Keywords

Introduction

Culture is a difficult yet promising concept to apply to sustainability challenges because of its diverse interpretations. It has a variety of meanings in everyday language, various interpretations depending on disciplines and their theoretical orientations, and different fundamental conceptualisations in Western and Indigenous worldviews. This chapter focuses on explaining these divergences because unless they are visible and named, they will continue to handicap the effective use of culture as a lens for examining sustainability issues. The latent promise of this divergence, which will be clear by the end of this book, lies in the rich bodies of knowledge that underpin culture’s many interpretations and their potential contribution to sustainability transitions.

Culture’s meaning has been evolving since it first appeared in the English language over 500 years ago, and there have been many attempts to achieve some sense of order across different understandings of culture: either via its etymological evolution (e.g. Bennett et al., 2005; Williams, 1976) or through reviewing academic definitions of culture (e.g. Faulkner et al., 2006; Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952) and/or by grouping similar academic applications (e.g. Hammersley, 2019). Standard dictionaries of English typically offer three groups of common usages: one referring to the arts and other manifestations of intellectual and skilful achievement; a second referring to ways of life of a particular group of people; and a third referring to the cultivation of plants and animals, including cells and micro-organisms. Williams (1976) identified three main meanings: one aligning with artistic activity and works of art; the second referring to the process of societal development to an intellectual, spiritual or aesthetic ideal; and the third broadly referring to different ways of life. Forty-five years later, a review confirmed these three usages and added a fourth: culture as the process and outcomes of shared meanings (Hammersley, 2019).

My own review, which occupies most of this chapter, identifies nine senses in which culture is used. I focus on different perspectives of culture in the light of their potential to be applied to sustainability problems. Eight clusters of meaning derive from its use in Western language and scholarship. They include Williams’ and Hammersley’s categories and also draw from culture’s past and more recent usages. I also describe a further meaning that is implicit in many non-Western worldviews. These nine clusters are hard evidence, if any more were needed, of why culture can be such a slippery term.

Literature on culture is extensive and theoretically complex. In this chapter, I have attempted to explain key differences in interpretations in the simplest language possible so that it makes sense to a broad audience. I am not able to do justice to these rich and sometimes hotly argued fields of knowledge. For those who are interested in diving more deeply into any of these areas of literature, I have included some key citations as a starting point.

Culture’s Multiple Meanings

Culture’s divarication started early. Its linguistic origins in English are from the early fifteenth century where it initially referred to the tending of crops. It evolved to span several other meanings (human development; the arts; folk cultures) before it began to be used academically in the nineteenth century (Williams, 1976). Its meanings diverged further as it became a key concept in many social science and humanities disciplines, developing more complex and more nuanced meanings than are evident in standard dictionary definitions. From being a core focus of anthropology (initially applied to non-Western cultures) and humanities (relating to works of aesthetic and intellectual endeavour), it became more widely adopted across social science and humanities disciplines from the early 1970s. This ‘cultural turn’ was largely an outcome of the rise in academic interest in meaning and symbolism (of actions, objects, texts, discourses, etc.), which was a reaction against the previously dominant focus on empirically observable ‘facts’ (Chaney, 1994). This shift in focus resulted in new subdisciplines, such as cultural geography, cultural archaeology, cultural sociology, sociology of culture, cultural psychology, cultural history and the general field of cultural studies, each with its own particular take on culture. Ongoing waves of ‘posts’, ‘turns’ and ‘isms’ (e.g. post-structuralism, the performative turn, new materialism) have continued to influence culture’s interpretations and have opened up new avenues for cultural scholarship.

Alongside these ever-evolving interpretations has been an ongoing expansion in culture’s applications as a descriptor. Where in past decades people spoke of native cultures, folk cultures, high culture and mass culture, they are now more likely to talk about consumer culture, drug cultures, gamer cultures, visual culture, organisational cultures and cancel culture. Culture is applied, with one or several of its meanings, to define or explain a bewildering and shifting array of social experiences.

As a result of these divergences, culture has accrued a range of meanings and finely wrought nuances such that different fields of knowledge can sit in ‘baneful isolation’ (Patterson, 2014: 3). Academics writing about culture generally do so based on their specialised interpretation, supported by the annexation of everyday words (such as ‘practice’, ‘performance’, ‘text’ or ‘structure’) to mean something very specific to that discipline. The result can be dense and impenetrable prose, creating barriers for communication even for academics in other social science or humanities disciplines, and making potentially enlightening cross-fertilisations unlikely. For academics in other disciplines and for lay people, academic writing on culture can be wholly inaccessible.

The combination of divergent meanings, ever-expanding applications and conceptual–linguistic specialisation means that culture can be highly ambiguous, such that ‘what counts as culture depends upon what is being described or explained, and for what purposes’ (Hammersley, 2019: 96). The ambiguity becomes particularly problematic when academics and students who are not based in a cultural discipline use the term ‘culture’ and fail to define what they mean, appearing to assume that their readers interpret the term as they do, just as we would with any commonly used noun. This ‘persistent lack of consensus or rigor in defining culture’ (Patterson, 2014: 3) means that it can be subject to misinterpretation and hence any claims may be of questionable value to others.

A further problem with culture lies in its Eurocentric origins and meanings. Non-Western societies, and particularly Indigenous societies, have very different worldviews and knowledge systems, and these are reflected in language. Even where an Indigenous word may superficially appear to be equivalent to a term in English, it will be foundationally different and thus convey a set of meanings to native language speakers that are not evident to others. Indigenous and other societies may conceive of culture in fundamentally different ways or may use a seemingly equivalent word that has subtle or substantial differences in meaning. In my view, this is not a reason to dismiss non-Western conceptualisations, but rather an opportunity to open up new possibilities for understanding the world.

Clearly, then, the scope of ‘what culture means’ is very broad. As a concept, it cannot do useful work for the sustainability transition unless we can articulate its scope and are able to consider how different interpretations relate to each other. In the following sections, I discuss the nine main clusters of meaning that I have derived from a broad review of literature relating to culture. Across these clusters, it will be seen how the concept of culture has diverged both ontologically (the nature of the reality that culture represents) and epistemologically (the kinds of evidence or knowledge that can describe that reality).

Some of the clusters of meaning (numbers 1, 3 and 4 below) will be unsurprising to the lay reader as they closely align with everyday understandings, so require little explanation. One cluster (number 2 below) is largely obsolete in its original application but has a different relevance today. Other clusters (numbers 5–8 below) emerge out of developments in the social sciences, and in these instances, I spend a little longer outlining relevant theories so that the meaning applied to culture makes sense to a lay reader. For non-Western understandings of culture (number 9 below), I focus in particular on Indigenous perspectives and draw from literature relating to a small number of Indigenous societies. I am unable to do this topic full justice, because in reality there are potentially thousands of different non-Western perspectives, and no reason to think that they do or must align. My intention is simply to open the door to the possibilities for entirely different interpretations, worldviews and language systems to contribute to understandings of culture.

Culture-As-Nurture

Culture’s original meaning was akin to husbandry, referring to the tending, caring and cultivation of plants and animals (Williams, 1976). This root meaning is carried on today in words like ‘agriculture’ and ‘horticulture’ and has a specialised application to laboratory-based ‘cultures’ where it refers to artificially maintained cells or bacteria (Bennett et al., 2005). Although absent from most social science discussions of culture, I believe this root meaning has important implications for sustainability.

Recent decades have seen the widespread growth of industrial agriculture. This involves increasingly large farming operations, crop and animal monocultures, heavy use of fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, large irrigation schemes and mechanised farm processes. These operations often replace smaller and more diverse farms or are established on previously forested land. Impacts include increased greenhouse gas emissions, habitat and species losses, pollution of water bodies and water scarcity, with consequential societal impacts including increasing inequalities, debilitating health impacts and food insecurity (IPES-Food, 2018; United Nations Environment Programme, 2021).

Global bodies such as the United Nations and the Food and Agriculture Organisation are increasingly calling for the transformation of agriculture away from the industrial model to return to food and farming systems where the focus is not just on producing the desired outputs but on nurturing the natural systems that support their production. Traditionally, communities in most parts of the world tended local food systems in ways that resulted in unique eco-cultural systems that simultaneously supported flourishing local ecosystems and human communities, and these have the potential to be restored (Koohafkan & Altieri, 2016). Other more modern forms of sustainable farming include agroecology or regenerative agriculture, which seek to de-intensify farming and develop mutually nurturing interactions between plants, animals, humans and the environment (Burns, 2020).

In all of these latter instances, the ‘culture’ in agriculture is returning closer to its original meaning of tending, caring and nurturing. This requires a cultural shift among farmers, in a wider sense of the word. Regenerative farming, for example, has been described as a social movement as much a change to farm techniques, involving alterations in ‘beliefs, values, emotions, worldviews, structures of meaning-making, and consciousness more generally’ (Gosnell et al., 2019: 1). To turn around the destructive effects of industrialised agriculture on climate, water, ecologies, health and livelihoods will involve reclaiming the ‘culture’ of agriculture and horticulture to more of its original sense: tending not only crops and animals but also the ecological and social systems with which they are mutually enmeshed.

Interpreting culture as nurture invites questions such as: What does a more nurturing form of agriculture look like? and What can we learn from farmers who already tend their farms sustainably?

Culture-As-Progress

From the seventeenth century, culture became a metaphor for human development, as in culturing the mind towards an ideal state of existence. By the late nineteenth century, through various linguistic and social influences, this had become associated with the idea that there was a pinnacle of civilisation towards which human societies should be evolving (Williams, 1976). Unsurprisingly, this civilisation was described in terms of European intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic priorities.

This conceptualisation of culture has had devastating effects because it underpinned colonial and imperialist activities, with Western nations partly justifying their actions on the basis that they were bringing ‘civilisation’ to the rest of the world (Ferguson, 2012). Similarly, within the emerging discipline of anthropology, early studies of ‘primitive cultures’ took the view that there was a natural progression through which societies evolved to become more advanced or civilised, aligning with the perceived superiority of Western culture (Hammersley, 2019). These notions are now widely condemned due to their role in hegemonies of power, racism and inequality.

At the same time, culture’s meaning took on an anti-progress dimension as a result of the industrial revolution. Industrialisation saw a mass movement of rural people to cities, despoilation of natural areas through mining and industrial development, and new forms of work and social organisation. Many of the intellectual elite were appalled at the impacts on traditional ways of life. The newly urbanised societies were unfavourably compared with English and European rural ‘folk’ cultures (Hammersley, 2019). From this perspective, culture referred to traditional ways of life that were being lost as a result of modernity.

Culture is still used in the sense of an ideal set of social qualities. The harmful consequences of this interpretation are visible from the personal scale of being an outcast from a desirable social group, to societies in which displaying difference is dangerous, to wars of aggression that seek to destroy or subjugate those with different beliefs, practices or languages. From a sustainability perspective, it also is visible in socio-technical imaginaries that idealise modernity and its reliance on fossil fuels, consumption and growth (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Stoddard et al., 2021).

Despite its negative connotations, culture-as-progress can be spun another way, so that rather that describing an idealised set of cultural attributes, it describes an ideal set of outcomes. If ‘progress’ is redefined as cultural change towards more sustainable outcomes, it means valuing multiple different approaches to sustainability. Used in this way, there is no blueprint for a ‘perfect’ set of cultural arrangements. Cultural diversity becomes all-important, a topic that I will return to later in the book.

This perspective invites questions such as: How do we know when a culture is sustainable? What specific cultural features (norms, beliefs, practices, etc.) align with more sustainable outcomes? What can we learn from cultures that have established ways of living sustainably? What process of change do we see in cultures that become more sustainable over time?

Culture-As-Product

From the late eighteenth century, culture began to be used to refer to products of the idealised conception of Western civilisation described above. Poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold was particularly influential in adopting culture to refer to the best of what has been known and said in the world (Collini, 1993). From this perspective, culture referenced particular types of aesthetic and intellectual products—literature, art, music, drama and ideas—that epitomised the pinnacle of civilisation. This was the start of culture becoming closely associated with the arts and with upper and middle classes.

Culture’s use in this sense remained elitist until the twentieth century, when the idea of there being a monopoly on culture as a normative standard started to erode. New forms of media enabled the proliferation of movies, music and other art forms (some of which directly challenged elitism) and this led to concepts of ‘mass culture’ or ‘popular culture’. Cultural theorists introduced the term ‘culture industry’ to describe that part of the capitalist system that produces cultural artefacts for mass consumption and to support its own replication (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944). Alongside this, artistic outputs from working classes and non-Western societies began to be more widely recognised and appreciated.

Today, culture in this sense is used to refer to an extraordinarily broad range of products and practices including artworks, music, theatre, dance, visual media, fashion, online content, and structures and places that represent shared values, meanings or preferences. The vestiges of culture as ‘high art’ still remain (e.g. referencing classical music, artworks and drama) but are largely eclipsed by its democratisation: today almost anyone can produce cultural artefacts, and cultural products can be almost anything, as long as others recognise it as such.

This interpretation of culture has made its way into the concept of ‘cultural capital’. As initially introduced by Pierre Bourdieu, it referred to people’s familiarity with ‘high culture’ and their ability to use this knowledge to their advantage in their social lives (Bourdieu, 1984). Cultural capital is now used more broadly to refer to familiarity with cultural products, uses of language and symbolism, ideas, tastes and preferences, along with skills and knowledge that can be strategically put to use to further one’s interests (Hanquinet & Savage, 2015).

From a sustainability perspective, culture-as-product is critically important because cultural outputs are highly influential in shaping how people perceive the world. For example, dominant forms of cultural media (radio, television, movies and latterly the digital world) have long encouraged unsustainable activities by normalising lifestyles and business operations that value over-consumption, greed and individualism. These ideas have permeated many societies to the extent that they have become almost unquestionable, embedded as invisible statements of ‘normal’. In contrast, societies that are not so embedded in Western cultural ideals can convey deeply different perspectives through their art, stories and other cultural outputs (Yunkaporta, 2020).

While there is already considerable activity in the arts supporting a sustainable future, this is still a relatively minor segment of cultural production. Culture-as-product invites a focus on questions such as: How can we create new visions of a sustainable future? How can art help reveal and challenge unsustainable practices? How can we build cultural capital that empowers people to take an active part in the sustainability transition?

Culture-As-Lifeways

In the mid-late nineteenth century, culture began to be used as a descriptor of the entire way of life of any group of people. Initially, this was predominantly an academic concept and emerged as a reaction against the dominance of Western cultural ideals as reflected in culture-as-progress and culture-as-product. An early influence was the work of German anthropologist Franz Boas, who argued that the evaluative hierarchy implied by culture-as-progress was socially harmful and that all societies set their own expectations of value (Bennett et al., 2005).

Rather than being aligned with a narrow interpretation of civilisation, culture started to be applied to the distinctive ways in which groups of people lived. Anthropological studies explored tangible aspects of culture such as clothing, foods and tools, along with practices and rituals, and sought to understand the meanings, knowledge and beliefs that were shared within a given social group. An early anthropological definition of culture in this sense was ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society’ (Tylor, 1920: 1).

The exploration of culture-as-lifeways became central to the discipline of anthropology from the 1920s. Investigations were initially of non-Western communities or ethnicities, often with a focus on societal structures like marriage, kinship and methods of exchange as well as the patterns of everyday life (Ortner, 1984). From the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists (and, later, sociologists) began to take an interest in cultures in the Western world, including diverse but distinctive groups such as youth cultures, gay cultures, sports cultures and other so-called subcultures and counter-cultures (Hammersley, 2019). Cultural analyses included religious, occupational or recreational aspects of everyday life.

Later in the twentieth century, culture became considered more generally as a system of interrelated characteristics centred on shared meanings, as reflected in this definition: ‘not only the beliefs and values of social groups, but also their language, forms of knowledge, and common sense, as well as the products, interactional practices, rituals, and ways of life established by these’ (Hays, 1994: 65). Language in this sense includes the subtle selections of words, phrases and patterns of speech that are shared by a group, including speech styles, terms, dialects and jargon. Common sense refers to shared understandings about what is ‘normal’ and largely unquestionable to that group. Culture-as-lifeways acknowledges the tangible features of culture but also encompasses its more intangible qualities such as shared meanings, beliefs and values.

Today, culture-as-lifeways continues to be explored academically through many disciplinary frames including in sociology, geography and anthropology. It is now broadly accepted that many people in the modern world ‘live culturally’ rather than within a particular culture. People shift between cultures in different parts of their lives, moving relatively seamlessly between varied cultural expectations (e.g. between home, work and sport, and depending on who they are with). At the same time, cultural phenomena that are passed down through generations and across population (e.g. ideas, norms, practices, physical objects) are influential in maintaining continuities over time and space, and are thus important (but not sole) causal influences in societal trajectories (Patterson et al., 2004).

The ways in which people live—their everyday activities, actions, acquisitions, tools, products, beliefs, norms and values—clearly have implications for sustainability. Some ensembles of cultural features will have better sustainability outcomes than others. If we were using carbon emissions as a measure of sustainability, for example, people who eat little meat, rarely fly and always use active and shared transport will have fewer carbon emissions that those who have a meat-based diet and are heavy users of private cars and air travel. If ecological footprint was the measure of sustainability, the cultures that value conspicuous consumption will likely have far higher ecological impacts than those that have preferences for more frugal living. Cultures that favour individual rights over collective welfare tend to have much higher levels of income disparity. Different ways of living have direct implications for ecological, social and economic outcomes.

A way-of-life perspective on culture invites explorations of the causal links between cultural attributes and sustainability. It invites questions such as: What ways of living offer the best chance of achieving a sustainable future? What adjustments to beliefs, expectations, rules of behaviour, habitual practices and material possessions might be required? Can we gain insights into more sustainable lifestyles from cultures other than our own?

Culture-As-Meaning

From the 1970s, the academic study of culture underwent a distinct swing and began to focus intently on shared meanings and symbolism. Influences on this intellectual shift included the work of Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, who explored how shared meanings underpin social processes such as social cohesion, power and exclusion (Bourdieu, 1977; Foucault, 1978, 1980; Geertz, 1973). From this perspective, culture was a set of ideologies and other control mechanisms for the governing of behaviour, incorporating ‘systems of meaning in terms of which we give form, order, point, and direction to our lives’ (Geertz, 1973: 13).

Culture in this sense comprises the invisible world of shared ideas, symbolism, feelings, beliefs and values. It usually does not include the empirically observable traces of these cognitive processes: ‘what people actually do, how they behave, the institutions they construct, and the physical exchanges of money and power in which they engage, however, are not part of culture’ (Wuthnow et al., 1984: 4). Objects or texts or actions are studied for the shared meanings that they convey, how they affect people cognitively and emotionally, and their implicit messages (e.g. of power, class, exclusivity and belonging) (Kasanga, 2015).

Culture-as-meaning was widely adopted across the social sciences and humanities, leading to new sub-disciplinary branches within anthropology, sociology and geography, and its widespread adoption in media studies. A new interdisciplinary grouping known as cultural studies, influenced by Marxism, took a particular interest in power and ideology (During, 1999). These branches diverged further on points of theory, such as whether the social world consists only of shared meanings or includes tangible phenomena, and whether the process of meaning-making is conscious or occurs below the level of conscious awareness (Hammersley, 2019). Cultural theories of meaning can be grouped into three main fields: those that identify the source of shared meanings in symbol-conveying phenomena such as objects, texts or discourses; those that identify the source of shared meaning in symbols held in people’s minds; and those that identify it in the ways in which people interact and communicate with one another (otherwise known as culturalist textualism, culturalist mentalism and intersubjectivism [Reckwitz, 2002]). Culture-as-meaning also gave rise to new methodological approaches that sought to interpret discourses, texts, images and mental states to identify their underlying meanings and interpolate how these shape social phenomena such as ideologies, institutions and social actions.

Culture-as-meaning has potentially strong relevance to sustainability questions. Unsustainable systems of production and consumption are underpinned by ideologies, shared meanings and symbolism, often messaged overtly through advertising as well as covertly through alignment with social influencers and other mechanisms; messaging that locks consumers into wanting more (Heath & Chatzidakis, 2012). Under standard capitalist models, corporations are expected to be self-serving agents focused on ongoing growth and wealth, and these ideologies permit worker exploitation and environmentally destructive resource extraction and manufacturing. To achieve transitions away from such models, it is critical to reveal their underlying ideologies and symbolisms, and to start to replace them with new meanings that align with sustainable products, services and ways of life. The start of such a shift is visible in the increasing value given by consumers to sustainable products and services, and in businesses that fundamentally realign their values and purpose with sustainability objectives, but we still have far to go.

Culture-as-meaning invites us to consider questions such as: How can we make visible the problematic ideologies/belief systems on which over-consumption is based? What new meanings and symbols convey sustainability concepts, and what is their impact in the social world? To what extent is the concept of sustainability developing its own ideologies and meanings, and are these consistent with a truly sustainable future?

Culture-As-Structure

Structures (also called ‘social structures’) are generally considered to be enduring patterns of social relationships that are underpinned by shared values and ideologies (Hays, 2000; Patterson, 2014). They include ‘capitalism, bureaucracy, the state, social networks, social classes, status groups, population dynamics, and the distribution of material resources’ (Hays, 2000: 597). Some aspects of structure, such as shared rules, values and ideologies, sound not dissimilar to culture, and I will return to this point.

Social structure has been central to the study of society since the mid-1800s, with early contributions by Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tonnies and Emile Durkheim. Studies of structure are broad ranging, including analyses of the structures of capitalism, structure through a feminist lens and the structural foundations of culture (Browne, 2005). In different ways, all identify powerful formal and informal shared ‘rules’, seemingly independent of individuals, which constrain human choices and shape their actions. Social stability exists because people agree to (or are forced to abide by) these shared expectations of behaviour.

A highly influential theoretical development in sociology in the twentieth century was Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration. This offered an explanation of why social structures endure, and why, despite this, human choices are not predetermined (Giddens, 1984). He proposed that structure is simply the routinised actions of many people over time, according to collective ‘rules’ or expectations about behaviour. Structures are rules that people tend to follow, and the rules exist because people continue to enact them. He called this two-way process the duality of structure: ‘the structural properties of social systems are both the medium and the outcome of the practices that constitute those systems’ (Giddens, 1979: 69). Sewell elaborates on Giddens’ ‘rules’, describing them as cultural schemas which are ‘taken-for-granted mental assumptions or modes of procedure that actors normally apply without being aware that they are applying them’ (Sewell, 1992: 22).

At the same time, people have a degree of freedom in how they act, which Giddens terms ‘agency’. Choices outside of the rules can occur but are generally infrequent, and thus people’s actions generally replicate social structures (Scott, 2007). The ability to make choices that defy structures is largely dependent on the degree to which individuals or groups have what Giddens calls ‘resources’. These include personal or collective capabilities and capacities, as well as physical manifestations such as property and wealth, both of which equate to power. Agency is constrained where people have little power and enhanced where people have more power. I will return to agency in Chapter 4.

In many senses, structure and culture describe the same (or similar) sets of attributes: they are both concerned with norms, beliefs, values, principles and conventions that shape practices and behavioural tendencies, as well as the resources that actors work with, acquire, produce and accumulate. Some authors differentiate between culture and structure by using culture to refer to a ‘soft’ system of subjective values, meanings and symbolism (e.g. Hannerz, 1992; Parsons, 1951), while social structures are ‘hard’ institutionalised social arrangements that are more permanent and pervasive such as economic systems, kin relations and political institutions (Bernandi et al., 2006; Hays, 1994). Capitalism, as an example, is described as ‘a spectacular case of a power-laden yet long-enduring structure’ (Sewell, 1992: 25).

Some writers suggest the difference is scale and persistence, with structure being more durable and less ephemeral than culture (Lentz, 2017). But others argue that structure can be analysed at many scales. These include long-term globally pervasive structures such as capitalism, to mid-scale and mid-term structures such as might exist with a political regime, through to localised and shorter-term structures that exist in specific personal or organisational relationships; sometimes referred to as macro, meso and micro level structures (Bernandi et al., 2006). Culture can similarly be seen to operate at different scales, from the ways of life and meanings shared by small groups of people to widely shared ideologies.

Unsurprisingly, some scholars suggest that culture and structure are indistinguishable. For many theorists (especially anthropologists), culture is the structure that orders social life. Giddens himself noted that his concept of structure is what many would refer to as culture (Scott, 2007). Both structure and culture refer to shared meanings and rules, and the manifestations of these in discernible patterns of practices and material possessions. While social structure is often treated as analytically distinct from culture, the two terms are arguably referring to the same sets of characteristics and the same processes. Sociologist Sharon Hays argues that ‘the theoretical misstep of separating “structure” and “culture” is one of the principal conceptual problems that keeps sociologists from recognizing the power and centrality of culture’ (Hays, 2000: 597).

Although structure and culture may be largely indistinguishable, the concept of structure usefully highlights the existence of pervasive and enduring cultural phenomena: ‘the deepest, most recurrent aspects of social reality, its framework or underlying form’ (Bernandi et al., 2006: 162). By including structure as one of the interpretations of culture, I am drawing attention to the literature that explores these deeper manifestations, and the insights that culture-as-structure can offer to sustainability questions.

From a sustainability perspective, the transition will not be achieved without fundamental changes to culture-as-structure. Deeply held ideologies—such as the growth paradigm, the right to benefit from the destruction of natural systems, and the sole responsibility of business to make profit for its shareholders—underpin the dominant economic system and its unsustainable outcomes. Recent societal shifts that are responding to sustainability crises, such as the growing acceptance of the concept of degrowth, discussions of the rights of nature and new forms of corporate responsibility, may be the beginning of fundamental changes in culture-as-structure.

Both cultural and structural traditions of scholarship can assist in transforming culture-as-structure. Seeing structures as particular types of cultural manifestations opens up structure to investigation with tools of cultural analysis. It helps reveal how ideologies are interwoven with certain social systems, institutions, practices and materialities. Seeing long-established and influential forms of culture as structural turns the spotlight onto beliefs and power relations that are so deeply embedded and widely shared that they are almost invisible to adherents.

Culture-as-structure invites questions such as: What are the fundamental structures that underpin and enable unsustainable systems? What ideologies, institutions and power relations are most responsible for systems that exploit people and planet? What macro and meso level structural changes will be required for a sustainable future, and where are those changes already under way?

Culture-As-Practice

Social practice theory is a form of cultural theory that focuses on practices as the main way in which the social world is constituted. Its historical roots lie Giddens’ structuration and its antecedents, as discussed under culture-as-structure, and also in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1977). Giddens proposed that people undertake routine behaviours that align with shared formal or informal rules, which reinforce and reproduce the social realm. To help explain how social order is internalised in how people think and act, Bourdieu proposed the concept of ‘habitus’—persistent patterns of thought, perceptions and action—which are themselves a response to the objective conditions within which the individual exists (Bourdieu, 1990). Habitus is acquired through the social and physical context of an individual and constrains the range of behaviours that an individual will feel comfortable to undertake.

Building on these concepts, practice theory takes the view that practices both create and evolve from shared meanings. Practices in this sense are habitually repeated activities that embody shared practical understandings. They are influenced by external rules and by people’s desires, beliefs and expectations (Schatzki, 1997; Schatzki et al., 2001). Practice theory is related to the culture-as-meaning tradition, but differs significantly in its focus on bodily routines and the role of material objects as part of practices. In this latter aspect, practice theory draws inspiration from science and technology studies and its interest in the active role of ‘things’ in shaping human action and social processes (Almila, 2016; Shove et al., 2012).

Practice is more than simply a routine activity such as cooking or taking a bus; it is a ‘routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, “things” and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’ (Reckwitz, 2002: 249). Together, these make up a system of interconnected elements (a practice) which is considered to have its own agency. In this sense, practices historically precede individuals and ‘recruit’ them to take part, and individuals are hosts or carriers of practice (Røpke, 2009; Shove & Pantzar, 2007). Through their frequent repetition, practices reinforce and replicate themselves and the meanings they embody. Studies of practice have been as diverse as stock market trading, academic presentations, ironing, chess and Nordic walking.

Of all cultural theories discussed in this chapter, practice theory appears to be most widely used in sustainability-related research to date. Sustainability issues started to become dominant in practice theory research from around 2013, with areas of focus including consumer identity, sustainable consumption and household energy practices (Corsini et al., 2019). From a sustainability perspective, practice theory has mainly been used to investigate routine activities and their tendency for replication. It provides important insights into how social practices emerge and evolve, and why policies that rely on rational choice or information deficit models are unlikely to be successful (Shove, 2010, 2014). It has predominantly been used to explain social stability rather than social change, although it has also underpinned investigations into how everyday practices change over time (Shove et al., 2012), interventions for sustainability (Strengers & Maller, 2014) and the role of collective activity in large-scale socio-technical change (Welch & Yates, 2018).

Practice theory invites investigation of the role of habitual routines in cementing unsustainability. It invites questions such as: Why are these unsustainable routines so widely shared and so hard to change? How can practice theory help explain the intractability of unsustainable business practices? How do practices change, and what stimulates a change in practices especially towards more sustainable outcomes?’.

Culture-As-Purpose

In the late twentieth century, scholars started using a cultural lens to improve understandings of how businesses and other organisations operated. In management studies and the sociology of organisations, the concept of ‘organisational cultures’ became widely used, and methods were developed to analyse how organisational problems could be said to arise from its ‘culture’ (Wilson, 2001). Culture in this sense is variously defined, but generally covers shared values, belief and norms along with behaviours (Flamholtz & Randle, 2014).

A significant portion of papers in this field discuss the purposeful creation of sustainability-oriented organisational cultures. This includes cultures that support corporate sustainability (Galpin et al., 2015; Linnenluecke & Griffiths, 2010) and cultural change for more sustainable products and services (Matinaro & Liu, 2017; Obal et al., 2020; del Reyes-Santiago et al., 2017). This interest in the processes of intentional culture change for sustainability has expanded to include non-business organisations such as universities (e.g. Adams et al., 2018).

This work is in a similar vein to institutional theory, which seeks to understand why organisations behave similarly within their particular sectors. Here, rather than looking at culture within an organisation, the interest is in what might be called cultural convergence between businesses or organisations. Reasons for this ‘institutional isomorphism’ include normative pressures (i.e. from the standards and practices within the sector), mimetic pressures (i.e. imitation of successful businesses) or coercive pressures from the context within which the business operates (Daddi et al., 2020). These ideas align with how culture is learned by individuals—through copying others, through unwritten ‘rules’ of behaviour and from wider contextual influences. Some studies in this field have applied institutional theory to sustainability questions such as the uniform nature of corporate social responsibility and climate change reporting, and the growing adoption of climate change strategies (Comyns, 2018; Daddi et al., 2020).

What is particularly pertinent about all of this literature is the growing interest in purposeful change in cultures to achieve particular outcomes (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2015). This is significantly different to most of the other approaches to culture discussed in this chapter where the primary focus is on cultural stability. In culture-as-purpose studies, culture is seen as something that can be intentionally created and changed.

Culture-as-purpose has the potential to be further developed as organisations, institutions, groups and communities intentionally seek to change aspects of their culture to achieve more sustainable outcomes. It invites investigation of questions such as: What are key stimuli for organisational change towards sustainability? What are the dynamics of organisational cultural change? What conditions enable culture change within and among organisations? How can change in one organisation spread to influence the sector as a whole?

Culture-As-Nature

In this final entry I reach beyond most Western thinking to suggest a further way that culture can be interpreted. As already touched on in Chapter 1, one of the most fundamental and widely influential concepts in Western thought is that culture is in distinct contrast to or is indeed the binary opposite of nature (Williams, 1980). To anthropologist Tim Ingold this ‘single, master dichotomy […] underpins the entire edifice of Western thought and science—namely that between the “two worlds” of humanity and nature’ (Ingold, 2003: 22). This deeply engrained conceptual split situates nature (the physical environment and non-human life forms) ‘out there’, and culture (humans and their ideas, beliefs, knowledge, actions and the products of these) ‘in here’.

This dualism has become so embedded in European language and thought that it is almost impossible to find a single word that expresses otherwise. Even among those working at the forefront of integrative thinking, the fundamental code of duality is still evident. Terms used to describe interconnections between people and their environments include ‘ecological culture’ (Escobar, 1996); ‘co-evolving human and natural systems’ (Gunderson & Holling, 2002); ‘linked ecological and social systems’ (Berkes et al., 2003); ‘bio-cultural diversity’ (Maffi, 2005); ‘social-ecological systems’ (Folke, 2006); ‘sacred ecology’ (Berkes, 1999); ‘ethno-ecology’ (Bridges & McClatchey, 2009); ‘ethno-botany’ (Grabherr, 2009); ‘social-natural environments’ (Duit et al., 2010); ‘coupled human–environment systems’ (Adger et al., 2010); and ‘eco-cultures’ (Pretty, 2011; Rapport & Maffi, 2011). These composite terms reflect the range of ways in which Western scholars are now starting to identify inseparable associations between people and their environments: ways in which they are ‘mutually implicated in each others’ coming into being’ (Ingold, 2003: 306). Yet even though the purpose of each of these terms is to highlight the interactions and convergences between nature and culture, what is particularly notable is how the terms continue to replicate duality through the use of coupled words. This continued linguistic reinforcement of two realms, despite the clear intent of these scholars to do otherwise, reflects the difficulty of intellectually transcending the dominant dualism. If we are constrained by English language and its embedded thought patterns, the idea that culture can include nature might seem inconceivable—indeed, wrong.

Many Indigenous worldviews and language systems, on the other hand, reflect no such duality. When referring to Indigenous perspectives I will generally give examples from Māori, the Indigenous culture with which I am most familiar. Here I gratefully acknowledge the many conversations I have had with Māori friends, colleagues and community members over the past few decades which have helped me understand a little of tikanga Maori (customary system of values and practices). I also draw from academic literature by Indigenous scholars. I acknowledge the differences in tikanga that exist between Māori tribal groups, and also that Māori perspectives do not represent other Indigenous perspectives. However, there are some concepts that are widely shared by Māori and many other Indigenous societies, and one of these is that humans and nature are inseparable, and, indeed, that they are kin.

To Māori, for example, all things (including people) are descendants of the union of Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatūānuku, the earth mother. People are, therefore, genealogically linked to the earth and all living things (Mead, 2016). This inseparability is reflected linguistically. The word ‘whenua’, for example, means both ‘land’ and ‘placenta’, so one cannot conceive of land without considering at the same time one’s relationship with it. The term ‘whakapapa’ refers to human ancestors but at the same time includes kin relationships with all aspects of the environment, including mountains, plants and animals (Roberts et al., 1995). A similar nature/culture unity is embedded in other Indigenous languages, such as the Fijian term ‘vanua’ (an area of land and sea considered as an integrated whole with its human occupants) and ‘aschii/aski’ (a living landscape together with its humans and spiritual beings) of the Cree people in northeast Canada (Berkes, 1999). So, within (certainly some) Indigenous worldviews, ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ are not separate concepts: one’s close relations, for example, can include creatures and features of the natural world.

Indigenous knowledge systems are founded in understandings of complexity and relationality—matters that Western scholarship is only just starting to grasp, having been for centuries captured by ideologies that value reductionism and individualism. Key concepts that are shared across many Indigenous societies include relatedness, respect and the importance of reciprocity with the natural world (Artelle et al., 2018). Some Western theories and perspectives in recent decades are starting to articulate similar ideas of relationality, inseparability and the power of non-human entities in human affairs. This includes socio-ecological scholars as cited above, and fields such as new materialism (Grusin, 2015) and ecofeminism (Plumwood, 2005). Donna Haraway (2015) calls for the need to ‘make kin’ with the non-human world which echoes longstanding Indigenous understandings of the world. Certain philosophical and spiritual belief systems in the Western world similarly recognise our deep interconnections with the natural world, such as the ‘deep ecology’ movement that had its beginnings in the 1970s (Naess, 2008) and the legacy of St Francis of Assisi in the Christian church. Although culture in English is set up linguistically as an oppositional idea to nature, it doesn’t follow that it has to be so conceptually.

Together, these perspectives challenge the conceptual boundaries around the scope of culture. Including nature (or aspects of nature) within an understanding of culture has important implications for sustainability transitions. By offering the understanding that culture can be inclusive of nature, possibilities arise for resetting problematic Western ideologies that underpin the divided way we think about the world and thus how we act in it.

Seeing culture as also inclusive of nature invites questions such as: Do relational worldviews tend to give rise to more sustainable outcomes than reductive worldviews? What distinctive practices align with concepts of relationality and reciprocity, and what can be learnt from these to assist in sustainability transitions? How can relational knowledge-practice systems be better supported and practitioners empowered?

What Culture Is Not

At this juncture, I fear that these wide-ranging definitions of culture may have led my readers into a pit of despair. Is culture everything? Is everything culture? If this were the case, the concept would be of no use to anyone. So let me put some boundaries around culture.

Culture is not about how people operate as individuals, each with their unique personal history, genetic inheritance and psychology. It is not about demographics—our age, income, gender and so on, although these may be associated with a tendency to align with particular cultural characteristics. Nor is culture about features that all humans share as social beings—our need for food, shelter, affection and belonging. All of these things may interplay with culture, and their realisation may be culturally shaped, but they are not culture.

Furthermore, culture is never a single phenomenon. Culture is not a piece of clothing or a particular practice; it is always about the interplay between phenomena, such as the meaning of a head covering or the practices associated with a technology. But while singular items are not culture, they may well be cultural. That is, there will likely be cultural influences at play in the design of the piece of clothing; a belief may well be expressed in tangible ways through practices; a routine was learned from others. Accordingly, culture is the opposite of a reductive approach to understanding the social world—it speaks to relationships between people as well as the relationships between the things that people think, have and do.

Finally, culture is not an exclusive explanation. While the social world can be described in cultural terms, it can be described equally validly using other concepts and theories of social, political or psychological processes. My self-appointed task in this book is to elevate culture as a useful lens through which to investigate the causes of and potential solutions to the sustainability crisis, but it is by no means the only approach.

Conclusion

This chapter, I hope, has made it clear why culture can be such a slippery, problematic term. If we use culture as an explanation without defining its meaning, it won’t necessarily be obvious to others which sense of the word we intend. Even in our own minds, we may be confused about which of these interpretations of culture we mean. I hope that my broad categorisations, although roughly sketched, are helpful in clarifying culture’s divergent interpretations. Each cluster of meanings has a subtle or significant difference to the others in terms of the phenomena it encompasses.

Each approach also has different implications for the roles culture could play in the sustainability transition. Culture-as-nurture invites a more caring approach to processes of production from nature. Culture-as-progress can be redefined as advancing towards more sustainable outcomes through cultural change. Culture-as-product highlights how creative processes and outputs are critically important in conveying and normalising ideas about sustainability. Culture-as-lifeways can help reveal how particular ways of living give rise to sustainable or unsustainable outcomes. Culture-as-meaning invites a focus on the symbolism inherent in products and practices. Culture-as-structure alerts us to pervasive and enduring ideologies and social arrangements that can be barriers to transition. Culture-as-practice invites a focus on routine behaviours and their implications for change processes. Culture-as-purpose highlights how intentional cultural change can achieve more sustainable outcomes. Culture-as-nature pushes past the nature/culture dichotomy to position the natural world as kin and therefore part of a given culture.

Each of the nine conceptualisations of culture is underpinned by extensive literature specific to a particular group of scholars. Each approach has an extraordinarily rich knowledge base that could actively contribute to the analysis and action required for the sustainability transition.

But culture’s diverse interpretations bring their own problems. They seem so disparate, and each so conceptually distinct, that we seem no further advanced with my quest for accessibility and integration. The metaphor of blind men seeking to understand an elephant is apt: each exploring a different part of its body and concluding that this is what the animal comprises, without an overall appreciation of the whole. In the following chapter, I move on from describing ears and trunk and feet and tail, and seek to identify the fundamental characteristics of elephant-ness. Instead of identifying differences, I seek similarities across these interpretations of culture.