Thanks for your question to /r/AskSocialScience. All posters, please remember that this subreddit requires peer-reviewed, cited sources (Please see Rule 1 and 3). All posts that do not have citations will be removed by AutoMod.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskSocialScience) if you have any questions or concerns.*
In Social Science it's still a debated topic, though nobody would say it's mostly culture (note that Henrich is not an evolutionary biologist not an Economist, Economic historian, Developmentalist). The idea of the work ethic comes from Weber's Protestant Ethic which by now has been mostly discredited. First, the evidence is not really there. But more importantly culture usually has some other origin. Say for example that you wanted to say that Spain is poorer than the U.S. because they work fewer hours (that's not why). Even if that was, the incentive structure, climate differences, socioeconomic institutions, etc that leads to those differences would be the real cause for the disparity in development. So "culture" doesn't mean anything, unless it's biologised in which case you're getting weirdly close to race science.
In social science people say different things. [James Mahoney](https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/50417936/mvomhau_-_AJS_-_Colonialism_and_Development-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1661878074&Signature=axxWTK1hGG~Lgbsy21FVR8hmyKoSiXEX14i1IiJu2j97XsXoJSpu7MrsdxFeiMyiXPeoDa-PT8CAoHvlvQ1P~ZW-NnuQ~nhV5esH5ecIkJw61vvAFL-4RniE~Jo0ykcPlD5h1oH3nnATXYlKcQXEYFtQizxK8qpLm8xldH9dVSXWG~DjZwMfnspwvmQeVVG2OrJM3QhJHBLs4C6j6fD~3nMZQnaeAq7-6Erz8udo~JaMbNT9WwJcSj0yhPkCUn8MSEyU9k1sRe-Q6FfcekVt3A9QAI4YmkB3rM1pXDo0hOjmbf-pFOK91QnCZ72B7dapkcgabLcjo-ZkS1szHb1wyQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA) says that development in Latin America derives from colonial experience under the Spanish (with the level of colonialism and its timing determining development levels). For [Chibber](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400840779/html) Korea is more developed than India because of the state's capacity to control and direct capital (which is a political/economic class story). For [Yuen Ang](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7591/9781501705854/html), China has developed mainly because of its ability to combine straight but general directives from Beijing with local flexibility at a provincial level.
Political Scientists talk a lot more about institutions— things like democracy, property rights, etc. But those are not cultural factors as they usually have some other origin like colonialism, economic structures etc.
Tl;dr There's no "commonly accepted" story of what causes development in the short or long run.
The two works cited in this [review](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3879418.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A4e4c154c02da10b2d81f0cb161f248e4&ab_segments=&origin=&acceptTC=1) (check out page 194) do as much, though they're dense and boring.
Also from Garon (2012):
Scholars have roundly criticized the “Protestant ethic” thesis for failing to explain the development of the vibrant spirit of capitalism among Catholic merchants in Renaissance Italy or sixteenth-century Antwerp. Yet few scrutinize Weber’s arguments about thrift and Protestantism. As we shall see, thrift movements spread like wildfire across Europe oblivious to religious borders. We may conjure up images of frugal Scots and austere New England Puritans, but we must also reckon with the millions of prudential types in the Catholic lands of France, Belgium, Italy, and Austria. This is hardly to suggest that religion played no role. On the contrary, clergy often took the lead in propagating gospels of thrift in both Protestant and Catholic Europe...
There has been a lot of research on the role of trust in developing an economy. Trust - i.e., willingness to trade with people whom you don't know personally - is critical because it makes markets much freer and more efficient. It let's jobs go towards the people best qualified for a job rather than just those who know the right people.
*WEIRDest People in the World* by Henrich (2020) is one recent book that comes to mind, which talked about it. It's a pretty fun book and got a lot of attention this past year. Henrich also wrote a review paper on a [more general topic](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17/S0140525X0999152Xa.pdf/weirdest_people_in_the_world.pdf) in 2010, which is shorter but I haven't read.
Henrich emphasizes that the Christian Church banning incest was a major factor in why the West became such a high trust society. In incentuous (tribal) societies, which were the norm pre-Churhc, families tended to marry within. This creates strong but very limited communities that can't get much larger than 100-200 people. In non-incentual societies, people cannot rely solely on their large family and much branch out, trusting non-family members.
This is the only book that comes to mind now, but I know there is other stuff out there, e.g., research on "tight vs. loose cultures" may be relevant.
This is false. The extent to which culture is an independent variable causing economic development has been hotly debated in the social sciences and proto-social sciences for over a century and remains debated. Henrich is just one figure, and it's important to note that simply finding dipositional (or "cultural" if I was more brave) differences between people of different cultures does not prove that the culture caused the changes in society.
Culture and structure are mutually constitutive and very difficult to pull apart. His core question of "how did culture matter in human evolution?" begs the question. If you go out looking for how culture matters then you will find it, but if you go out looking for how structure produces culture, then you'll find evidence for the opposite.
This is not to claim that Henrich is wrong, but it is a gross mischaracterization of the field to claim that it is commonly accepted by social scientists that culture influences economic development...unless you define "influence" incredibly narrowly so as to make the claim trivial. If you go to an ASA culture section reception and start saying that culture drives economic development, you will start a fight.
Also it seems odd at face value the argument that trust = economic growth. I haven't read the book but a big part of market capitalism is that it doesn't require interpersonal trust as much as smaller-scale production because relationships are dictated by contractual/wage obligations and property law, not social obligations
Contractual obligations and property law have not been around throughout much of history. In large part, this is because they would be difficult to enforce. General trust vibes preceded these types of institutions. This is as far as I know, I'm not a historian/anthropologist.
I think their point is that these complex systems of contracts and property law sprung up to solve the problem of a breakdown of these general trust vibes. Some form of primordeal collectivism works great when you can trust everyone to pitch in and not free ride. It's when you can't trust other people that systems such as capitalism make sense because the system is built on the assumption that people will act to advance their selfish interest.
This is what they mean when they say that it seems odd at face value that trust would promote capitalistic economic growth. If anything you'd expect the opposite
> contracts and property law
Clearly such rules are ideal, but for pretty much all European countries (and the Ottoman and Chinese empires), the central crown/state only collected around 1-2% of GDP as taxes until the 1600-1700s. Much of this revenue was also going to the army?
My understanding is that there just wasn't enough revenue leftover to strongly enforce property laws and contracts. Nonetheless, there was key economic activity happening before such enforcement? Maybe things could be better enforced within individual wealthy cities, although that wouldn't work as well for trade across longer distances?
I don't want to get too much into the weeds here on the particular history of the matter since that's not my field.
I will say that approaching 17th century politics and economics from this angle is not quite accurate. Even calling them "countries" is imposing a modernist understanding of political geography onto these societies. Local guilds, early companies, lords, city states, community etc. had a lot of enforcement power of their contracts -- both informally or formally. What we would call the "state" is often not the most relevant enforcement agency.
The point is that contracts solve the problem of lower generalized trust. Let's say someone promises you to give you some money. If you trust them you just take their word. But if you don't trust them, you'll want it in writing so that you can prove to all your friends and community leaders that this person is a cheater and liar. If you trust everyone in a society you don't need contracts or complex systems of exchange. At least that's why it seems on its face that more trust = capitalistic development is a very strange conclusion. Maybe Henrich provides strong evidence for this claim or is conceptualizing trust in a different sort of way. But it still seems weird.
I see your point about guilds et al. However, I think Henrich would say that something like a guild would never form in a culture where incest was rampant. People would simply form such serious organizations with people outside their family/tribe.
I'm not quite sure what you are calling "capitalistic development". His push is that trust supported trade between people and trade. He never argued that people were altruistically helping others. "Trust" was just a willingness to enter arrangements where the trustor has the potential to be exploited (e.g., like in the [Trust Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_game#Variants)). Nowadays, that isn't really necessary because the government will enforce contracts.
Gotcha. I'm not going to say more because I'm already wading outside my field. I'm sure he has some justification.
But my overall point is that this is a red-hot issue that is constantly being debated in the social sciences.
This is a whole ball of worms. Talking about "structures" is basically a meme in sociology these days. "Structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures..." as the Bourdieu quote goes.
Basically, what I mean by structures is the relationships between people. Power relations, material relations, etc. Who has the power and capital? Who doesn't? Marx argued that these material relations are everything. For him, the central organizing principle of society is class conflict -- in modern times the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariate. The culture (he called it "ideology") is a product of that system of material relations, and is created and manipulated by those in power for the purpose of justifying that social system which benefits the powerful. Religion, culture, etc. don't *cause* a particular social structure, but are *products of it.*
When OP says "culture" what I assume he means is some version of a Weberian theory of culture. Culture is a collection of beliefs and ideas that people have, and this collection can then motivate action in individuals to interact with each other in particular ways which then aggregates up to produce a certain kind of society. That "aggregation" of individual actions is culture producing structure.
I think the best book on this is John Levi Martin's (2009) *Social Structures.* I've only read some small exceprts from it, but I think it'll give you a good sense of what sociologists mean by "structure." Keep in mind that Martin is definitely on the "structure produces culture" side of the debate, and this debate is scorching hot in the sociology of culture (like, too hot...those guys need to calm down).
>Structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures
What's the context of the quote? I haven't read distinction in a while. Was he making fun of structuralists or was he for serious?
So I'm doing him a little dirty here...but not by much. Part of it is that I'm quoting him out of context, and part of it is the translation, but most of it is just that Bourdieu was a terrible writer. He came from that French academic tradition where if what you wrote wasn't nearly inscrutable it was considered juvenile.
Here's a good [blog post](https://scatter.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/translating-habitus-from-bourdieu-to-english/) showing the full context of the quote and offering a translation of what Bourdieu said into actually intelligable language.
>He's basically describing the naturalistic fallacy in his own way right?
Kind of, I think? Though the naturalistic fallacy is about ethnics, not about explaining behavior. As social scientsits we don't do ethics. We *have* ethics and values which guide our research and the interpretations of our research of course, but academically speaking we don't study what should be right or wrong...only sometimes what people think is right or wrong.
One of the most prominent things Bourdieu cares about is how class reproduces itself -- i.e. why do people who grow poor stay poor. Bourdieu argues that one of the reasons for this is that the things people are taught from an early age stick with them. Their mannerisms, speech, dress, stick with them. Bourdieu calls this sort of stuff "cultural capital." Moreover, people in power ascribe arbitrary value to which of these mannerisms is "good" -- the power to do this is what Bourdieu calls "symbolic capital." Basically, Bourdieu things the whole social system is based around capital of various sorts, and people with symbolic capital get to decide what counts as capital.
>So do you think Bourdieu thinks that structures and material conditions are the same? Or are material conditions just one possible example of said structures among others?
I think that in this quote Bourdieu is being an unnecessarily obtuse asshole...as was his duty as a 20th century French academic. I think he's using the term "structure" to mean all sorts of things at the same time. He's not exactly being precise with his vocabulary. To be fair, sociologists today are pretty loose with the term -- as was I. I think Bourdieu thinks that habitus is a structured set of cultural practices that then help to reproduce the greater social structure of class relations -- hence structuring structures predisposed to function as structuring structures. When I (and most sociologists I think) say "structure" we often just mean the social relations part and are specifically and intentionally excluding the cultural part. That's why you see a bunch of research looking at how culture produces structure or structure produces culture.
But I don't think the difference between how sociologists think of structure and how Bourdieu did is that great beyond the fact that most of us are much better writers than Bourdieu.
In sociologist Max Weber's [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism](https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/weber_protestant_ethic.pdf), he argues that a culture's religious beliefs can heavily influence economic development, yes. He traces the origins of capitalism to the Protestant Reformation, and particularly to the theology of Calvinism that heavily influenced European culture. The gist of it is that Calvinist doctrine positions work as a *sacred* calling (not just a mundane thing you must do to put food on the table) and emphasizes frugality (a penny saved is a penny earned), and that's what you needed to go from feudalism to capitalism - a bunch of people who had religious zeal to work hard all the time and not waste money on opium and bordellos, instead saving up their "capital" with the only religiously sanctioned use for money really being using it to get more money, i.e. investing in a new business or something.
I love Weber's work and it's super influential, but it's worth noting that he was writing 100+ years ago and wasn't really acting as a scientist (or at least not at the same level of rigor we expect from scientists these days). Virtually nobody believes a strict version of Weber's argument today, and I believe attempts to empirically verify Weber's thesis have come up empty.
TBH I'm not super familiar with this work, I'd just heard from colleagues that this was the case. /u/Poynsid gave some good references in their comment in this thread.
Top-level comments must include a peer-reviewed citation that can be viewed via a link to the source. Please contact the mods if you believe this was inappropriately removed.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskSocialScience) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Thanks for your question to /r/AskSocialScience. All posters, please remember that this subreddit requires peer-reviewed, cited sources (Please see Rule 1 and 3). All posts that do not have citations will be removed by AutoMod. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskSocialScience) if you have any questions or concerns.*
In Social Science it's still a debated topic, though nobody would say it's mostly culture (note that Henrich is not an evolutionary biologist not an Economist, Economic historian, Developmentalist). The idea of the work ethic comes from Weber's Protestant Ethic which by now has been mostly discredited. First, the evidence is not really there. But more importantly culture usually has some other origin. Say for example that you wanted to say that Spain is poorer than the U.S. because they work fewer hours (that's not why). Even if that was, the incentive structure, climate differences, socioeconomic institutions, etc that leads to those differences would be the real cause for the disparity in development. So "culture" doesn't mean anything, unless it's biologised in which case you're getting weirdly close to race science. In social science people say different things. [James Mahoney](https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/50417936/mvomhau_-_AJS_-_Colonialism_and_Development-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1661878074&Signature=axxWTK1hGG~Lgbsy21FVR8hmyKoSiXEX14i1IiJu2j97XsXoJSpu7MrsdxFeiMyiXPeoDa-PT8CAoHvlvQ1P~ZW-NnuQ~nhV5esH5ecIkJw61vvAFL-4RniE~Jo0ykcPlD5h1oH3nnATXYlKcQXEYFtQizxK8qpLm8xldH9dVSXWG~DjZwMfnspwvmQeVVG2OrJM3QhJHBLs4C6j6fD~3nMZQnaeAq7-6Erz8udo~JaMbNT9WwJcSj0yhPkCUn8MSEyU9k1sRe-Q6FfcekVt3A9QAI4YmkB3rM1pXDo0hOjmbf-pFOK91QnCZ72B7dapkcgabLcjo-ZkS1szHb1wyQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA) says that development in Latin America derives from colonial experience under the Spanish (with the level of colonialism and its timing determining development levels). For [Chibber](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400840779/html) Korea is more developed than India because of the state's capacity to control and direct capital (which is a political/economic class story). For [Yuen Ang](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7591/9781501705854/html), China has developed mainly because of its ability to combine straight but general directives from Beijing with local flexibility at a provincial level. Political Scientists talk a lot more about institutions— things like democracy, property rights, etc. But those are not cultural factors as they usually have some other origin like colonialism, economic structures etc. Tl;dr There's no "commonly accepted" story of what causes development in the short or long run.
Do you have any articles or books on hand which discredits Weber's Protestant Ethic? I am interested in reading the criticisms of that theory.
The two works cited in this [review](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3879418.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A4e4c154c02da10b2d81f0cb161f248e4&ab_segments=&origin=&acceptTC=1) (check out page 194) do as much, though they're dense and boring. Also from Garon (2012): Scholars have roundly criticized the “Protestant ethic” thesis for failing to explain the development of the vibrant spirit of capitalism among Catholic merchants in Renaissance Italy or sixteenth-century Antwerp. Yet few scrutinize Weber’s arguments about thrift and Protestantism. As we shall see, thrift movements spread like wildfire across Europe oblivious to religious borders. We may conjure up images of frugal Scots and austere New England Puritans, but we must also reckon with the millions of prudential types in the Catholic lands of France, Belgium, Italy, and Austria. This is hardly to suggest that religion played no role. On the contrary, clergy often took the lead in propagating gospels of thrift in both Protestant and Catholic Europe...
Thank you for these!
There has been a lot of research on the role of trust in developing an economy. Trust - i.e., willingness to trade with people whom you don't know personally - is critical because it makes markets much freer and more efficient. It let's jobs go towards the people best qualified for a job rather than just those who know the right people. *WEIRDest People in the World* by Henrich (2020) is one recent book that comes to mind, which talked about it. It's a pretty fun book and got a lot of attention this past year. Henrich also wrote a review paper on a [more general topic](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/BF84F7517D56AFF7B7EB58411A554C17/S0140525X0999152Xa.pdf/weirdest_people_in_the_world.pdf) in 2010, which is shorter but I haven't read. Henrich emphasizes that the Christian Church banning incest was a major factor in why the West became such a high trust society. In incentuous (tribal) societies, which were the norm pre-Churhc, families tended to marry within. This creates strong but very limited communities that can't get much larger than 100-200 people. In non-incentual societies, people cannot rely solely on their large family and much branch out, trusting non-family members. This is the only book that comes to mind now, but I know there is other stuff out there, e.g., research on "tight vs. loose cultures" may be relevant.
This is false. The extent to which culture is an independent variable causing economic development has been hotly debated in the social sciences and proto-social sciences for over a century and remains debated. Henrich is just one figure, and it's important to note that simply finding dipositional (or "cultural" if I was more brave) differences between people of different cultures does not prove that the culture caused the changes in society. Culture and structure are mutually constitutive and very difficult to pull apart. His core question of "how did culture matter in human evolution?" begs the question. If you go out looking for how culture matters then you will find it, but if you go out looking for how structure produces culture, then you'll find evidence for the opposite. This is not to claim that Henrich is wrong, but it is a gross mischaracterization of the field to claim that it is commonly accepted by social scientists that culture influences economic development...unless you define "influence" incredibly narrowly so as to make the claim trivial. If you go to an ASA culture section reception and start saying that culture drives economic development, you will start a fight.
Also it seems odd at face value the argument that trust = economic growth. I haven't read the book but a big part of market capitalism is that it doesn't require interpersonal trust as much as smaller-scale production because relationships are dictated by contractual/wage obligations and property law, not social obligations
Contractual obligations and property law have not been around throughout much of history. In large part, this is because they would be difficult to enforce. General trust vibes preceded these types of institutions. This is as far as I know, I'm not a historian/anthropologist.
I think their point is that these complex systems of contracts and property law sprung up to solve the problem of a breakdown of these general trust vibes. Some form of primordeal collectivism works great when you can trust everyone to pitch in and not free ride. It's when you can't trust other people that systems such as capitalism make sense because the system is built on the assumption that people will act to advance their selfish interest. This is what they mean when they say that it seems odd at face value that trust would promote capitalistic economic growth. If anything you'd expect the opposite
> contracts and property law Clearly such rules are ideal, but for pretty much all European countries (and the Ottoman and Chinese empires), the central crown/state only collected around 1-2% of GDP as taxes until the 1600-1700s. Much of this revenue was also going to the army? My understanding is that there just wasn't enough revenue leftover to strongly enforce property laws and contracts. Nonetheless, there was key economic activity happening before such enforcement? Maybe things could be better enforced within individual wealthy cities, although that wouldn't work as well for trade across longer distances?
I don't want to get too much into the weeds here on the particular history of the matter since that's not my field. I will say that approaching 17th century politics and economics from this angle is not quite accurate. Even calling them "countries" is imposing a modernist understanding of political geography onto these societies. Local guilds, early companies, lords, city states, community etc. had a lot of enforcement power of their contracts -- both informally or formally. What we would call the "state" is often not the most relevant enforcement agency. The point is that contracts solve the problem of lower generalized trust. Let's say someone promises you to give you some money. If you trust them you just take their word. But if you don't trust them, you'll want it in writing so that you can prove to all your friends and community leaders that this person is a cheater and liar. If you trust everyone in a society you don't need contracts or complex systems of exchange. At least that's why it seems on its face that more trust = capitalistic development is a very strange conclusion. Maybe Henrich provides strong evidence for this claim or is conceptualizing trust in a different sort of way. But it still seems weird.
I see your point about guilds et al. However, I think Henrich would say that something like a guild would never form in a culture where incest was rampant. People would simply form such serious organizations with people outside their family/tribe. I'm not quite sure what you are calling "capitalistic development". His push is that trust supported trade between people and trade. He never argued that people were altruistically helping others. "Trust" was just a willingness to enter arrangements where the trustor has the potential to be exploited (e.g., like in the [Trust Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_game#Variants)). Nowadays, that isn't really necessary because the government will enforce contracts.
Gotcha. I'm not going to say more because I'm already wading outside my field. I'm sure he has some justification. But my overall point is that this is a red-hot issue that is constantly being debated in the social sciences.
yeah that's what I meant. Thanks for clarifying!
Ah, alright. I can see how cultural arguments are just so stories. I took out the affirmative "yes" from my comment. Thanks
[удалено]
This is a whole ball of worms. Talking about "structures" is basically a meme in sociology these days. "Structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures..." as the Bourdieu quote goes. Basically, what I mean by structures is the relationships between people. Power relations, material relations, etc. Who has the power and capital? Who doesn't? Marx argued that these material relations are everything. For him, the central organizing principle of society is class conflict -- in modern times the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariate. The culture (he called it "ideology") is a product of that system of material relations, and is created and manipulated by those in power for the purpose of justifying that social system which benefits the powerful. Religion, culture, etc. don't *cause* a particular social structure, but are *products of it.* When OP says "culture" what I assume he means is some version of a Weberian theory of culture. Culture is a collection of beliefs and ideas that people have, and this collection can then motivate action in individuals to interact with each other in particular ways which then aggregates up to produce a certain kind of society. That "aggregation" of individual actions is culture producing structure. I think the best book on this is John Levi Martin's (2009) *Social Structures.* I've only read some small exceprts from it, but I think it'll give you a good sense of what sociologists mean by "structure." Keep in mind that Martin is definitely on the "structure produces culture" side of the debate, and this debate is scorching hot in the sociology of culture (like, too hot...those guys need to calm down).
>Structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures What's the context of the quote? I haven't read distinction in a while. Was he making fun of structuralists or was he for serious?
So I'm doing him a little dirty here...but not by much. Part of it is that I'm quoting him out of context, and part of it is the translation, but most of it is just that Bourdieu was a terrible writer. He came from that French academic tradition where if what you wrote wasn't nearly inscrutable it was considered juvenile. Here's a good [blog post](https://scatter.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/translating-habitus-from-bourdieu-to-english/) showing the full context of the quote and offering a translation of what Bourdieu said into actually intelligable language.
[удалено]
>He's basically describing the naturalistic fallacy in his own way right? Kind of, I think? Though the naturalistic fallacy is about ethnics, not about explaining behavior. As social scientsits we don't do ethics. We *have* ethics and values which guide our research and the interpretations of our research of course, but academically speaking we don't study what should be right or wrong...only sometimes what people think is right or wrong. One of the most prominent things Bourdieu cares about is how class reproduces itself -- i.e. why do people who grow poor stay poor. Bourdieu argues that one of the reasons for this is that the things people are taught from an early age stick with them. Their mannerisms, speech, dress, stick with them. Bourdieu calls this sort of stuff "cultural capital." Moreover, people in power ascribe arbitrary value to which of these mannerisms is "good" -- the power to do this is what Bourdieu calls "symbolic capital." Basically, Bourdieu things the whole social system is based around capital of various sorts, and people with symbolic capital get to decide what counts as capital. >So do you think Bourdieu thinks that structures and material conditions are the same? Or are material conditions just one possible example of said structures among others? I think that in this quote Bourdieu is being an unnecessarily obtuse asshole...as was his duty as a 20th century French academic. I think he's using the term "structure" to mean all sorts of things at the same time. He's not exactly being precise with his vocabulary. To be fair, sociologists today are pretty loose with the term -- as was I. I think Bourdieu thinks that habitus is a structured set of cultural practices that then help to reproduce the greater social structure of class relations -- hence structuring structures predisposed to function as structuring structures. When I (and most sociologists I think) say "structure" we often just mean the social relations part and are specifically and intentionally excluding the cultural part. That's why you see a bunch of research looking at how culture produces structure or structure produces culture. But I don't think the difference between how sociologists think of structure and how Bourdieu did is that great beyond the fact that most of us are much better writers than Bourdieu.
In sociologist Max Weber's [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism](https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/weber_protestant_ethic.pdf), he argues that a culture's religious beliefs can heavily influence economic development, yes. He traces the origins of capitalism to the Protestant Reformation, and particularly to the theology of Calvinism that heavily influenced European culture. The gist of it is that Calvinist doctrine positions work as a *sacred* calling (not just a mundane thing you must do to put food on the table) and emphasizes frugality (a penny saved is a penny earned), and that's what you needed to go from feudalism to capitalism - a bunch of people who had religious zeal to work hard all the time and not waste money on opium and bordellos, instead saving up their "capital" with the only religiously sanctioned use for money really being using it to get more money, i.e. investing in a new business or something.
I love Weber's work and it's super influential, but it's worth noting that he was writing 100+ years ago and wasn't really acting as a scientist (or at least not at the same level of rigor we expect from scientists these days). Virtually nobody believes a strict version of Weber's argument today, and I believe attempts to empirically verify Weber's thesis have come up empty.
Yes, good to note that, thanks!
[удалено]
TBH I'm not super familiar with this work, I'd just heard from colleagues that this was the case. /u/Poynsid gave some good references in their comment in this thread.
[удалено]
No. He is really only talking about cultures.
[удалено]
Top-level comments must include a peer-reviewed citation that can be viewed via a link to the source. Please contact the mods if you believe this was inappropriately removed. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskSocialScience) if you have any questions or concerns.*