzzling on two theoretical fronts.
First, the classic line of research foundational
for the “Wisconsin model” of educational
attainment developed during the 1960s and
1970s found aspirations to be a consistent
predictor of future behavioral outcomes. This
linkage is now so tenuous that education
researchers today doubt whether survey items
tapping aspirations are capable of capturing
the relevant behavioral factors in the contem-
porary context (Kao and Thompson 2003).
Second, the line of anthropological work on
“oppositional culture” elaborated by Ogbu
and collaborators from the late 1970s to the
late 1990s (Fordham and Ogbu 1986; Ogbu
1978, 1987; Ogbu and Simons 1998) seemed
to propose a straightforward mechanism link-
ing group-based differences in outcomes to
group-based differences in (mostly declara-
tive) cultural commitments.
“Oppositional culture” theory. Accord-
ing to the oppositional culture account, mem-
bers of certain ethnoracial minorities (e.g.,
historically enslaved “involuntary migrants”),
would come to develop a set of adaptive cul-
tural patterns that alienate them from the
achievement-oriented values of the dominant
(in the case of the United States) white cul-
ture. The most important elements of this
cultural pattern consist of skepticism and
cynicism toward educational institutions, and
adaptive expectations and aspirations for suc-
cess that fall below those of the more advan-
taged majority group (Ogbu 2003). Black
102 American Sociological Review 82(1)
youth in the United States, according to this
account, do not link achievement-
oriented behaviors with success in school and
beyond, as they see the game rigged against
them regardless of the effort they put in.
Alienated from dominant institutions, black
youth develop a set of counter-normative atti-
tudes that end up depressing their academic
performance in relation to their white coun-
terparts. To make matters worse, black youth
who do take up the achievement-oriented
values and aspirations of the white majority
culture are predicted to be brought back in
line via a peer-enforced social control mecha-
nism linking these behaviors with lack of
loyalty to the ethnoracial in-group. In other
words, high-achieving minorities have the
“burden of acting white.”
Although initially developed using intui-
tive interpretations of ethnographic data
(Fordham and Ogbu 1986), oppositional cul-
ture theory makes explicit predictions regard-
ing the link between declarative commitments,
public culture, and action. In fact, almost all
of the cultural mechanisms postulated in the
oppositional culture account rely on declara-
tive cultural elements, such as beliefs, atti-
tudes, and explicitly formulated folk theories
as to the functioning and linkage of dominant
institutions (Harris 2006). In this account,
“sayings,” in the form of explicit declarations
of oppositional culture values and beliefs,
inexorably lead to “doings,” in the form of
counter-productive academic behaviors.
Researchers have tried to determine
whether the culture-behavior-outcome links
postulated in the oppositional culture account
can be verified using large-scale, population-
level data (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey
1998; Carter 2005; Tyson et al. 2005). This
work not only generally fails to verify the
empirical linkage between declarative culture
and on-the-ground outcomes laid out by oppo-
sitional culture theorists (e.g., Harris 2006),
but it has instead uncovered a paradox: black
youth seem to have equal or even higher com-
mitments to pro-school goals, and they seem
to make a stronger connection between suc-
cess in school and status attainment in adult-
hood than do white students. In addition, no
consistent evidence can be found that high-
performing black students face a “burden of
acting white” by being ostracized, teased, or
dismissed by their same-race peers (Ainsworth-
Darnell and Downey 1998; Downey 2008;
Tyson et al. 2005).
“Asian values” theory. Another conse-
quence of lack of theorizing the independent
roles of declarative, nondeclarative, and pub-
lic cultural elements (and their relations) is
that in addition to paradox, we may also end
up with a situation in which cultural explana-
tions emphasizing the link between declara-
tive commitments, action, and performance
are deployed in blatantly selective ways. At
the same time that cultural models emphasiz-
ing declarative elements are increasingly
shunned for their failure to shed light on
white/black (and sometimes white/Hispanic)
differences in school performance, they are
all the rage in studies dealing with the rela-
tively higher performance of Asian American
students in relation to white students (e.g.,
Liu and Xie 2016).13
Accordingly, we find a growing cottage
industry of studies purporting to explain the
superior performance of Asian students by
pointing to a whole slew of cultural factors.
According to this line of work, Asians outper-
form whites because Asian students “prior-
itize self-reliance and achievement,” or are
more likely to “believe in education,” or are
more liable to feel “a greater obligation to
their immigrant parents,” or are more likely to
report belief “in the value of education for
future socioeconomic mobility,” “have stricter
work ethics,” and so on (Kao and Thompson
2003:433; see also Hsin and Xie 2014). An
arbitrary grab bag of differences at the level
of declarative culture (linked by purely
semantic relations) is put back on the explan-
atory pedestal, even when the same type of
culture-mediated mechanism is rejected when
it comes to accounting for the underper-
formance of African American and Hispanic
students. This is clearly not theoretically
defensible, but it is the inevitable conse-
quence of the incoherent way in which cul-
ture is conceptualized in this field.
Lizardo 103
However, as with oppositional culture the-
ory, the “cultural explanations” trotted out to
attempt to account for the Asian/white perfor-
mance gap do not fare well when confronted
with attempts at systematic empirical evalua-
tion. For instance, one proposal is that Asian
students outdo white students because of
strong cultural beliefs that link effort and
achievement, beliefs rooted in a cultural tradi-
tion of Confucianism that emphasizes people’s
perfectibility via education and self-cultivation
(Jiménez and Horowitz 2013). This explana-
tion, however, runs against the recalcitrant fact
that Asian students outperform white students
whether they trace their ethnic ancestry to geo-
graphic regions plausibly construed as charac-
terized by a Confucian heritage (East and
Southeast Asians) or not (South Asians and
Filipinos) (Hsin and Xie 2014).
A Reformulation
Beyond paradox. The empirical difficulties
encountered by cultural explanations of ethno-
racial inequalities in school performance,
rather than resulting in head-scratching para-
dox, contain important lessons for cultural
analysis. In the case of the achievement-aspira-
tion paradox among minority youth, it is clear
that if the analyst departs from a (biased)
conception of personal culture as exclusively
composed of declarative attitudes and aspira-
tions, then said analyst would have a strong
case for concluding that culture does not mat-
ter (Tyson et al. 2005). This further implies
that something that is not culture—namely,
structure (Hays 1994)—should carry the bulk
of the explanatory weight. In fact, this is pre-
cisely the conclusion reached by some post-
functionalist critical and conflict theorists in
education research. This situation resembles,
for similar analytic reasons, that faced by
scholars who would like to bring a more theo-
retically robust understanding of cultural pro-
cesses into the study of poverty (e.g., Lamont
and Small 2008).
However, this conclusion emerges not
from the superior empirical adequacy of
structural models, but from the shortsighted
understanding of culture deployed by the ana-
lyst. In the particular case of oppositional
culture and Asian values theories, rather than
being instances of well-conceptualized
approaches that just had the hard-luck to run
against the facts, their failure has to do with
their analytic weakness as cultural theories.
Essentially, if you live exclusively by the
declarative sword then you die by the declara-
tive sword. Insofar as action (and outcomes)
is tied to cultured competences, and these
competences are generally nondeclarative,
then attempting to explain performance dif-
ferences by linking them to differences in
declarative commitments is like trying to get
water from a rock. The very same lack of
variance (oppositional, Confucian, or other-
wise) in declarative commitments commen-
surate with the performance differences
alluded to earlier will doom this sort of cul-
tural explanation from the start.
Overcoming the strong coupling bias.
The approach proposed here can help disci-
pline researchers against the bias of expecting
strong coupling between personal and public
culture or between either of these and differ-
ent facets of public culture, when the likely
empirical pattern is a more complex tapestry
of weak and strong coupling across different
cultural elements (to be established in each
case). For instance, rather than strong cou-
pling between declarative and nondeclarative
culture, and between both of these and public
cultural codes, researchers attempting to test
Ogbu’s explanation for achievement gaps
among minority youth found a pattern of
structured dissociation between declarative
commitments and nondeclarative compe-
tences—and between the first of these ele-
ments and achievement outcomes on the
ground (Farkas et al. 2002).
In this way, what appears paradoxical in
standard accounts can be made sense of by
consistently distinguishing between cultural
elements and specifying their interrelations.
From this perspective, the achievement-
aspiration paradox emerges as the natural
result of institutionalization of achievement
104 American Sociological Review 82(1)
discourse at the level of public codes; this
public/personal coupling (relation (b) in Fig-
ure 2) is manifest as a homogenizing discur-
sive constraint (resulting in a pattern of no
variance) and chronic accessibility and use of
institutionalized vocabularies of motive con-
stitutive of the American cultural code of
achievement and success (Downey 2008;
Harris 2006). Because nondeclarative compe-
tences relevant for school success have an
independent causal etiology, the discursive
homogenization process has the potential to
generate, in some cases, a structured dissocia-
tion evident as a contrast between the chronic
accessibility, and thus easy elicitation, of
declarative commitments to success and hard
work and the lack of availability of the forms
of nondeclarative culture relevant for meeting
the expectations of schooling institutions
(relation (c) in Figure 2).
Better specification of linkages
between cultural elements. Establishing
the distinct causal etiologies of both declara-
tive discourses and nondeclarative compe-
tences and their links to public culture can
help researchers provide more convincing
and empirically adequate accounts of how
culture is implicated in important substantive
outcomes. This will also allow analysts to
theorize which absent linkages are actually
surprising (or paradoxical), which ones we
should expect as a matter of course, and
which ones should be regularly absent. Fur-
thermore, due to the fact that, within persons,
different facets of personal culture can arise
via independent enculturation pathways, link-
ages of different cultural elements (e.g., of
declarative attitudes and nondeclarative dis-
positions) should not be taken as given;
instead, they should always have the status of
empirical hypotheses. In this respect,
researchers should be wary of connecting
global characterizations of personal culture
(e.g., summary typologies of attitudinal, dis-
positional, or behavioral clusters, such as
“oppositional,” “street,” and “decent”), with
aspects of public culture and institutions.
Instead, each linkage between a given ele-
ment of personal culture and a corresponding
facet of public culture should be justified
independently.
For instance, the fact that we can observe
seemingly oppositional behaviors decoupled
from performance (e.g., high academic per-
formers who rebel against the culture of
schools) should not be surprising (Carter
2005): oppositional behaviors and academic
performance are outcomes that pertain to two
different ways in which personal culture may
interface with the public culture of schools.
Accordingly, it is quite possible (and in fact to
be expected) for persons to grind against
some aspects of an institution while matching
others. For instance, when the institutional-
ized culture of schools is hostile to students’
lifestyle-based nondeclarative competences
(e.g., those related to speech, dress, cultural
tastes, and interactive styles), both white
working-class (Lareau 2011) and minority
youth of middle- and working-class prove-
nance (Carter 2005) display oppositional and
nonconformist behaviors and attitudes. Yet
this oppositional pattern may be empirically
independent of performance as long as the
relevant nondeclarative academic skills are
available to the same youth (Harris and Rob-
inson 2007).
In the same way, and despite its intuitive
appeal, the hypothesis that highly institution-
alized commitments to achievement and suc-
cess are strongly coupled (in an oppositional
relationship) to personal declarations of eth-
noracial solidarity among black and Hispanic
youth is false (Carter 2005). Contra Ogbu,
there is no analytic reason to expect this oppo-
sitional link, since these deal with two very
distinct forms of the declarative/public rela-
tion. One is tied to chronically accessible
declarations of ethnoracial pride typical of
black and other racialized ethnic minorities in
the United States; the other is tied to equally
long-standing and universal (across ethnora-
cial groups) commitments to American ideals
of success and achievement. Because these
emerge as distinct forms of strong coupling
(and thus declarative homogenization) at the
interface of declarative commitments and
institutionalized public codes (Swidler 2001a),
there is no theoretically defensible reason to
Lizardo 105
expect that they should be negatively corre-
lated within persons. Nor is there good reason
to expect that declarative commitments to
ethnoracial solidarity should have any relation
(positive or negative) to nondeclarative prac-
tices productive of achievement and success
in school (Carter 2005).
Accordingly, the issue is not that disadvan-
taged youth possess adaptively rational but
globally deviant forms of cultural knowledge
as to what it takes to be successful, or that they
do not share the same attainment goals and
values as their more advantaged peers. Instead,
the key issue has to do with the mode of
encoding of the kind of cultural knowledge
that is linked to outcomes. For advantaged
youth, cultural knowledge required for school
success is redundantly encoded in both declar-
ative and (most crucially) nondeclarative for-
mats. For disadvantaged youth, in contrast, the
link between school completion and the attain-
ment of future goals is mainly encoded in
semantic memory as “know that” knowledge,
easily acquired via a small number of expo-
sures and just as easily elicited in the inter-
view situation (see Carter 2005). Because
acquisition of nondeclarative knowledge must
go through the multiple exposure bottleneck,
it is more demanding in terms of time and
parental resources and thus more tightly linked
to patterns of material advantage and disad-
vantage (Lareau 2011; Weininger, Lareau, and
Conley 2015; Zhou and Lee 2014).
From these considerations, we can derive
the often-noted implication that, when it
comes to situations that require nondeclara-
tive know-how, especially in the context of
navigating the established routines of educa-
tional institutions, skill-based background
differences between and within groups should
emerge with a vengeance (Carter 2005; Lar-
eau 2011). For disadvantaged minorities, this
process is sufficient to generate the often-
noted within-person dissociation between
declarative “belief” in education and practical
“achievement” (Carter 2005:24). In other
cases, some forms of declarative opposition
to dominant values may emerge due to a
structured mismatch between existing
nondeclarative competences and the public
demands of the institution. This implies that
nondeclarative culture may, in some impor-
tant cases, have an indirect effect on declara-
tive (non)commitments when it repeatedly
fails to fit existing public codes, with declara-
tive non-commitment emerging as a result of
this failure to fit (Harris and Robinson 2007;
Stephens, Markus, and Phillips 2014).14
Overcoming the declarative culture
bias. The approach proposed here can also
help discipline researchers against the perva-
sive bias of reserving the (generic) term “cul-
ture” (at either the individual or group level)
only for declarative commitments, while
ignoring that nondeclarative competences,
skills, habits, and nonverbal styles are also
deserving of the label, and in some settings
may be the more relevant cultural mechanism
to explain a given outcome. In race and edu-
cation research, the causal relevance of non-
declarative culture applies to cases of
under- and over-performance in relation to the
(empirically arbitrary) white norm (Ainsworth-
Darnell and Downey 1998; Harris and Robin-
son 2007; Hsin and Xie 2014).
For instance, Hsin and Xie (2014) find that
a series of nondeclarative cultured compe-
tences—glossed under the antiseptic terms
“noncognitive skills,” “self-control,” and
“motivation”—are the primary mechanisms
accounting for the academic advantage over
white students for all student groups sub-
sumed under the Asian label regardless of
ethno-geographic origin (e.g., East Asian,
South Asian, Filipino). In the same way, oppo-
sitional culture researchers find that rather
than devaluation and self-destructive opposi-
tion on the part of minority youth in relation to
white youth, what exists is a nondeclarative
enculturation gap, especially when it comes to
development of the “cultural skills, habits, and
styles that are rewarded by teachers” (Downey
2008:299). Statistically adjusting for differ-
ences in previously accumulated (middle
school) academic skills accounts for the bulk
of the differences in schooling performance
between black and white high-schoolers, even
106 American Sociological Review 82(1)
after adjusting for what have been referred to
as oppositional behaviors (Harris and Robin-
son 2007). These factors, however, are usually
not classified as cultural in the current litera-
ture, which reserves this label for the usual
triad of aspirations, attitudes, and beliefs
allegedly characteristic of cultural groups (Liu
and Xie 2016).15
Beyond groupism. Finally, the approach
outlined here has the advantage of allowing
the analyst to move beyond the “groupism”
sometimes afflicting cultural analysis in cul-
ture and stratification research (Brubaker
2002; Zhou and Lee 2014). This tendency is
sometimes magnified by the declarative bias
and its attendant focus on the discursive com-
mitments allegedly distinctive of minority
groups composed of taxonomic (usually eth-
noracial) categories (Liu and Xie 2016; Ogbu
2003). When we hone in on the right set of
cultural elements, we are better able to theo-
rize within- and between-group differences in
orientations and performance (Lareau 2011;
Hsin and Xie 2014).
The example of the rocky careers of oppo-
sitional culture and Asian values theories
should not only make analysts wary of focus-
ing on the wrong kind of cultural elements,
but it should also sensitize us to always try to
provide explanatory stories featuring similar
kinds of cultural processes to explain within
and between “group gap” outcomes regard-
less of the direction (i.e., positive or negative)
of such outcomes. Maintaining a consistent
distinction between declarative and nonde-
clarative culture, on the other hand, allows us
to theorize both disadvantage and advantage
(Carter 2005; Hsin and Xie 2014) by pointing
to a unified set of cultural processes and
mechanisms.
Autonomy, Obedience, and Class
Cultures
Traditionally, cultural analysts interested in
the origins of class cultures followed Weber
in thinking that the primary empirical goal
was one of documenting the existence of
distinct, class-differentiated “images of the
world.” These images were thought to be
accessible via the declarative reports pro-
vided by informants in response to survey
items or interview questions. Secondarily,
analysts aimed to provide process-based
explanations of the genesis of these class-
based orientations in the routine work and
domestic experiences of persons in class-
differentiated societies. Finally, scholars pre-
sumed that these orientations were passed
down intergenerationally from parents to
children, thus contributing to a status repro-
duction process (Kohn 1977). More recently,
incorporation of theories of practice into our
understanding of the genesis of class cultures
has enriched this picture by partially sensitiz-
ing analysts to the role of nondeclarative
pathways of enculturation in the creation of
structured linkages between class and life
chances (Lareau 2011).
However, as with the literature on race-
based educational inequalities considered ear-
lier, conceptual confusion haunts the more
recent incorporation of habit and practice
theories into the study of the role of cultural
processes in class-based inequality. This
ambiguity leads to the emergence of empiri-
cal patterns that analysts are forced to con-
ceptualize as paradoxical, absent a more
precise formulation. The problem comes
down once again to the deployment of an
impoverished theoretical understanding inca-
pable of distinguishing different modes of
internalization of personal culture, as well as
the relative absence of an explicit theory of
enculturation capable of dealing coherently
with multiple pathways of cultural acquisition
and related dissociation phenomena.
When it comes to theorizing the genesis
and dynamics of class cultures, an emphasis
on structured dissociation and dual encultura-
tion pathways sensitizes the analyst against
the default expectation that there should be
strong couplings between sayings and doings
(of either parents or children) within classes.
Instead, this approach naturally predicts that
structured disjunctures should exist between
the public semantics of the declarative
Lizardo 107
culture(s) espoused and transmitted in explicit
form in class-differentiated settings (e.g.,
self-direction versus conformity; cosmopoli-
tanism and meritocracy) and the pragmatic
goals of the nondeclarative practices (e.g.,
skillful adaptation to institutionalized adult
authority; performance of ease and natural-
ness in status attainment) transmitted by both
parents and peers via nondeclarative path-
ways. This is especially the case when it
comes to the forms of cultural competence
that prepare newcomers to navigate dominant
institutions.
Weininger and Lareau (2009) set out to
test Kohn’s (1977) proposal that middle-class
parents emphasize a (declarative) orientation
toward autonomy, self-direction, and freedom
from control in relation to established author-
ities and conventions, whereas working-class
parents emphasize an orientation toward con-
formity, obedience, and adaptation to extant
rule structures. Not surprisingly, their
research, triangulating between interview-
based data useful for tapping into explicit
declarations and observational data attuned to
nondeclarative practices, uncovers a paradox:
the Kohn prediction seems to obtain only
when it comes to adult self-reports of parent-
ing style and socialization goals or in terms of
the declarative utterances verbalized explic-
itly by parents in their interactions with chil-
dren. In these cases, middle-class parents did
seem to emphasize a language of autonomy
and independence (e.g., negotiation with chil-
dren over rules, emphasizing choice behav-
ior) and working-class parents did seem to
emphasize a discourse of obedience (e.g.,
issuing directives without qualification, justi-
fying decisions by reference to positional
authority), especially when it came to inter-
generational interactions within households.
However, when it came to enculturation
processes linking children to institutional
realms outside the household, middle-class
parents spent countless hours attempting to
shape the behavioral dispositions of their chil-
dren in a direction of conformity and adapta-
tion to institutional environments populated
by adults in authority, and they maximized the
amount of leisure time spent in structured
(rule-governed) activities under tight adult
supervision and control (Weininger and Lar-
eau 2009). This type of enculturation occurred
via both explicitly symbolized interaction
(e.g., the issuing of verbal directives) and,
most significantly, via the enmeshing of chil-
dren in organizational structures endowed
with nondeclarative routines centered on the
inculcation of habits attuned to the spatial and
temporal rules of the institution, sometimes
involving the direct manipulation of the body,
a clear index of nondeclarative enculturation
(Cohen and Leung 2009). When it came to
children’s leisure, working-class parents, on
the other hand, followed a practical rule of
autonomy, in which children spent the major-
ity of their time in unstructured self- or peer-
directed activities with very little in the way of
intergenerational interaction. Children from
working-class families had little to no expo-
sure to practical enculturation dedicated to
managing or navigating institutional environ-
ments controlled by adults in authority posi-
tions outside the household.
In many ways, working-class children
experience more practical and bodily auton-
omy from adult demands than do their more
discursively self-directed middle-class coun-
terparts. For Weininger and Lareau (2009:
693), this finding implies that class-based
patterns of enculturation involve “paradoxical
pathways” not considered in the Kohn tradi-
tion. In our terms, however, this state of
affairs is not paradoxical, because it is quite
possible to enculture individuals in seemingly
contradictory ways as long as this is done via
distinct enculturation channels (e.g., primar-
ily declarative versus nondeclarative). This
type of paradox (or structured dissociation in
our terms) is relevant for stratification out-
comes, because it helps account for the subse-
quent advantage that middle-class children
have in navigating and succeeding in middle-
class institutions, in which they are expected
to negotiate their way through an environ-
ment populated by authority figures in charge
of dispensing material and symbolic rewards
(Lareau 2011).
108 American Sociological Review 82(1)
Omnivorousness, Ease, and the
Culture of Privilege
A paradox besetting the sociological study of
elite cultures is the rise of what Ollivier
(2008) once provocatively referred to as
“conspicuous openness to diversity” and what
most analysts, following Peterson and Kern
(1996), refer to as “omnivorousness.” This is
the tendency, on the part of contemporary
cultural elites, to claim a multicultural open-
ness to a wide variety of forms of aesthetic
experience and engagement with a seemingly
broad cross-section of types of cultural goods.
Across now countless studies using survey
and interview methods to capture the stated
preferences and associated vocabularies of
motive of elites, researchers find that high-
status culture today seems to be characterized
by broad-ranging preferences and stated
refusals to express dislikes or rejections of
specific genres, forms, or objects across a
wide range of aesthetic domains (Lizardo and
Skiles 2012). The general phenomenon of
omnivorousness is thus now a seemingly
intractable issue for any theoretical account
that conceives of elites’ nondeclarative cul-
ture as having to follow in lockstep with their
stated declarative discourses, preferences,
and motivations.
In contrast to this story, cultural analysts
have observed that in spite of the discursive
homogenization around the institutional lan-
guage of multiculturalism, tolerance, respect
for diversity, and non-comparability across
forms of participation, elites continue to
engage aesthetic objects in ways that seem
both class-coded and linked to class-specific
experiences (Khan 2011). When suitably
prodded, the same elites betray an implicit
preference for complexity, formal innovation,
and a purposive authorial intention in cultural
works, even when engaging objects and expe-
riences where these are not to be expected
(Holt 1998). In this case, while the declara-
tive culture of contemporary elites is defi-
nitely attuned to highly institutionalized
discourses regarding the value of inclusion,
cross-cultural understanding, and the inherent
value of all forms of cultural expression, they
continue to engage ever-expanding sets of
cultural objects in inherently class-marked
ways.
These forms of class-differentiated cultural
engagement are able to survive in spite of
elites lacking a coherent declarative discourse
marking them, or even themselves as a group,
as particularly distinct (Khan 2011). Contem-
porary elites thus express, in the aesthetic
domain, the same sort of structured dissocia-
tion between declarative and nondeclarative
culture that Vaisey (2009) sees as characteriz-
ing the moral domain of contemporary youth.
In spite of this hiatus between discourse and
competence, there has clearly been a conser-
vation of nondeclarative habits of cultural
engagement, such that the ways in which
elites engage cultural goods is an extension of
aestheticist practices first developed in the
traditional fine arts (Lizardo and Skiles 2012).
This implies that class-linked forms of
aesthetic appreciation and judgment continue
to be reliably fostered and transmitted in elite
households, and concomitantly predicted by
the usual markers of privilege and advantage,
without explicit exclusionary reference to
other forms of engagement or without the
concomitant transmission of an elaborate
declarative ideology privileging these forms
of engagement as superior. As with the case
of the dual transmission of paradoxical class
cultures (Weininger and Lareau 2009), in
which the semantics of explicit declarations
do not necessarily match the pragmatic goals
of nondeclarative culture, this is a plausible
equilibrium. This also implies that the all too
common analytic equation of elite declarative
discourses as standing for the culture of elites
would result in the unwarranted conclusion
that class cultures do not make a difference
for lifestyle practices (Atkinson 2011). The
solution to this impasse is that elite culture
(like other forms of culture imputed to taxo-
nomic groups) is an amalgam of both declara-
tive discourses and nondeclarative practices,
which are more likely to display strong dis-
sociations between semantics and pragmatics
than to exhibit strong coherence and unity.
Lizardo 109
This last claim is supported in studies of
the contemporary “culture of privilege”
among elites in the United States (Khan 2011;
Khan and Jerolmack 2013). This work has the
advantage of getting a closer look at cultural
transmission and encoding processes and thus
at the experiential origins of weak couplings
between declarative and nondeclarative cul-
tural elements. This research reveals system-
atic links between the mode of encoding of
cultural knowledge and subsequent dynamics
of cultural use, as well as weak couplings
between the different cultural elements so
internalized. Not surprisingly, these take the
form of structured dissociations between
declarative “sayings” and nondeclarative
“doings” and are produced by the discursive
homogenization of declarative commitment
mechanisms at the personal/public interface,
which we observed in the case of oppositional
culture theory.
The most salient manifestation of this phe-
nomenon, and the one Khan (2011) sees as
constitutive of modern forms of privilege, is
that instanced in the declarative endorsement
of highly institutionalized public codes pro-
moting openness, cosmopolitanism, and meri-
tocracy, along with pervasive rhetorics
connecting “earned rewards” with “hard
work.” This declarative/public coupling is
accompanied by an unstated, socializing
“group style” that marginalizes people who
actually attempt to practice what they preach,
and which decouples this declarative discourse
from practice (Khan and Jerolmack 2013). In
this case, the nondeclarative oppositional cul-
ture (in relation to institutionalized codes) of
ease and naturalness enforced by elite peers
happens to be the actual culture of privilege
that garners social rewards in this context. At
the level of public culture, the meritocratic
code produces homogenization of declarative
commitments and a simultaneous decoupling
between declarations and practices that actu-
ally privilege those most adept at demonstrat-
ing effortless ease rather than nose-to-grindstone
effort (Khan and Jerolmack 2013).
Because ease is a kind of bodily profi-
ciency (Cohen and Leung 2009), it must be
acquired, following the correspondence prin-
ciple, via a mode of exposure bound to pro-
duce the right sort of encoding (know-how)
rather than as declarative culture. This pro-
duces structured heterogeneity among privi-
leged youth keyed to an implicit ranking as to
who can display the nondeclaratively privi-
leged forms of ease with the most proficiency.
People who do this, however, are precisely
those who become cultural omnivores capa-
ble of engaging all forms of experience, but
especially potentially aesthetic experience,
with aplomb, assurance, and a sense that the
world is unproblematically open to them
(Khan 2011).
Discussion and
Concluding Remarks
Roughly eight years ago, in the pages of this
journal, Gross (2009:374) noted that:
The growth of cultural sociology in recent
years owes little to a pragmatist theory of
action or mechanisms, but the theory I pro-
pose implies a substantially broadened dis-
ciplinary role for cultural sociology, in part
because it suggests that, where meanings
vary among actors, cultural interpretation
may generate more explanatory specifica-
tions of mechanisms.
This article began by noting, like Gross, the
growing discipline-wide relevance of cultural
analysis; however, I argued that without the
requisite analytic specification of its central
concept, cultural analysis will not be able to
live up to its discipline-unifying potential, nor
will it be capable of doing the work of speci-
fying the generative mechanisms responsible
for the phenomena of interest to social scien-
tists at large. This analytic specification must
be tied to a flexible, empirically grounded
account of the way persons acquire culture in
the first place. Such a theory of enculturation
would provide a way to make the necessary
distinctions while allowing the analyst to
make sense of the relevant empirical
phenomena.
110 American Sociological Review 82(1)
As we have seen, without sound theoreti-
cal footing, this can very quickly become a
daunting task. As a rule, analysts face a rather
complex landscape of empirical facts that can
be made sense of only by linking them to a
coherent analytic account of the nature and
dynamics of the enculturation process. Absent
such a framework, we have seen various
examples of how failure to make the distinc-
tion between declarative and nondeclarative
forms of cultural knowledge can lead to para-
doxes, puzzles, and the misclassification of
relevant cultural processes as non-cultural.
These conundrums emerge not because of a
dearth of empirical work or available data,
but due to the failure to apply the most effec-
tive theoretical framework to the interpreta-
tion of these data.
The analytic elaboration that I proposed is
meant as a necessary first step in achieving
these goals. The approach I laid out, while not
necessarily tied to any particular action the-
ory, is clearly influenced by formulations
belonging to the broad family of “habit/prac-
tice theories” (e.g., pragmatism or Bourdieu-
inspired approaches). These forerunners stand
out for having emphasized the importance of
habitual, nondeclarative competences in cul-
tural analysis. It should be obvious that mod-
els of action that minimize or ignore
nondeclarative culture altogether, such as
rational-action, desire-belief-opportunity
models, or notions of agency that define the
term in question-begging terms as always
implying voluntary (e.g., conscious and
effortful) action, are not consistent with the
proposal outlined here. Such conceptions
would perforce result in an artificially
restricted conception of personal culture as
composed exclusively of explicitly espoused
beliefs, values, and other declarations used in
intentional ways. However, a sole focus on
habits and habituation will not do either,
because, as we have seen, the theoretical
action lies precisely at the intersection of
declarative and nondeclarative culture and the
link of both of these with institutionalized
public culture (Leschziner and Green 2013;
Lizardo and Strand 2010).
In this sense, the theory of enculturation I
outlined is more compatible with pluralist con-
ceptions of personal culture focused on the
interplay among different cultural elements, at
the intra- and extra-personal levels, and
deployed in different modalities of action,
whether in a controlled, intentional manner or in
automatic, habitual ways (e.g., Eliasoph and
Lichterman 2003; Gross 2009; Swidler 2001a,
2001b; Vaisey 2009). However, as we saw ear-
lier, most pluralist accounts in contemporary
cultural sociology fail to make the required
analytic distinctions. This work stands to benefit
from a more concerted effort to clarify the par-
ticular linkages between the elements that serve
as their focus (as well as the links that they
deem secondary). Fruitful dialogue between dif-
ferent theoretical paradigms can thus be fur-
thered by adopting a theoretically consistent
vocabulary of the sort I developed here.
At the level of meta-methodology, the
model of enculturation I outlined is thoroughly
consistent with Gross’s (2009) call to specify
the dynamic role of “social mechanisms” at
multiple temporal scales and levels of aggrega-
tion. As such, a key line of future work is to
begin to theorize how dynamic enculturation,
cultural activation, and cultural use processes
link with dispositional, relational, and institu-
tional/environmental mechanisms across set-
tings to generate important phenomena of both
theoretical and practical interest.
I focused on issues of culture and inequal-
ity as the core domains where the approach
outlined could be used to further theorizing
and aid in conceptual clarification, but it is
important to underscore that the framework
provided here is in no way logically tied to
the role of cultural processes in the reproduc-
tion of power, privilege, and difference
(although this happens to be an area of broad
disciplinary interest). Instead, maintaining a
consistent distinction between declarative and
nondeclarative culture at the personal level,
and distinguishing both from (possibly disag-
gregated aspects of ) public culture, is impor-
tant in all arenas in which cultural processes
figure prominently, including contemporary
studies of racial and ethnic classification,
Lizardo 111
organizational analysis, studies of culture of
markets, and social science history among
others. In all these areas of inquiry, proper
specification and understanding of the role of
cultural processes require the analyst to note  
and weigh the role of those understandings,
habits, and skills that can be discursively
 
articulated from those that remain below the
surface but are evident in action, as both
interlink with public culture in complex but
decipherable ways.
 
Editors’ Note
This article was conditionally accepted by the previous
ASR editors (Larry W. Isaac and Holly J. McCammon)
on September 16th, 2015, while they were still handling
previously granted invitations to revise and resubmit as
part of the editorial transition. To prevent any conflict
of interest, Isaac served as the lead editor on subsequent
revisions of the manuscript until its official acceptance on
June 27th of 2016.
 
Acknowledgments
Early versions of this paper were presented at the spring
 
of 2013 University of Notre Dame’s Culture Workshop
and at the fall of 2013 Yale University’s Workshop in
Cultural Sociology. I would like to thank Terry McDon-
nell, Kari Christoffersen, Brandon Vaidyanathan, Daniel
Escher, Phillip Smith, Ilana Silber, Emily Erickson,
Andrew Cohen, Alison Gerber, Joe Klett, Tim Malac-
arne, Xiaohong Xu, Fred Wherry, and Jeff Alexander for
their incisive questions, challenges, and suggestions.
 
Special thanks go to Robert Fishman who read early ver-
sions of the manuscript and provided invaluable feed-
back. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the graduate
student participants in the spring of 2015 edition of my
 
“Cognition, Culture, and Society” graduate seminar,
especially Dustin Stoltz, Marshall Taylor, and Justin Van
Ness, whose questions, reflections, and insight helped
clarify the theoretical ideas presented here at a pivotal
moment in the development of the manuscript. Finally, I
 
would like to thank Larry Isaac and the anonymous ASR
readers for pushing me, sometimes kicking and scream-
ing, to expand and clarify the core theoretical contribu-
tion. This process made the paper an order of magnitude
better than it otherwise would have been. All remaining
10. This is an argumentative turn Alexander (2004) also
errors and omissions, of the intended and unintended
variety, remain my sole responsibility.
11. A more accurate characterization of Parsons’s
Notes
  1. I use the generic term “cultural analysis” to refer to
any attempt by a sociologist to use cultural theory
to tackle substantive issues regardless of subfield.
This is more or less how some people use the
term “cultural sociology” (e.g., Alexander 2003);
I avoid this term because it has become identified
with a particular, and in many ways idiosyncratic,
approach to cultural analysis.
2. On the importance of theorizing as a generative
activity—as opposed to the consumption of theory
as finished work—see Swedberg (2012).
3. This does not mean there cannot be a higher-order
association between nondeclarative embodiments and
declarative knowledge. Recent research shows that
declarative culture (e.g., attitudes, ideologies) can be
cued and recalled when persons are forced to adopt a
(compatible) comportment (Cohen and Leung 2009).
4. Strauss and Quinn (1997:8–9) sometimes opt for
the less wieldy terminology of “intrapersonal cul-
ture” (or “culture-in-persons”) and “extrapersonal
culture.” Eliasoph and Lichterman (2003), for their
part, use the Durkheimian term “collective repre-
sentations” to refer to the public cultural domain
(but later disaggregate this into “languages,”
“vocabularies,” and “codes”). To simplify matters,
here I stick to the personal/public distinction, with
the understanding that I refer roughly to the same
partition as these other authors.
5. For a more elaborate, but less analytically wieldy,
disaggregation along similar lines, see Patterson
(2014).
6. I see “decoupling” as the limiting case of weak
coupling and “fusion” as the limiting case of strong
coupling. The obsolete Parsonian (1951) notion of
“interpenetration” between personality and cultural
systems constituted an awkward attempt to theorize
the cultural coupling issue. Parsons’s formulation
failed because it could not be told apart form a
fusion argument (Swidler 2001b).
7. Swidler (2001a) also deals with coupling between
these two elements, but she theorizes this as a devi-
ation from the modal pattern that requires special
explanation.
8. This difference is clear in a recent debate between
Swidler (2008) and Vaisey (2008); both theorists
reveal that rather than disagreeing on fundamental
analytic issues, they are actually interested in fun-
damentally different empirical phenomena.
9. Biernacki’s (1995) work has been enthusiastically
endorsed by Swidler (2001b), suggesting they do
share the same approach to theorizing the weak
coupling between nondeclarative practices and pub-
lic culture.
made when he directed his attention toward ritual,
performance, and other elements of culture-in-use.
(1951) middle period functionalism would empha-
size the triple strong coupling between declarative
culture (value commitments), nondeclarative cul-
ture (unconscious need dispositions), and institu-
tionalized patterns (public culture).
112 American Sociological Review 82(1)
12. See Ignatow (2007) for a review of the cognitive
science evidence against this presumption.
13. Resorting to cultural factors in this case seems
prima facie desirable due to the fact that appeal to
structural factors (namely, parents’ socioeconomic
status) provides limited leverage in accounting for
the Asian/white gap (Hsin and Xie 2014; Liu and
Xie 2016).
14. For an application of this same principle to a dif-
ferent case—that of the creation of an oppositional
culture of disinvestment in traditional achievement
values on the part of recent cohorts of the college
educated under conditions of credential inflation—
see Vaisey (2006).
15. Nondeclarative factors subsumed under “effort”
and “noncognitive skills” are indeed correlated
with declarative culture, such as explicit beliefs
that effort is linked to achievement across all
Asian groups (Hsin and Xie 2014). However, the
correlation between nondeclarative skills and
immigration status is about twice as strong as the
declarative/nondeclarative correlation, suggesting
that self-selection based on nondeclarative cultural
knowledge is more tightly linked to the underlying
mechanism generating differences in educational
outcomes (Hsin and Xie 2014), and that for most
Asians there is a structured decoupling between
the nondeclarative skills responsible for success in
school and explicit assent to the values measured
using standard self-placement methods.
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Omar Lizardo is Professor of Sociology at the Univer-
sity of Notre Dame. His research deals with various top-
ics in sociology, social psychology, cultural sociology,
network theory, and cognitive science. He was the recipi-
ent of the 2013 Lewis Coser Award for Theoretical
Agenda Setting from the American Sociological Associa-
tion Section on Theory. Previous work published in ASR
has been recognized (with Robert Fishman) with the
2014 Charles Tilly best article award from the ASA sec-
tion on Comparative Historical Sociology, and the 2008
Clifford Geertz prize for Best Article from the ASA Sec-
tion on Culture.