Analyzing Cultures

Designed for classroom use in a number of disciplines, this comprehensive introduction to cultural semiotics is also an easy-to-use reference for those who would like a better understanding of the topic. No other text provides this kind of practical framework for the classroom study of semiotics. Each of the 12 chapters is clearly written and self-contained.

Designed for classroom use in a number of disciplines, this comprehensive introduction to cultural semiotics is also an easy-to-use reference for those who would like a better understanding of the topic. No other text provides this kind of practical framework for the classroom study of semiotics. Each of the 12 chapters is clearly written and self-contained.

Certain consultants argue leaders can quickly, easily, and considerably alter their organization cultures to improve performance. Conversely, field researchers have described situations where leaders could do little to alter the existing organization culture. Between these extreme positions, a spectrum of varying degrees of leader influence exists, and organizations fall at various places along this spectrum. This book presents five field studies dealing with team, service, and sales cultures where both expected and unexpected outcomes arose. In multiple instances, leaders hoped showing some employee appreciation would compensate for offering below market average wages. Several leadership groups were prospering based on cost cuts or increased sales. Those below often had their work intensified and they were experiencing greater stress. Eight paradoxical situations were uncovered and the interpretations of the participants were based in part on their personal work histories and the history of their current organization. In each case, evidence of employee informal organization and managerial operating cultures were documented. Analyzing Organization Cultures uses detailed case studies of five work organizations to offer a comparative approach to analyzing organizational culture. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational studies, management history, human resource management, and organizational theory.

Traits that signal belonging dictate our daily routines, including how we eat, move, and connect to others. In recent years, "fat" has emerged as a shared anchor in defining who belongs and is valued versus who does not and is not. The stigma surrounding weight transcends many social, cultural, political, and economic divides. The concern over body image shapes not only how we see ourselves, but also how we talk, interact, and fit into our social networks, communities, and broader society. Fat in Four Cultures is a co-authored comparative ethnography that reveals the shared struggles and local distinctions of how people across the globe are coping with a bombardment of anti-fat messages. Highlighting important differences in how people experience "being fat," the cases in this book are based on fieldwork by five anthropologists working together simultaneously in four different sites across the globe: Japan, the United States, Paraguay, and Samoa. Through these cases, Fat in Four Cultures considers what insights can be gained through systematic, cross-cultural comparison. Written in an eye-opening and narrative-driven style, with clearly defined and consistently used key terms, this book effectively explores a series of fundamental questions about the present and future of fat and obesity.

Systematic Methods for Analyzing Culture is a practical manual that provides step-by-step instruction for collecting and analyzing cultural data. This compact guide explains complex topics in straightforward and practical terms, via research examples, textual and visual software guides, and hands-on exercises. Through each chapter’s introductory examples, the manual illustrates how socially learned knowledge provides group members with shared understandings of the world, which allow for mutually intelligible interactions. The authors then carefully walk readers through the process of eliciting those socially learned, shared, and thus cultural representations of reality, which structure the thinking and practice of individuals inhabiting social groups. Specifically, the book shows how researchers can elicit such thought and behavior via methods such as free lists, pile sorts, cultural consensus and consonance analysis, textual analysis, and personal network research. The book will help both undergraduate and graduate students identify ways to unpack the "black box" of culture, which may be absent or given only cursory attention within their training and respective fields. The book’s clear and systematic step-by-step walkthroughs of each method will also encourage more established researchers, educators, and practitioners—from diverse fields and with varying levels of experience—to integrate techniques for assessing cultural processes into their research, teaching, and practice.

A book at the intersection of data science and media studies, presenting concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture--the billions of photographs shared on social media every day, the hundreds of millions of songs created by twenty million musicians on Soundcloud, the content of four billion Pinterest boards? In Cultural Analytics, Lev Manovich presents concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. Drawing on more than a decade of research and projects from his own lab, Manovich offers a gentle, nontechnical introduction to the core ideas of data analytics and discusses the ways that our society uses data and algorithms.

Intended to bridge the gap between the latest methodological developments and cross-cultural research, this interdisciplinary resource presents the latest strategies for analyzing cross-cultural data. Techniques are demonstrated through the use of applications that employ cross national data sets such as the latest European Social Survey. With an emphasis on the generalized latent variable approach, internationally–prominent researchers from a variety of fields explain how the methods work, how to apply them, and how they relate to other methods presented in the book. Syntax and graphical and verbal explanations of the techniques are included. A website features some of the data sets and syntax commands used in the book. Applications from the behavioral and social sciences that use real data-sets demonstrate: The use of samples from 17 countries to validate the resistance to change scale across these nations How to test the cross-national invariance properties of social trust The interplay between social structure, religiosity, values, and social attitudes A comparison of anti-immigrant attitudes and patterns of religious orientations across European countries. The book is divided into techniques for analyzing cross-cultural data within the generalized-latent-variable approach: multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis and multiple-group structural equation modeling; multi-level analysis; latent class analysis; and item-response theory. Since researchers from various disciplines often use different methodological approaches, a consistent framework for describing and applying each method is used so as to cross ‘methodological borders’ between disciplines. Some chapters describe the basic strategy and how it relates to other techniques presented in the book, others apply the techniques and address specific research questions, and a few combine the two. A table in the preface highlights for each chapter: a description of the contents, the statistical methods used, the goal(s) of the analysis, and the data set employed. This book is intended for researchers, practitioners, and advanced students interested in cross-cultural research. Because the applications span a variety of disciplines, the book will appeal to researchers and students in: psychology, political science, sociology, education, marketing and economics, geography, criminology, psychometrics, epidemiology, and public health, as well as those interested in methodology. It is also appropriate for an advanced methods course in cross-cultural analysis.

The first comprehensive and statistically significant analysis of the predictive powers of each cross-cultural model, based on nation-level variables from a range of large-scale database sources such as the World Values Survey, the Pew Research Center, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the UN Statistics Division, UNDP, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, TIMSS, OECD PISA. Tables with scores for all culture-level dimensions in all major cross-cultural analyses (involving 20 countries or more) that have been published so far in academic journals or books. The book will be an invaluable resource to masters and PhD students taking advanced courses in cross-cultural research and analysis in Management, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and related programs. It will also be a must-have reference for academics studying cross-cultural dimensions and differences across the social and behavioral sciences.