CULTURE Culture generally refers to the totality of all learned social behavior of a given group, and provides not only "systems of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, and acting" (Goodenough, 1981: 110), but includes the rules and symbols of interpretation and discourse as well. The MEANING of culture includes not only social behavior, but the guiding framework by which cultural members understand their, and others', behavior. To speak of culture as a monolithic and invariant "thing" glosses over the cultural work required to produce the repetitive meanings, invoke interpretive tools, and recreate a semblance of ordered social existence. Cultures are produced both by the experiences of everyday interaction and by specialized culture-producing organizations (Collins, 1979: 60). In prisons, for example, the cultural work of staff and prisoners, and the formal and informal structure imposed by state and administrative personnel combine to create rules and resources for the communicative processes that form the basis of prison culture. Culture also includes the material and symbolic artifacts of behavior, such as belief systems (views of crime), conceptual machinery for ordering social arrangments (beliefs about punishment), and pre-existing structural (prisons as formal organizations) and material (stone walls and bars) attributes, or what Marx has called the means and mode of production, upon which cultural meanings are re-created and maintained. However, because culture is not uniformly shared not understood with equal competence by members, the concept of culture itself assumes several forms. Culture is a "collective fiction" (Clifford, 1988: 106) to the extent that it is a shared fabrication with meanings that, while seemingly constant, are in fact ambiguous, tentative, changing, and may vary dramatically between groups. To overcome this problem of diverse conceptual meanings, the synthetic approach adopted by Van Maanen and Barley (1985), although broad, provides the basis for the meaning used here: In crude relief, culture can be understood as a set of solutions devised by a group of people to meet specific problems posed by situations they face in common. . .This notion of culture as a living, historical product of group problem solving allows an approach to cultural study that is applicable to any group, be it a society, a neighborhood, a family, a dance band, or an organization and its segments (Van Maanen and Barley, 1985: 33). Culture, then, is the socially established set of public codes, the syntax and lexicon, that guide the symbolic conventions of "reality construction" of ordering and legitimating everday roles, priorities and operating procedures (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 99). This definition incorporates both the interactional and structural components of culture, and requires analysis of of how a shared social existence becomes translated into patterned behavior.

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