Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Cultural Conflict

Item

Title

Cultural Conflict

Author

Mullins, Ian

Research Area

Culture

Topic

Culture and Society

Abstract

This essay traces the emergence of the concept of cultural conflict as it is commonly used today in the social sciences. I describe the history of social scientific approaches to cultural conflict as they developed from the post‐World War II period through the 1980s; emphasizing how changes in the ways scholars conceptualize culture correspond to changes in how conflict is investigated. I argue that a pendulum‐like swing has occurred between, what I refer to as, inequality‐based approaches and value‐based approaches to the study of conflict. Researchers deploying inequality‐based approaches tend to focus on how inherent antagonisms within political, economic, and religious institutions, to name a few, lead people into contentious relations with others. In these accounts, culture is viewed as a by‐product of a group's position within a particular institution, and as such, is considered to reflect members' collective interests (or institutionally produced needs). Value‐based approaches, on the other hand, are characterized by the researcher's attention to fundamental differences in what people believe, and how these beliefs lead to contentious relations between various groups, nations, or even civilizations. In these approaches, culture is seen as enduring sets of schemas, or value systems, that direct action. This essay then turns to the debate over particular value‐based approaches to cultural conflict that emerged in the 1990s and presents emerging alternatives to these approaches. I conclude by presenting work that represent the current state of scholarship on cultural conflict and discuss how increased cross‐disciplinary collaborations contribute to our ability to advance social science research and develop new understandings of how culture relates to conflict.

Related Essays

Mediation in International Conflicts (Political Science), Kyle Beardsley and Nathan Danneman

Culture and Cognition (Sociology), Karen A. Cerulo

Micro‐Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine

Culture and Social Networks (Sociology), Jan A. Fuhse

Group Identity and Political Cohesion (Political Science), Leonie Huddy

Herd Behavior (Psychology), Tatsuya Kameda and Reid Hastie

Culture and Movements (Sociology), Francesca Polletta and Beth Gharrity Gardner

Curriculum as a Site of Political and Cultural Conflict (Sociology), Fabio Rojas

Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland

Production of Culture (Sociology), Vaughn Schmutz and Candace N. Miller

Culture and Globalization (Sociology), Frederick F. Wherry

Identifier

etrds0059

extracted text

Cultural Conflict
IAN MULLINS

Abstract
This essay traces the emergence of the concept of cultural conflict as it is commonly
used today in the social sciences. I describe the history of social scientific approaches
to cultural conflict as they developed from the post-World War II period through
the 1980s; emphasizing how changes in the ways scholars conceptualize culture
correspond to changes in how conflict is investigated. I argue that a pendulum-like
swing has occurred between, what I refer to as, inequality-based approaches
and value-based approaches to the study of conflict. Researchers deploying
inequality-based approaches tend to focus on how inherent antagonisms within
political, economic, and religious institutions, to name a few, lead people into contentious relations with others. In these accounts, culture is viewed as a by-product
of a group’s position within a particular institution, and as such, is considered to
reflect members’ collective interests (or institutionally produced needs). Value-based
approaches, on the other hand, are characterized by the researcher’s attention to
fundamental differences in what people believe, and how these beliefs lead to
contentious relations between various groups, nations, or even civilizations. In these
approaches, culture is seen as enduring sets of schemas, or value systems, that direct
action. This essay then turns to the debate over particular value-based approaches
to cultural conflict that emerged in the 1990s and presents emerging alternatives to
these approaches. I conclude by presenting work that represent the current state
of scholarship on cultural conflict and discuss how increased cross-disciplinary
collaborations contribute to our ability to advance social science research and
develop new understandings of how culture relates to conflict.

INTRODUCTION
This essay traces the emergence of the concept of cultural conflict as it is
commonly used today in the social sciences. It would be impossible to cover
the entire history of cultural conflict, or every perspective on the issue;
such a project would take entire volumes. So here I focus on the history of
social scientific approaches to cultural conflict as they developed from the
post-World War II period through the 1980s, and then turn my attention to a
particular understanding of how culture contributes to conflict that emerged
in the 1990s. I describe this as a shift between inequality-based approaches
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and value-based approaches. I cover a range of criticisms and debates
over these approaches that have allowed several powerful perspectives
to emerge, which represent the current state of scholarship on cultural
conflict. The essay concludes by discussing how increased cross-disciplinary
collaborations contribute to our ability to advance social science research
and develop new understandings of how culture relates to conflict.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The history of cultural conflict begins with the transition from a focus
on social conflict to cultural conflict. It corresponds to a shift from what I
refer to as inequality-based approaches to the study of conflict to those
that are value-based. Researchers deploying inequality-based approaches
tend to focus on how inherent antagonisms (or competing interests) within
political, economic, and religious institutions, to name a few, lead people
into contentious relations with others. In these accounts, culture is viewed
as a by-product of a group’s position within a particular institution, and as
such, is considered to reflect members’ collective interests (or institutionally
produced needs). Value-based approaches, on the other hand, are characterized by the researcher’s attention to fundamental differences in what people
believe, and how these beliefs lead to contentious relations between various
groups, nations, or even civilizations. In these approaches, culture is seen as
enduring sets of schemas, or value-systems, that direct action.
A focus on social conflict, associated with inequality-based approaches,
implies that researchers attempt to explain conflict by investigating material
interests as the source of antagonism. Culture, here, is seen to have little to no
causal influence on the occurrence of conflict. On the other hand, value-based
approaches focus on cultural conflict in the sense that they view culture as
the primary cause or determinant of conflict rather than as an effect of conflict. Scholars conceptualize culture as systems of values that have become
independent from the material or socioeconomic conditions in which they
originated. To better understand how the relationship between particular
conceptions of culture correspond to particular ways of understanding conflict, the next section discusses the pendulum-like swing from studying social
conflict to cultural conflict in more detail.
SOCIAL CONFLICT TO CULTURAL CONFLICT
Many of the past scholarly references to conflict relate to the “conflict
theorists” of the 1950s and 1960s, like C. Wright Mills, Lewis Coser, and
Ralf Dahrendorf. These thinkers, despite their differences, are best known
for their criticisms of structural functionalism, the dominant approach to
sociology from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Structural functionalists, best

Cultural Conflict

3

represented by Talcott Parsons, viewed society as composed of interdependent subsystems that develop to meet peoples’ needs and to ensure the
survival of the overall system. People, from this perspective, are believed to
possess a volatile human nature that must be constrained by the system in
order to maintain stability. In this view, conflict represents a disruption in the
system, wherein the natural tendencies of people are not being adequately
constrained by social structures. The occurrence of conflict requires the
system to adjust, whether this means developing new cultural norms or
new institutions of social control, to prevent future disruptions. It is in this
sense that conflict is viewed as a normal attribute of all social systems. It is
fundamentally caused by human nature and results in improvements being
made to the system that are assumed to maintain long-term stability (for
more information, see Parsons, 1951; Parsons & Shils, 1951).
Conflict theorists criticized structural functionalists for assuming that conflict is a normal, common attribute to all social orders (Joas & Knöbl, 2009).
Instead, conflict theorists claimed that people who would otherwise behave
in an orderly manner are pressured into contentious relationships by social
institutions, and that social institutions relating to politics, economy, family,
and religion have developed in ways that manufacture antagonisms between
people that would not have existed otherwise (Abbott, 2004; Joas & Knöbl,
2009). For example, in White Collar, C. Wright Mills (1951) examines how the
position of middle-class Americans in the labor force alienates them from
work, their own personalities, and also estranges them from their local communities. In other words, their position in the labor force generates negative
tensions with people in other social classes, in addition to producing ill will
toward others in the same social class, as their interests cannot be satisfied
without infringing on others. Thus, from the perspective of the conflict theorists, conflict does not occur naturally but has social origins that must be
investigated and explained; this is where the connotation of social conflict
comes from.
Culture in these accounts is often considered to be epiphenomenal, a mere
by-product of the material or socioeconomic conditions in which people live,
and therefore does not have causal attributes. Culture, in this sense, can be
thought of as a shadow; it mimics or even distorts how an object appears but
it does not substantively change the object. As a result, the accounts provided
by the conflict theorists of the 1950s and 1960s are often limited to discussions of how antagonisms are manifested in instances of social conflict. They
cannot adequately account for the ways in which so-called epiphenomenal
aspects of social life also contribute to conflict (see Collins, 1985 for more
information on the conflict theorists).
New perspectives emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, which further developed sociological understandings of how culture relates to institutions, and

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

therefore how culture contributes to conflict. Contributions from theorists
associated with the “practical turn” in sociology, like Pierre Bourdieu and
Anthony Giddens, began to present culture as symbolic resources that mediate an individual’s relationship to institutions. Symbolic resources, according
to these theorists, refer to the understandings and social statuses that people gain from participating in institutions such as education, the arts, or the
labor force. These symbolic resources link individuals to institutions; they
provide people with the ability to make sense of and act within the world. In
addition to enabling action, these authors contend, symbolic resources also
constrain action because they limit the ways that people can make sense of
situations. Because a person can only draw upon symbols (or meanings) that
are available to them, and because they develop habituated ways of interpreting those symbols, in any given situation some courses of action will appear
to be possible, while others will not even occur to them. Bourdieu and Giddens can each be characterized as deploying inequality-based approaches
because they conceptualize culture as inseparably linked to the material and
socioeconomic conditions. The habituated ways in which people interpret
symbols primarily corresponds to their objective position within a broader
set of relations, such as an economic class.
The emphasis that Bourdieu and Giddens each place on culture as symbolic resources yields a focus on symbolic conflict, or, as Bourdieu (1998)
calls it, “symbolic violence.” Conflict here does not refer to physical violence (although clashes can turn physically aggressive) so much as it does
to people’s struggles over symbolic resources that enable them to interpret
and act within the world. For example, in Distinction, Bourdieu (1984) investigates how competition between French social elites helps shape class-based
antagonisms in French society as a whole. He argues that the upper strata of
French society develop particular likes and dislikes—leisure activities, membership to clubs, the food they like—which distinguishes them from the “vulgarity” of lower strata. The more exclusive these upper class tastes appear,
the more valuable they become, because tastes are not harmless preferences
but are symbolic resources that enable people to act, and thus act as powerful processes of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, the distinguishable
taste and lifestyles that emerge out of economic stratification are not only
by-products of inequality, but they are also sites of contestation and struggle
in their own right.
In sum, as with the earlier inequality-based approaches, Bourdieu and
Giddens did not attribute causality to culture in and of itself, although their
emphasis on how symbolic resources mediate between a person’s place in
the world and how he or she acts in the world provided an important link for
other scholars to do so. By the 1990s, some sociologists and political scientists
altered the view of how culture is related to conflict. Rejecting the premise

Cultural Conflict

5

of inequality-based approaches and associated claims that culture corresponds directly to material or socioeconomic conditions, these researchers
considered culture to be systems of belief that exist independently from the
social conditions in which they originate. It is this separation of culture from
underlying conditions that marks a shift away from studying conflict using
inequality-based approaches and toward using value-based approaches.
In other words, once culture was viewed as independent of other factors,
researchers began imbuing it with independent causal attributes.
VALUE-BASED APPROACHES TO CULTURAL CONFLICT
Cultural conflict, as we commonly understand it today, refers to accounts of
contentious relationships between people, groups, or nations, in which culture, not underlying material or socioeconomic inequalities, causes conflict
to occur. Researchers deploying these approaches make several assumptions
that shape their investigations. First, they assume that culture, as systems of
beliefs, has become detached from material conditions (e.g., Hunter, 1991;
Hunter, 2006; Huntington, 1996). In this sense, culture has become a reality
unto itself. Second, researchers base their work on the premise that recent
societal changes have led to culture eclipsing material conditions as the
primary cause of conflict. In this sense, antagonisms exist between people
because they adhere to different cultural systems, not because they possess
competing class interests. Aligned with these assumptions, the primary goal
of researchers is to understand how differences in belief contribute to conflict.
Value-based approaches to the study of cultural conflict often are accounts
of societal battles, whether domestic or global, between culturally polarized
groups. For example, in Culture Wars, James Davison Hunter (1991) investigates political discourse in the United States and argues that two competing
cultural views of morality have emerged in the United States since the end
of the Cold War. Hunter contends that these two views of morality, religious
conservatism and a secular progressivism, are so entrenched in party politics that each has decoupled from the material or socioeconomic conditions
in which they originated. As a result, the United States has become permanently polarized between two general groups. At a global level, authors like
Samuel Huntington (1996) use a value-based approach to discuss irresolvable
differences between entire civilizations—in this case, Western and Islamic
civilizations.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Value-based approaches to cultural conflict are currently the subject of
intense debate across various disciplines, such as sociology, political science,

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

history, and cultural studies. While policy experts and the public seem
to savor accounts of cultural conflict for their simplicity, it is this very
simplicity that is at the heart of academic critiques of such work. Many
scholars challenge value-based accounts of cultural conflict as tautological
and empirically unsupported. Some take their criticism further by doing
empirical work in order to test the propositions presented in value-based
accounts. This section explores these critiques in more detail, highlighting
several of the most significant arguments and responses related to the debate
over the culture wars thesis. I then present new research that represents a
move away from value-based approaches.
DEBATING VALUE-BASED APPROACHES
Criticisms. The advantage of value-based approaches is that they provide
simple and provocative accounts of cultural conflict that allow authors to
make strong causal claims. The downside is that while the explanations
are appealing for their clarity, they can easily become tautological when a
researcher presents the presence of difference between categorically distinct
groups or populations as the cause of continued division. This is because,
conflict, as an eruption between people who adhere to irreconcilably
different sets of values, then serves as an indicator of that difference. It
produces a situation in which it is nearly impossible for researchers to
distinguish between the aspects of culture that are presumed to contribute
to occurrences of conflict and the aspects of culture that are asserted to be
consequences of such conflict.
Besides pointing to the tautological reasoning used to make these arguments, many scholars challenge the empirical claims used to support
accounts of cultural conflict. The most popular (i.e., most frequently cited)
challenges to the culture wars thesis tend to analyze large-scale opinion
surveys such as the General Social Survey (GSS) to test whether Americans
are actually polarized along moral issues. For example, Paul DiMaggio,
John Evans, and Bethany Bryson (1996) argue that researchers often mistake
the appearance of polarization as expressed in political and media rhetoric
as representing differences in what the general public actually believes.
Analyzing GSS data, they test whether Americans are polarized along a
number of social and moral issues such as the role of women in the public
sphere, acceptance of racial integration, and abortion. They find that on
all accounts except abortion, Americans are not nearly as polarized as the
culture wars thesis suggest.
Alan Wolfe (1998) also analyzes GSS data in combination with his own
qualitative interviews with middle-class Americans about their views on
social issues such as religion, patriotism, family, racial discrimination, and

Cultural Conflict

7

sexuality. With the exception of homosexuality, he also finds that accounts
of culture wars have been greatly exaggerated. Instead, he argues that most
middle-class Americans are pragmatically minded and willing to support
traditional values in some manner while also supporting the expansion of
rights and increased social acceptance of discriminated groups. Fiorina,
Abrams, and Pope (2010) conducted a similar investigation using opinion
poll data to examine whether most Americans are more likely to be politically moderate or extreme ideologues. These authors find that there is a
strong trend toward Americans being politically moderate.
In response to his critics, Hunter (2006) argues that his conception of culture
as public discourse operates at the collective level and not that of personal
belief. Therefore, he suggests, anyone using individual-level data not only
misses the point of his argument but is also incapable of testing the accuracy of his thesis. Yet Hunter’s response draws attention to another limitation of his approach. He may not only be mistaking political and media
rhetoric as representing differences in what the general public believes, he
also assumes that people act upon the discourses that are conveyed in that
rhetoric. Whether people draw upon a particular discourse during the course
of action is an empirical question, not one that can simply be implied. For
example, political ads often present candidates as polar opposites. An ad
might attempt to scare viewers by saying that a Democratic candidate is
going to raise their taxes, socialize their healthcare, and grant amnesty to
undocumented immigrants who have come into their country. The same ad
might present the Republican candidate as fiscally responsible, committed to
competition in the marketplace, and willing to do what it takes to preserve
border security. The question for researchers is: What does the meaning conveyed in this ad represent? Hunter’s error is that his approach encourages
researchers to interpret the difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates made in this ad as representative of what the broader US
public believes. He further compounds this error by claiming that the polarization demonstrated in this type of ad has become permanent; that based
on their adherence to particular moral systems, people will continue to act
in ways that perpetuate this cultural conflict. Had Hunter revised his claims,
to state that the discursive patterns he identifies are just that, discursive patterns, and not proof that cultural systems have become, in his own words,
sui generis, then we would be having a different discussion altogether.
Emerging Alternatives. Had Hunter limited his claims and matched them to
the type of data he collected, more likely than not, his work would resemble
George Lakoff’s Moral Politics. Lakoff (2002), who uses a value-based
approach, presents the cultural divide between Democrats and Republicans

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as relating to competing moral systems. He identifies both “liberal” and
“conservative” ideological positionings as radial categories (or umbrella
concepts) and then searches for a coherent organization that runs throughout
each. He concludes that the moral differences between liberals and conservatives can be reduced to people adhering to different understandings
of the family. Liberals apply a “nurturing parent” model of the family to
their broader political beliefs (implicating a role for programs providing
a social safety net), while conservatives do the same with a “strict father”
model (emphasizing self-reliance over social provision to those in need).
The main difference between this argument and the culture war thesis is
that Lakoff limits his discussion to the discursive systems. He also makes
it clear that people can use either model in various ways. In this sense,
Lakoff acknowledges the diversity of opinion within each radial category
and also remains open to the possibility that people could move between
the different models. So, rather than making claims about a new form of
permanent polarization in US politics, Lakoff provides us with the analytical
tools to examine how miscommunication and breakdown in dialogue occurs
between liberals and conservatives.
Moving past the dichotomy between value-based approaches and
inequality-based approaches, scholars today are investigating the relationship between cultural conflict and other historically significant social
divisions that occur along economic, racial, religious, linguistic, or educational lines. Notably, these scholars are doing away with the assumption
that polarization occurs along one central cleavage. Instead, by investigating
how different moral views or contrasting cultural beliefs map onto existing
social differences, these scholars are able to develop understandings of how
conflict develops along multiple, smaller cleavages. For example, Claude
Fischer and Greggor Mattson (2009) review claims made between 1970 and
2005 to understand whether America is becoming more polarized, or using
their terminology, more fragmented. While they find little support for claims
that fragmentation is increasing along racial or ethnic lines, they argue that
there is a widening gap in social class—whether measured by educational
attainment or income. Furthermore, they contend that Americans are
becoming more concentrated in “little worlds” defined by contrasting ways
of life.
Scholars researching institutions are also actively challenging the assumptions made in value-based approaches, namely, that belief alone determines
action. For example, Amy Binder and Kate Wood (2013) set out to understand how two groups of people with similar political ideologies can engage
in very different styles of political action. Comparing conservative political
clubs at two US universities, they find that the universities themselves have

Cultural Conflict

9

distinct institutional cultures that help shape the political action of conservative students on each campus. This speaks to the situated nature in which
political action takes place. People do not act only in response to a single cultural system, but are nested within various institutions, organizations, and
social relationships that shape action to varying degrees.
Political scientists are developing new accounts of how polarization occurs
amongst political parties. For example, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2005)
question whether we should view Democrats and Republicans as mirror
images of each other. Treating each party as a distinct community, or what
they refer to as separate social configurations, they find that political polarization is increasing, but that it is due largely to changes in the Republican
Party, not the Democratic Party. More specifically, they argue that during
George W. Bush’s presidency, a slim majority of the Republican Party gained
control and pushed the party’s agenda further to the political right, while
Democrats maintained their previous political positions. Research in this
mode demonstrates quite clearly that researchers should not view cultural
conflict as equally created by “both sides,” but rather that we must view
political and organizational interests, and sources of power, as central to the
discussion.
Lastly, in what is perhaps the most promising of recent approaches, sociologist Rogers Brubaker (2013) compares how language and religion, as significant domains of cultural activity, each lead to political conflict. To do so,
he first compares each domain of cultural activity to see how they are similar and different. Second, he compares the ways in which particular activities
that regulate private behavior within each domain become manifested within
political claims addressing such matters as gender, sexuality, family, education, social policy, and economy. Investigating liberal societies, he argues
that linguistic pluralism has become a less significant source of political conflict in recent times, whereas, religious pluralism has become more deeply
institutionalized and increasingly politicized, which has begun to lead to
more robust forms of diversity and political conflict. Brubaker’s work further demonstrates the usefulness of comparing various domains of cultural
activity in order to understand the relation of culture to conflict.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
As I have argued here, scholars developed the value-based approaches to
cultural conflict in the 1990s in order to understand how cultural beliefs contribute to contentious relationships between people, large-scale groups, organizations, and civilizations. Ironically, the major contribution and limitation
of these value-based approaches is that they analytically severed the link

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

between culture and structural conditions. By viewing culture as an independent system, value-based conflict theorists presented themselves as able to
assess the independent causal attributes of culture leading to the occurrence
of conflict. However, as indicated by the large body of criticism being waged
against value-based accounts of cultural conflict, they go too far toward one
logical extreme. Researchers cannot isolate culture as an independent causal
factor that is detached from all material or socioeconomic conditions without making questionable epistemologically claims that decreases the usefulness of their investigations. In other words, the simplified accounts provided
by scholars deploying value-based approaches have the potential of obscuring our understandings of how conflict occurs in today’s world. Specifically
value-based approaches to cultural conflict limit our understandings of how
culture relates to conflict because:
Culture is always seen as causing conflict. Scholars can only observe causation as unidirectional. They cannot reverse the causal order or investigate the possibility of a dialectic relationship between culture and conflict.
Existing cultural differences are always seen as causing conflict and then
the occurrence of that conflict is seen as reinforcing those preexisting
cultural differences. This not only leads to tautological explanations,
it also discourages scholars from investigating how instances of conflict between cultural groups can lead to the emergence of new cultural
forms.
Conflict is always seen as occurring along one central cleavage. This
assumption prevents scholars from considering the possibility that
more than two cultural groups are involved in a conflict. This assumption also obscures smaller, more fragmentary, cleavages that may
occur.
Cultural groups are viewed as homogeneous communities. This encourages scholars to negate the possibility of internal divisions leading to
internal conflicts that are either resolved, persist, or lead to the formation of new cultural groups or subgroups.
Cultural differences, and therefore cultural groups, are always presumed
to exist before the occurrence of conflict. This can lead to misidentifying
cultural groups that have emerged during a conflict as having existed
before the conflict.
These limitations must be taken seriously if scholars are to develop new
insights and understandings of cultural conflict. This does not mean eliminating concepts such as cultural conflict; it simply suggests that scholars need
to revaluate how they consider culture within their investigations of conflict.

Cultural Conflict

11

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE STUDY OF CULTURAL CONFLICT
The studies presented in this entry speak to the challenges of studying
conflict. Scholars emphasizing material or socioeconomic conditions often
neglect how culture, in the forms of peoples’ understandings of the world,
leads to disagreements and contentious relationships between groups. At
the same time, researchers granting primacy to culture as an independent
causal force, independent from material or socioeconomic conditions, go
too far in the other direction by assuming culture to be the most significant
factor driving conflict. Scholarship in this area could benefit from taking
the middle ground between inequality-based and value-based approaches
and attempt to develop comprehensive approaches that account for both
structural and cultural factors.
The challenge to developing a comprehensive approach (or approaches)
is that it requires researchers to do away with particular assumptions about
how culture relates to material or socioeconomic conditions. Researchers
should not assume that culture is epiphenomenal, nor should they consider
it to be completely independent. In other words, whether material and
socioeconomic conditions or culture lead to conflict is not a zero-sum proposition. Instead, whether underpinning social conditions, culture, or some
linkage between the two leads to conflict should always be an empirical
question. It is plausible that structural factors will seem more significant in
some instances but not others, and the same for culture.
Researchers must also do away with the belief that identifiable cultural
groups actually represent homogeneous communities. The degree of homogeneity, solidarity, sense of commonality, or even degree of connectivity
between members, must also be an empirical question. One way to do this
is to initially conceptualize cultural groups as broad categories such as
“Democrat” or “Republican.” Then, whether researchers read accounts of a
particular categorical group or conduct their own field research, they can
begin to characterize the degree to which the people associated with a category are actually a group (Brubaker 2004). Doing so will lead to empirically
grounded understandings of the relationships and dynamics in and between
“groups” of people, as well as the salience that particular categories have
in their lives. This should not only prevent researchers from jumping to
conclusions about whether a broader political discourse represents a cultural
group or not but it also challenges researchers to consider people as more
multidimensional. Individuals do not belong to a single cultural group; they
are nested within numerous cultural groups. With this complexity in mind,
researchers need to understand how individuals become involved in some
cultural conflicts but not others.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

After doing away with these old assumptions about the relation between
material or socioeconomic conditions and culture, in addition to the assumption that cultural groups are homogeneous, there are four areas of research
that promise to provide new insights and understandings of how culture is
related to conflict.
Constructing longer chains of succession between culture and conflict.
If culture can contribute to the occurrence of conflict, and conflict can
produce new cultural understandings and practices, then we need
long-term empirical cases that follow development of various cultures
and conflicts as they relate to each other.
Investigating the ways that people participate in particular conflicts and
how those experiences affect their participation in others.
Studying the relationship between smaller conflicts (or cleavages) in order
to understand if there are broader, more central conflicts. How do temporary alliances in smaller conflicts either tell us about those smaller
conflicts or speak to the presence of a broader, more pervasive conflict?
Examining internal conflicts within a cultural group. How do contentious
relationships within a cultural group lead to the emergence of new
groups or subgroups?
Pursuing these research agendas will be much easier if scholars engage
in cross-disciplinary dialogue. This not only means engaging in discussions
across the humanities and social sciences, it also means reaching out to others
in the technological sciences in order to develop new data collection methods. The more types of information scholars can bring in, the better they will
be at understanding how culture contributes to conflict. For example, sociologists are beginning to partner with computer scientists to develop new
techniques that can collect vast amounts of information from the Internet in
an instant. While few sociologists know how to write a program for doing
this, few computer scientists would know how to interpret that information
sociologically. Together they can produce new modes of data collection that
will open new areas of investigation. Through these joint efforts, scholars are
sure to develop new understandings and insights into the relation between
culture and conflict.
REFERENCES
Abbott, A. (2004). Methods of discovery: Heuristics for the social sciences. New York, NY:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Binder, A., & Wood, K. (2013). Becoming right: How campuses shape young conservatives.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cultural Conflict

13

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice,
Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Brubaker, R. (2013). Language, religion and the politics of difference. Nations and
Nationalism, 19(1), 1–20.
Collins, R. (1985). Four sociological traditions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
DiMaggio, P., Evans, J. H., & Bryson, B. (1996). Have American’s social attitudes
become more polarized? American Journal of Sociology, 102(3), 690–755.
Fiorina, M. P., Abrams, S. J., & Pope, J. C. (2010). Culture war?: The myth of a polarized
America (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Longman.
Fischer, C. S., & Mattson, G. (2009). Is America fragmenting? Annual Review of Sociology, 35, 435–455.
Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2005). Off center: The republican revolution and the erosion of
American democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hunter, J. D. (1991). Culture wars: The struggle to define America. New York, NY: Free
Press.
Hunter, J. D. (2006). The enduring culture war. In E. J. J. Dionne & M. Cromartie
(Eds.), Is there a culture war?: A dialogue on values and American public life. Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press.
Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New
York, NY: Touchstone.
Joas, H., & Knöbl, W. (2009). Social theory: Twenty introductory lectures. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think (2nd ed.). Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C. W. (1951). White collar: The American middle classes. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. New York, NY: Free Press.
Parsons, T., & Shils, E. A. (1951). Toward a general theory of action. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Wolfe, A. (1998). One nation, after all: What middle class Americans really think about god,
country, family, racism, welfare, immigration, homosexuality, work, the right, the left, and
each other. New York, NY: Viking Penguin.

IAN MULLINS SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ian Mullins is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California,
San Diego. He researches conservative politics in Southern California and the
history of explanation in sociology. http://sociology.ucsd.edu/graduate/
Mullins.shtml; http://ianmmullins.com

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

RELATED ESSAYS
Mediation in International Conflicts (Political Science), Kyle Beardsley and
Nathan Danneman
Culture and Cognition (Sociology), Karen A. Cerulo
Micro-Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine
Culture and Social Networks (Sociology), Jan A. Fuhse
Group Identity and Political Cohesion (Political Science), Leonie Huddy
Herd Behavior (Psychology), Tatsuya Kameda and Reid Hastie
Culture and Movements (Sociology), Francesca Polletta and Beth Gharrity
Gardner
Curriculum as a Site of Political and Cultural Conflict (Sociology), Fabio Rojas
Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland
Production of Culture (Sociology), Vaughn Schmutz and Candace N. Miller
Culture and Globalization (Sociology), Frederick F. Wherry



Cultural Conflict
IAN MULLINS

Abstract
This essay traces the emergence of the concept of cultural conflict as it is commonly
used today in the social sciences. I describe the history of social scientific approaches
to cultural conflict as they developed from the post-World War II period through
the 1980s; emphasizing how changes in the ways scholars conceptualize culture
correspond to changes in how conflict is investigated. I argue that a pendulum-like
swing has occurred between, what I refer to as, inequality-based approaches
and value-based approaches to the study of conflict. Researchers deploying
inequality-based approaches tend to focus on how inherent antagonisms within
political, economic, and religious institutions, to name a few, lead people into contentious relations with others. In these accounts, culture is viewed as a by-product
of a group’s position within a particular institution, and as such, is considered to
reflect members’ collective interests (or institutionally produced needs). Value-based
approaches, on the other hand, are characterized by the researcher’s attention to
fundamental differences in what people believe, and how these beliefs lead to
contentious relations between various groups, nations, or even civilizations. In these
approaches, culture is seen as enduring sets of schemas, or value systems, that direct
action. This essay then turns to the debate over particular value-based approaches
to cultural conflict that emerged in the 1990s and presents emerging alternatives to
these approaches. I conclude by presenting work that represent the current state
of scholarship on cultural conflict and discuss how increased cross-disciplinary
collaborations contribute to our ability to advance social science research and
develop new understandings of how culture relates to conflict.

INTRODUCTION
This essay traces the emergence of the concept of cultural conflict as it is
commonly used today in the social sciences. It would be impossible to cover
the entire history of cultural conflict, or every perspective on the issue;
such a project would take entire volumes. So here I focus on the history of
social scientific approaches to cultural conflict as they developed from the
post-World War II period through the 1980s, and then turn my attention to a
particular understanding of how culture contributes to conflict that emerged
in the 1990s. I describe this as a shift between inequality-based approaches
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and value-based approaches. I cover a range of criticisms and debates
over these approaches that have allowed several powerful perspectives
to emerge, which represent the current state of scholarship on cultural
conflict. The essay concludes by discussing how increased cross-disciplinary
collaborations contribute to our ability to advance social science research
and develop new understandings of how culture relates to conflict.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The history of cultural conflict begins with the transition from a focus
on social conflict to cultural conflict. It corresponds to a shift from what I
refer to as inequality-based approaches to the study of conflict to those
that are value-based. Researchers deploying inequality-based approaches
tend to focus on how inherent antagonisms (or competing interests) within
political, economic, and religious institutions, to name a few, lead people
into contentious relations with others. In these accounts, culture is viewed
as a by-product of a group’s position within a particular institution, and as
such, is considered to reflect members’ collective interests (or institutionally
produced needs). Value-based approaches, on the other hand, are characterized by the researcher’s attention to fundamental differences in what people
believe, and how these beliefs lead to contentious relations between various
groups, nations, or even civilizations. In these approaches, culture is seen as
enduring sets of schemas, or value-systems, that direct action.
A focus on social conflict, associated with inequality-based approaches,
implies that researchers attempt to explain conflict by investigating material
interests as the source of antagonism. Culture, here, is seen to have little to no
causal influence on the occurrence of conflict. On the other hand, value-based
approaches focus on cultural conflict in the sense that they view culture as
the primary cause or determinant of conflict rather than as an effect of conflict. Scholars conceptualize culture as systems of values that have become
independent from the material or socioeconomic conditions in which they
originated. To better understand how the relationship between particular
conceptions of culture correspond to particular ways of understanding conflict, the next section discusses the pendulum-like swing from studying social
conflict to cultural conflict in more detail.
SOCIAL CONFLICT TO CULTURAL CONFLICT
Many of the past scholarly references to conflict relate to the “conflict
theorists” of the 1950s and 1960s, like C. Wright Mills, Lewis Coser, and
Ralf Dahrendorf. These thinkers, despite their differences, are best known
for their criticisms of structural functionalism, the dominant approach to
sociology from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Structural functionalists, best

Cultural Conflict

3

represented by Talcott Parsons, viewed society as composed of interdependent subsystems that develop to meet peoples’ needs and to ensure the
survival of the overall system. People, from this perspective, are believed to
possess a volatile human nature that must be constrained by the system in
order to maintain stability. In this view, conflict represents a disruption in the
system, wherein the natural tendencies of people are not being adequately
constrained by social structures. The occurrence of conflict requires the
system to adjust, whether this means developing new cultural norms or
new institutions of social control, to prevent future disruptions. It is in this
sense that conflict is viewed as a normal attribute of all social systems. It is
fundamentally caused by human nature and results in improvements being
made to the system that are assumed to maintain long-term stability (for
more information, see Parsons, 1951; Parsons & Shils, 1951).
Conflict theorists criticized structural functionalists for assuming that conflict is a normal, common attribute to all social orders (Joas & Knöbl, 2009).
Instead, conflict theorists claimed that people who would otherwise behave
in an orderly manner are pressured into contentious relationships by social
institutions, and that social institutions relating to politics, economy, family,
and religion have developed in ways that manufacture antagonisms between
people that would not have existed otherwise (Abbott, 2004; Joas & Knöbl,
2009). For example, in White Collar, C. Wright Mills (1951) examines how the
position of middle-class Americans in the labor force alienates them from
work, their own personalities, and also estranges them from their local communities. In other words, their position in the labor force generates negative
tensions with people in other social classes, in addition to producing ill will
toward others in the same social class, as their interests cannot be satisfied
without infringing on others. Thus, from the perspective of the conflict theorists, conflict does not occur naturally but has social origins that must be
investigated and explained; this is where the connotation of social conflict
comes from.
Culture in these accounts is often considered to be epiphenomenal, a mere
by-product of the material or socioeconomic conditions in which people live,
and therefore does not have causal attributes. Culture, in this sense, can be
thought of as a shadow; it mimics or even distorts how an object appears but
it does not substantively change the object. As a result, the accounts provided
by the conflict theorists of the 1950s and 1960s are often limited to discussions of how antagonisms are manifested in instances of social conflict. They
cannot adequately account for the ways in which so-called epiphenomenal
aspects of social life also contribute to conflict (see Collins, 1985 for more
information on the conflict theorists).
New perspectives emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, which further developed sociological understandings of how culture relates to institutions, and

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

therefore how culture contributes to conflict. Contributions from theorists
associated with the “practical turn” in sociology, like Pierre Bourdieu and
Anthony Giddens, began to present culture as symbolic resources that mediate an individual’s relationship to institutions. Symbolic resources, according
to these theorists, refer to the understandings and social statuses that people gain from participating in institutions such as education, the arts, or the
labor force. These symbolic resources link individuals to institutions; they
provide people with the ability to make sense of and act within the world. In
addition to enabling action, these authors contend, symbolic resources also
constrain action because they limit the ways that people can make sense of
situations. Because a person can only draw upon symbols (or meanings) that
are available to them, and because they develop habituated ways of interpreting those symbols, in any given situation some courses of action will appear
to be possible, while others will not even occur to them. Bourdieu and Giddens can each be characterized as deploying inequality-based approaches
because they conceptualize culture as inseparably linked to the material and
socioeconomic conditions. The habituated ways in which people interpret
symbols primarily corresponds to their objective position within a broader
set of relations, such as an economic class.
The emphasis that Bourdieu and Giddens each place on culture as symbolic resources yields a focus on symbolic conflict, or, as Bourdieu (1998)
calls it, “symbolic violence.” Conflict here does not refer to physical violence (although clashes can turn physically aggressive) so much as it does
to people’s struggles over symbolic resources that enable them to interpret
and act within the world. For example, in Distinction, Bourdieu (1984) investigates how competition between French social elites helps shape class-based
antagonisms in French society as a whole. He argues that the upper strata of
French society develop particular likes and dislikes—leisure activities, membership to clubs, the food they like—which distinguishes them from the “vulgarity” of lower strata. The more exclusive these upper class tastes appear,
the more valuable they become, because tastes are not harmless preferences
but are symbolic resources that enable people to act, and thus act as powerful processes of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, the distinguishable
taste and lifestyles that emerge out of economic stratification are not only
by-products of inequality, but they are also sites of contestation and struggle
in their own right.
In sum, as with the earlier inequality-based approaches, Bourdieu and
Giddens did not attribute causality to culture in and of itself, although their
emphasis on how symbolic resources mediate between a person’s place in
the world and how he or she acts in the world provided an important link for
other scholars to do so. By the 1990s, some sociologists and political scientists
altered the view of how culture is related to conflict. Rejecting the premise

Cultural Conflict

5

of inequality-based approaches and associated claims that culture corresponds directly to material or socioeconomic conditions, these researchers
considered culture to be systems of belief that exist independently from the
social conditions in which they originate. It is this separation of culture from
underlying conditions that marks a shift away from studying conflict using
inequality-based approaches and toward using value-based approaches.
In other words, once culture was viewed as independent of other factors,
researchers began imbuing it with independent causal attributes.
VALUE-BASED APPROACHES TO CULTURAL CONFLICT
Cultural conflict, as we commonly understand it today, refers to accounts of
contentious relationships between people, groups, or nations, in which culture, not underlying material or socioeconomic inequalities, causes conflict
to occur. Researchers deploying these approaches make several assumptions
that shape their investigations. First, they assume that culture, as systems of
beliefs, has become detached from material conditions (e.g., Hunter, 1991;
Hunter, 2006; Huntington, 1996). In this sense, culture has become a reality
unto itself. Second, researchers base their work on the premise that recent
societal changes have led to culture eclipsing material conditions as the
primary cause of conflict. In this sense, antagonisms exist between people
because they adhere to different cultural systems, not because they possess
competing class interests. Aligned with these assumptions, the primary goal
of researchers is to understand how differences in belief contribute to conflict.
Value-based approaches to the study of cultural conflict often are accounts
of societal battles, whether domestic or global, between culturally polarized
groups. For example, in Culture Wars, James Davison Hunter (1991) investigates political discourse in the United States and argues that two competing
cultural views of morality have emerged in the United States since the end
of the Cold War. Hunter contends that these two views of morality, religious
conservatism and a secular progressivism, are so entrenched in party politics that each has decoupled from the material or socioeconomic conditions
in which they originated. As a result, the United States has become permanently polarized between two general groups. At a global level, authors like
Samuel Huntington (1996) use a value-based approach to discuss irresolvable
differences between entire civilizations—in this case, Western and Islamic
civilizations.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Value-based approaches to cultural conflict are currently the subject of
intense debate across various disciplines, such as sociology, political science,

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

history, and cultural studies. While policy experts and the public seem
to savor accounts of cultural conflict for their simplicity, it is this very
simplicity that is at the heart of academic critiques of such work. Many
scholars challenge value-based accounts of cultural conflict as tautological
and empirically unsupported. Some take their criticism further by doing
empirical work in order to test the propositions presented in value-based
accounts. This section explores these critiques in more detail, highlighting
several of the most significant arguments and responses related to the debate
over the culture wars thesis. I then present new research that represents a
move away from value-based approaches.
DEBATING VALUE-BASED APPROACHES
Criticisms. The advantage of value-based approaches is that they provide
simple and provocative accounts of cultural conflict that allow authors to
make strong causal claims. The downside is that while the explanations
are appealing for their clarity, they can easily become tautological when a
researcher presents the presence of difference between categorically distinct
groups or populations as the cause of continued division. This is because,
conflict, as an eruption between people who adhere to irreconcilably
different sets of values, then serves as an indicator of that difference. It
produces a situation in which it is nearly impossible for researchers to
distinguish between the aspects of culture that are presumed to contribute
to occurrences of conflict and the aspects of culture that are asserted to be
consequences of such conflict.
Besides pointing to the tautological reasoning used to make these arguments, many scholars challenge the empirical claims used to support
accounts of cultural conflict. The most popular (i.e., most frequently cited)
challenges to the culture wars thesis tend to analyze large-scale opinion
surveys such as the General Social Survey (GSS) to test whether Americans
are actually polarized along moral issues. For example, Paul DiMaggio,
John Evans, and Bethany Bryson (1996) argue that researchers often mistake
the appearance of polarization as expressed in political and media rhetoric
as representing differences in what the general public actually believes.
Analyzing GSS data, they test whether Americans are polarized along a
number of social and moral issues such as the role of women in the public
sphere, acceptance of racial integration, and abortion. They find that on
all accounts except abortion, Americans are not nearly as polarized as the
culture wars thesis suggest.
Alan Wolfe (1998) also analyzes GSS data in combination with his own
qualitative interviews with middle-class Americans about their views on
social issues such as religion, patriotism, family, racial discrimination, and

Cultural Conflict

7

sexuality. With the exception of homosexuality, he also finds that accounts
of culture wars have been greatly exaggerated. Instead, he argues that most
middle-class Americans are pragmatically minded and willing to support
traditional values in some manner while also supporting the expansion of
rights and increased social acceptance of discriminated groups. Fiorina,
Abrams, and Pope (2010) conducted a similar investigation using opinion
poll data to examine whether most Americans are more likely to be politically moderate or extreme ideologues. These authors find that there is a
strong trend toward Americans being politically moderate.
In response to his critics, Hunter (2006) argues that his conception of culture
as public discourse operates at the collective level and not that of personal
belief. Therefore, he suggests, anyone using individual-level data not only
misses the point of his argument but is also incapable of testing the accuracy of his thesis. Yet Hunter’s response draws attention to another limitation of his approach. He may not only be mistaking political and media
rhetoric as representing differences in what the general public believes, he
also assumes that people act upon the discourses that are conveyed in that
rhetoric. Whether people draw upon a particular discourse during the course
of action is an empirical question, not one that can simply be implied. For
example, political ads often present candidates as polar opposites. An ad
might attempt to scare viewers by saying that a Democratic candidate is
going to raise their taxes, socialize their healthcare, and grant amnesty to
undocumented immigrants who have come into their country. The same ad
might present the Republican candidate as fiscally responsible, committed to
competition in the marketplace, and willing to do what it takes to preserve
border security. The question for researchers is: What does the meaning conveyed in this ad represent? Hunter’s error is that his approach encourages
researchers to interpret the difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates made in this ad as representative of what the broader US
public believes. He further compounds this error by claiming that the polarization demonstrated in this type of ad has become permanent; that based
on their adherence to particular moral systems, people will continue to act
in ways that perpetuate this cultural conflict. Had Hunter revised his claims,
to state that the discursive patterns he identifies are just that, discursive patterns, and not proof that cultural systems have become, in his own words,
sui generis, then we would be having a different discussion altogether.
Emerging Alternatives. Had Hunter limited his claims and matched them to
the type of data he collected, more likely than not, his work would resemble
George Lakoff’s Moral Politics. Lakoff (2002), who uses a value-based
approach, presents the cultural divide between Democrats and Republicans

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as relating to competing moral systems. He identifies both “liberal” and
“conservative” ideological positionings as radial categories (or umbrella
concepts) and then searches for a coherent organization that runs throughout
each. He concludes that the moral differences between liberals and conservatives can be reduced to people adhering to different understandings
of the family. Liberals apply a “nurturing parent” model of the family to
their broader political beliefs (implicating a role for programs providing
a social safety net), while conservatives do the same with a “strict father”
model (emphasizing self-reliance over social provision to those in need).
The main difference between this argument and the culture war thesis is
that Lakoff limits his discussion to the discursive systems. He also makes
it clear that people can use either model in various ways. In this sense,
Lakoff acknowledges the diversity of opinion within each radial category
and also remains open to the possibility that people could move between
the different models. So, rather than making claims about a new form of
permanent polarization in US politics, Lakoff provides us with the analytical
tools to examine how miscommunication and breakdown in dialogue occurs
between liberals and conservatives.
Moving past the dichotomy between value-based approaches and
inequality-based approaches, scholars today are investigating the relationship between cultural conflict and other historically significant social
divisions that occur along economic, racial, religious, linguistic, or educational lines. Notably, these scholars are doing away with the assumption
that polarization occurs along one central cleavage. Instead, by investigating
how different moral views or contrasting cultural beliefs map onto existing
social differences, these scholars are able to develop understandings of how
conflict develops along multiple, smaller cleavages. For example, Claude
Fischer and Greggor Mattson (2009) review claims made between 1970 and
2005 to understand whether America is becoming more polarized, or using
their terminology, more fragmented. While they find little support for claims
that fragmentation is increasing along racial or ethnic lines, they argue that
there is a widening gap in social class—whether measured by educational
attainment or income. Furthermore, they contend that Americans are
becoming more concentrated in “little worlds” defined by contrasting ways
of life.
Scholars researching institutions are also actively challenging the assumptions made in value-based approaches, namely, that belief alone determines
action. For example, Amy Binder and Kate Wood (2013) set out to understand how two groups of people with similar political ideologies can engage
in very different styles of political action. Comparing conservative political
clubs at two US universities, they find that the universities themselves have

Cultural Conflict

9

distinct institutional cultures that help shape the political action of conservative students on each campus. This speaks to the situated nature in which
political action takes place. People do not act only in response to a single cultural system, but are nested within various institutions, organizations, and
social relationships that shape action to varying degrees.
Political scientists are developing new accounts of how polarization occurs
amongst political parties. For example, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2005)
question whether we should view Democrats and Republicans as mirror
images of each other. Treating each party as a distinct community, or what
they refer to as separate social configurations, they find that political polarization is increasing, but that it is due largely to changes in the Republican
Party, not the Democratic Party. More specifically, they argue that during
George W. Bush’s presidency, a slim majority of the Republican Party gained
control and pushed the party’s agenda further to the political right, while
Democrats maintained their previous political positions. Research in this
mode demonstrates quite clearly that researchers should not view cultural
conflict as equally created by “both sides,” but rather that we must view
political and organizational interests, and sources of power, as central to the
discussion.
Lastly, in what is perhaps the most promising of recent approaches, sociologist Rogers Brubaker (2013) compares how language and religion, as significant domains of cultural activity, each lead to political conflict. To do so,
he first compares each domain of cultural activity to see how they are similar and different. Second, he compares the ways in which particular activities
that regulate private behavior within each domain become manifested within
political claims addressing such matters as gender, sexuality, family, education, social policy, and economy. Investigating liberal societies, he argues
that linguistic pluralism has become a less significant source of political conflict in recent times, whereas, religious pluralism has become more deeply
institutionalized and increasingly politicized, which has begun to lead to
more robust forms of diversity and political conflict. Brubaker’s work further demonstrates the usefulness of comparing various domains of cultural
activity in order to understand the relation of culture to conflict.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
As I have argued here, scholars developed the value-based approaches to
cultural conflict in the 1990s in order to understand how cultural beliefs contribute to contentious relationships between people, large-scale groups, organizations, and civilizations. Ironically, the major contribution and limitation
of these value-based approaches is that they analytically severed the link

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

between culture and structural conditions. By viewing culture as an independent system, value-based conflict theorists presented themselves as able to
assess the independent causal attributes of culture leading to the occurrence
of conflict. However, as indicated by the large body of criticism being waged
against value-based accounts of cultural conflict, they go too far toward one
logical extreme. Researchers cannot isolate culture as an independent causal
factor that is detached from all material or socioeconomic conditions without making questionable epistemologically claims that decreases the usefulness of their investigations. In other words, the simplified accounts provided
by scholars deploying value-based approaches have the potential of obscuring our understandings of how conflict occurs in today’s world. Specifically
value-based approaches to cultural conflict limit our understandings of how
culture relates to conflict because:
Culture is always seen as causing conflict. Scholars can only observe causation as unidirectional. They cannot reverse the causal order or investigate the possibility of a dialectic relationship between culture and conflict.
Existing cultural differences are always seen as causing conflict and then
the occurrence of that conflict is seen as reinforcing those preexisting
cultural differences. This not only leads to tautological explanations,
it also discourages scholars from investigating how instances of conflict between cultural groups can lead to the emergence of new cultural
forms.
Conflict is always seen as occurring along one central cleavage. This
assumption prevents scholars from considering the possibility that
more than two cultural groups are involved in a conflict. This assumption also obscures smaller, more fragmentary, cleavages that may
occur.
Cultural groups are viewed as homogeneous communities. This encourages scholars to negate the possibility of internal divisions leading to
internal conflicts that are either resolved, persist, or lead to the formation of new cultural groups or subgroups.
Cultural differences, and therefore cultural groups, are always presumed
to exist before the occurrence of conflict. This can lead to misidentifying
cultural groups that have emerged during a conflict as having existed
before the conflict.
These limitations must be taken seriously if scholars are to develop new
insights and understandings of cultural conflict. This does not mean eliminating concepts such as cultural conflict; it simply suggests that scholars need
to revaluate how they consider culture within their investigations of conflict.

Cultural Conflict

11

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE STUDY OF CULTURAL CONFLICT
The studies presented in this entry speak to the challenges of studying
conflict. Scholars emphasizing material or socioeconomic conditions often
neglect how culture, in the forms of peoples’ understandings of the world,
leads to disagreements and contentious relationships between groups. At
the same time, researchers granting primacy to culture as an independent
causal force, independent from material or socioeconomic conditions, go
too far in the other direction by assuming culture to be the most significant
factor driving conflict. Scholarship in this area could benefit from taking
the middle ground between inequality-based and value-based approaches
and attempt to develop comprehensive approaches that account for both
structural and cultural factors.
The challenge to developing a comprehensive approach (or approaches)
is that it requires researchers to do away with particular assumptions about
how culture relates to material or socioeconomic conditions. Researchers
should not assume that culture is epiphenomenal, nor should they consider
it to be completely independent. In other words, whether material and
socioeconomic conditions or culture lead to conflict is not a zero-sum proposition. Instead, whether underpinning social conditions, culture, or some
linkage between the two leads to conflict should always be an empirical
question. It is plausible that structural factors will seem more significant in
some instances but not others, and the same for culture.
Researchers must also do away with the belief that identifiable cultural
groups actually represent homogeneous communities. The degree of homogeneity, solidarity, sense of commonality, or even degree of connectivity
between members, must also be an empirical question. One way to do this
is to initially conceptualize cultural groups as broad categories such as
“Democrat” or “Republican.” Then, whether researchers read accounts of a
particular categorical group or conduct their own field research, they can
begin to characterize the degree to which the people associated with a category are actually a group (Brubaker 2004). Doing so will lead to empirically
grounded understandings of the relationships and dynamics in and between
“groups” of people, as well as the salience that particular categories have
in their lives. This should not only prevent researchers from jumping to
conclusions about whether a broader political discourse represents a cultural
group or not but it also challenges researchers to consider people as more
multidimensional. Individuals do not belong to a single cultural group; they
are nested within numerous cultural groups. With this complexity in mind,
researchers need to understand how individuals become involved in some
cultural conflicts but not others.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

After doing away with these old assumptions about the relation between
material or socioeconomic conditions and culture, in addition to the assumption that cultural groups are homogeneous, there are four areas of research
that promise to provide new insights and understandings of how culture is
related to conflict.
Constructing longer chains of succession between culture and conflict.
If culture can contribute to the occurrence of conflict, and conflict can
produce new cultural understandings and practices, then we need
long-term empirical cases that follow development of various cultures
and conflicts as they relate to each other.
Investigating the ways that people participate in particular conflicts and
how those experiences affect their participation in others.
Studying the relationship between smaller conflicts (or cleavages) in order
to understand if there are broader, more central conflicts. How do temporary alliances in smaller conflicts either tell us about those smaller
conflicts or speak to the presence of a broader, more pervasive conflict?
Examining internal conflicts within a cultural group. How do contentious
relationships within a cultural group lead to the emergence of new
groups or subgroups?
Pursuing these research agendas will be much easier if scholars engage
in cross-disciplinary dialogue. This not only means engaging in discussions
across the humanities and social sciences, it also means reaching out to others
in the technological sciences in order to develop new data collection methods. The more types of information scholars can bring in, the better they will
be at understanding how culture contributes to conflict. For example, sociologists are beginning to partner with computer scientists to develop new
techniques that can collect vast amounts of information from the Internet in
an instant. While few sociologists know how to write a program for doing
this, few computer scientists would know how to interpret that information
sociologically. Together they can produce new modes of data collection that
will open new areas of investigation. Through these joint efforts, scholars are
sure to develop new understandings and insights into the relation between
culture and conflict.
REFERENCES
Abbott, A. (2004). Methods of discovery: Heuristics for the social sciences. New York, NY:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Binder, A., & Wood, K. (2013). Becoming right: How campuses shape young conservatives.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cultural Conflict

13

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice,
Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Brubaker, R. (2013). Language, religion and the politics of difference. Nations and
Nationalism, 19(1), 1–20.
Collins, R. (1985). Four sociological traditions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
DiMaggio, P., Evans, J. H., & Bryson, B. (1996). Have American’s social attitudes
become more polarized? American Journal of Sociology, 102(3), 690–755.
Fiorina, M. P., Abrams, S. J., & Pope, J. C. (2010). Culture war?: The myth of a polarized
America (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Longman.
Fischer, C. S., & Mattson, G. (2009). Is America fragmenting? Annual Review of Sociology, 35, 435–455.
Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2005). Off center: The republican revolution and the erosion of
American democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hunter, J. D. (1991). Culture wars: The struggle to define America. New York, NY: Free
Press.
Hunter, J. D. (2006). The enduring culture war. In E. J. J. Dionne & M. Cromartie
(Eds.), Is there a culture war?: A dialogue on values and American public life. Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press.
Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New
York, NY: Touchstone.
Joas, H., & Knöbl, W. (2009). Social theory: Twenty introductory lectures. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think (2nd ed.). Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C. W. (1951). White collar: The American middle classes. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. New York, NY: Free Press.
Parsons, T., & Shils, E. A. (1951). Toward a general theory of action. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Wolfe, A. (1998). One nation, after all: What middle class Americans really think about god,
country, family, racism, welfare, immigration, homosexuality, work, the right, the left, and
each other. New York, NY: Viking Penguin.

IAN MULLINS SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ian Mullins is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California,
San Diego. He researches conservative politics in Southern California and the
history of explanation in sociology. http://sociology.ucsd.edu/graduate/
Mullins.shtml; http://ianmmullins.com

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

RELATED ESSAYS
Mediation in International Conflicts (Political Science), Kyle Beardsley and
Nathan Danneman
Culture and Cognition (Sociology), Karen A. Cerulo
Micro-Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine
Culture and Social Networks (Sociology), Jan A. Fuhse
Group Identity and Political Cohesion (Political Science), Leonie Huddy
Herd Behavior (Psychology), Tatsuya Kameda and Reid Hastie
Culture and Movements (Sociology), Francesca Polletta and Beth Gharrity
Gardner
Curriculum as a Site of Political and Cultural Conflict (Sociology), Fabio Rojas
Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland
Production of Culture (Sociology), Vaughn Schmutz and Candace N. Miller
Culture and Globalization (Sociology), Frederick F. Wherry


Cultural Conflict
IAN MULLINS

Abstract
This essay traces the emergence of the concept of cultural conflict as it is commonly
used today in the social sciences. I describe the history of social scientific approaches
to cultural conflict as they developed from the post-World War II period through
the 1980s; emphasizing how changes in the ways scholars conceptualize culture
correspond to changes in how conflict is investigated. I argue that a pendulum-like
swing has occurred between, what I refer to as, inequality-based approaches
and value-based approaches to the study of conflict. Researchers deploying
inequality-based approaches tend to focus on how inherent antagonisms within
political, economic, and religious institutions, to name a few, lead people into contentious relations with others. In these accounts, culture is viewed as a by-product
of a group’s position within a particular institution, and as such, is considered to
reflect members’ collective interests (or institutionally produced needs). Value-based
approaches, on the other hand, are characterized by the researcher’s attention to
fundamental differences in what people believe, and how these beliefs lead to
contentious relations between various groups, nations, or even civilizations. In these
approaches, culture is seen as enduring sets of schemas, or value systems, that direct
action. This essay then turns to the debate over particular value-based approaches
to cultural conflict that emerged in the 1990s and presents emerging alternatives to
these approaches. I conclude by presenting work that represent the current state
of scholarship on cultural conflict and discuss how increased cross-disciplinary
collaborations contribute to our ability to advance social science research and
develop new understandings of how culture relates to conflict.

INTRODUCTION
This essay traces the emergence of the concept of cultural conflict as it is
commonly used today in the social sciences. It would be impossible to cover
the entire history of cultural conflict, or every perspective on the issue;
such a project would take entire volumes. So here I focus on the history of
social scientific approaches to cultural conflict as they developed from the
post-World War II period through the 1980s, and then turn my attention to a
particular understanding of how culture contributes to conflict that emerged
in the 1990s. I describe this as a shift between inequality-based approaches
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

and value-based approaches. I cover a range of criticisms and debates
over these approaches that have allowed several powerful perspectives
to emerge, which represent the current state of scholarship on cultural
conflict. The essay concludes by discussing how increased cross-disciplinary
collaborations contribute to our ability to advance social science research
and develop new understandings of how culture relates to conflict.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
The history of cultural conflict begins with the transition from a focus
on social conflict to cultural conflict. It corresponds to a shift from what I
refer to as inequality-based approaches to the study of conflict to those
that are value-based. Researchers deploying inequality-based approaches
tend to focus on how inherent antagonisms (or competing interests) within
political, economic, and religious institutions, to name a few, lead people
into contentious relations with others. In these accounts, culture is viewed
as a by-product of a group’s position within a particular institution, and as
such, is considered to reflect members’ collective interests (or institutionally
produced needs). Value-based approaches, on the other hand, are characterized by the researcher’s attention to fundamental differences in what people
believe, and how these beliefs lead to contentious relations between various
groups, nations, or even civilizations. In these approaches, culture is seen as
enduring sets of schemas, or value-systems, that direct action.
A focus on social conflict, associated with inequality-based approaches,
implies that researchers attempt to explain conflict by investigating material
interests as the source of antagonism. Culture, here, is seen to have little to no
causal influence on the occurrence of conflict. On the other hand, value-based
approaches focus on cultural conflict in the sense that they view culture as
the primary cause or determinant of conflict rather than as an effect of conflict. Scholars conceptualize culture as systems of values that have become
independent from the material or socioeconomic conditions in which they
originated. To better understand how the relationship between particular
conceptions of culture correspond to particular ways of understanding conflict, the next section discusses the pendulum-like swing from studying social
conflict to cultural conflict in more detail.
SOCIAL CONFLICT TO CULTURAL CONFLICT
Many of the past scholarly references to conflict relate to the “conflict
theorists” of the 1950s and 1960s, like C. Wright Mills, Lewis Coser, and
Ralf Dahrendorf. These thinkers, despite their differences, are best known
for their criticisms of structural functionalism, the dominant approach to
sociology from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Structural functionalists, best

Cultural Conflict

3

represented by Talcott Parsons, viewed society as composed of interdependent subsystems that develop to meet peoples’ needs and to ensure the
survival of the overall system. People, from this perspective, are believed to
possess a volatile human nature that must be constrained by the system in
order to maintain stability. In this view, conflict represents a disruption in the
system, wherein the natural tendencies of people are not being adequately
constrained by social structures. The occurrence of conflict requires the
system to adjust, whether this means developing new cultural norms or
new institutions of social control, to prevent future disruptions. It is in this
sense that conflict is viewed as a normal attribute of all social systems. It is
fundamentally caused by human nature and results in improvements being
made to the system that are assumed to maintain long-term stability (for
more information, see Parsons, 1951; Parsons & Shils, 1951).
Conflict theorists criticized structural functionalists for assuming that conflict is a normal, common attribute to all social orders (Joas & Knöbl, 2009).
Instead, conflict theorists claimed that people who would otherwise behave
in an orderly manner are pressured into contentious relationships by social
institutions, and that social institutions relating to politics, economy, family,
and religion have developed in ways that manufacture antagonisms between
people that would not have existed otherwise (Abbott, 2004; Joas & Knöbl,
2009). For example, in White Collar, C. Wright Mills (1951) examines how the
position of middle-class Americans in the labor force alienates them from
work, their own personalities, and also estranges them from their local communities. In other words, their position in the labor force generates negative
tensions with people in other social classes, in addition to producing ill will
toward others in the same social class, as their interests cannot be satisfied
without infringing on others. Thus, from the perspective of the conflict theorists, conflict does not occur naturally but has social origins that must be
investigated and explained; this is where the connotation of social conflict
comes from.
Culture in these accounts is often considered to be epiphenomenal, a mere
by-product of the material or socioeconomic conditions in which people live,
and therefore does not have causal attributes. Culture, in this sense, can be
thought of as a shadow; it mimics or even distorts how an object appears but
it does not substantively change the object. As a result, the accounts provided
by the conflict theorists of the 1950s and 1960s are often limited to discussions of how antagonisms are manifested in instances of social conflict. They
cannot adequately account for the ways in which so-called epiphenomenal
aspects of social life also contribute to conflict (see Collins, 1985 for more
information on the conflict theorists).
New perspectives emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, which further developed sociological understandings of how culture relates to institutions, and

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

therefore how culture contributes to conflict. Contributions from theorists
associated with the “practical turn” in sociology, like Pierre Bourdieu and
Anthony Giddens, began to present culture as symbolic resources that mediate an individual’s relationship to institutions. Symbolic resources, according
to these theorists, refer to the understandings and social statuses that people gain from participating in institutions such as education, the arts, or the
labor force. These symbolic resources link individuals to institutions; they
provide people with the ability to make sense of and act within the world. In
addition to enabling action, these authors contend, symbolic resources also
constrain action because they limit the ways that people can make sense of
situations. Because a person can only draw upon symbols (or meanings) that
are available to them, and because they develop habituated ways of interpreting those symbols, in any given situation some courses of action will appear
to be possible, while others will not even occur to them. Bourdieu and Giddens can each be characterized as deploying inequality-based approaches
because they conceptualize culture as inseparably linked to the material and
socioeconomic conditions. The habituated ways in which people interpret
symbols primarily corresponds to their objective position within a broader
set of relations, such as an economic class.
The emphasis that Bourdieu and Giddens each place on culture as symbolic resources yields a focus on symbolic conflict, or, as Bourdieu (1998)
calls it, “symbolic violence.” Conflict here does not refer to physical violence (although clashes can turn physically aggressive) so much as it does
to people’s struggles over symbolic resources that enable them to interpret
and act within the world. For example, in Distinction, Bourdieu (1984) investigates how competition between French social elites helps shape class-based
antagonisms in French society as a whole. He argues that the upper strata of
French society develop particular likes and dislikes—leisure activities, membership to clubs, the food they like—which distinguishes them from the “vulgarity” of lower strata. The more exclusive these upper class tastes appear,
the more valuable they become, because tastes are not harmless preferences
but are symbolic resources that enable people to act, and thus act as powerful processes of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, the distinguishable
taste and lifestyles that emerge out of economic stratification are not only
by-products of inequality, but they are also sites of contestation and struggle
in their own right.
In sum, as with the earlier inequality-based approaches, Bourdieu and
Giddens did not attribute causality to culture in and of itself, although their
emphasis on how symbolic resources mediate between a person’s place in
the world and how he or she acts in the world provided an important link for
other scholars to do so. By the 1990s, some sociologists and political scientists
altered the view of how culture is related to conflict. Rejecting the premise

Cultural Conflict

5

of inequality-based approaches and associated claims that culture corresponds directly to material or socioeconomic conditions, these researchers
considered culture to be systems of belief that exist independently from the
social conditions in which they originate. It is this separation of culture from
underlying conditions that marks a shift away from studying conflict using
inequality-based approaches and toward using value-based approaches.
In other words, once culture was viewed as independent of other factors,
researchers began imbuing it with independent causal attributes.
VALUE-BASED APPROACHES TO CULTURAL CONFLICT
Cultural conflict, as we commonly understand it today, refers to accounts of
contentious relationships between people, groups, or nations, in which culture, not underlying material or socioeconomic inequalities, causes conflict
to occur. Researchers deploying these approaches make several assumptions
that shape their investigations. First, they assume that culture, as systems of
beliefs, has become detached from material conditions (e.g., Hunter, 1991;
Hunter, 2006; Huntington, 1996). In this sense, culture has become a reality
unto itself. Second, researchers base their work on the premise that recent
societal changes have led to culture eclipsing material conditions as the
primary cause of conflict. In this sense, antagonisms exist between people
because they adhere to different cultural systems, not because they possess
competing class interests. Aligned with these assumptions, the primary goal
of researchers is to understand how differences in belief contribute to conflict.
Value-based approaches to the study of cultural conflict often are accounts
of societal battles, whether domestic or global, between culturally polarized
groups. For example, in Culture Wars, James Davison Hunter (1991) investigates political discourse in the United States and argues that two competing
cultural views of morality have emerged in the United States since the end
of the Cold War. Hunter contends that these two views of morality, religious
conservatism and a secular progressivism, are so entrenched in party politics that each has decoupled from the material or socioeconomic conditions
in which they originated. As a result, the United States has become permanently polarized between two general groups. At a global level, authors like
Samuel Huntington (1996) use a value-based approach to discuss irresolvable
differences between entire civilizations—in this case, Western and Islamic
civilizations.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
Value-based approaches to cultural conflict are currently the subject of
intense debate across various disciplines, such as sociology, political science,

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

history, and cultural studies. While policy experts and the public seem
to savor accounts of cultural conflict for their simplicity, it is this very
simplicity that is at the heart of academic critiques of such work. Many
scholars challenge value-based accounts of cultural conflict as tautological
and empirically unsupported. Some take their criticism further by doing
empirical work in order to test the propositions presented in value-based
accounts. This section explores these critiques in more detail, highlighting
several of the most significant arguments and responses related to the debate
over the culture wars thesis. I then present new research that represents a
move away from value-based approaches.
DEBATING VALUE-BASED APPROACHES
Criticisms. The advantage of value-based approaches is that they provide
simple and provocative accounts of cultural conflict that allow authors to
make strong causal claims. The downside is that while the explanations
are appealing for their clarity, they can easily become tautological when a
researcher presents the presence of difference between categorically distinct
groups or populations as the cause of continued division. This is because,
conflict, as an eruption between people who adhere to irreconcilably
different sets of values, then serves as an indicator of that difference. It
produces a situation in which it is nearly impossible for researchers to
distinguish between the aspects of culture that are presumed to contribute
to occurrences of conflict and the aspects of culture that are asserted to be
consequences of such conflict.
Besides pointing to the tautological reasoning used to make these arguments, many scholars challenge the empirical claims used to support
accounts of cultural conflict. The most popular (i.e., most frequently cited)
challenges to the culture wars thesis tend to analyze large-scale opinion
surveys such as the General Social Survey (GSS) to test whether Americans
are actually polarized along moral issues. For example, Paul DiMaggio,
John Evans, and Bethany Bryson (1996) argue that researchers often mistake
the appearance of polarization as expressed in political and media rhetoric
as representing differences in what the general public actually believes.
Analyzing GSS data, they test whether Americans are polarized along a
number of social and moral issues such as the role of women in the public
sphere, acceptance of racial integration, and abortion. They find that on
all accounts except abortion, Americans are not nearly as polarized as the
culture wars thesis suggest.
Alan Wolfe (1998) also analyzes GSS data in combination with his own
qualitative interviews with middle-class Americans about their views on
social issues such as religion, patriotism, family, racial discrimination, and

Cultural Conflict

7

sexuality. With the exception of homosexuality, he also finds that accounts
of culture wars have been greatly exaggerated. Instead, he argues that most
middle-class Americans are pragmatically minded and willing to support
traditional values in some manner while also supporting the expansion of
rights and increased social acceptance of discriminated groups. Fiorina,
Abrams, and Pope (2010) conducted a similar investigation using opinion
poll data to examine whether most Americans are more likely to be politically moderate or extreme ideologues. These authors find that there is a
strong trend toward Americans being politically moderate.
In response to his critics, Hunter (2006) argues that his conception of culture
as public discourse operates at the collective level and not that of personal
belief. Therefore, he suggests, anyone using individual-level data not only
misses the point of his argument but is also incapable of testing the accuracy of his thesis. Yet Hunter’s response draws attention to another limitation of his approach. He may not only be mistaking political and media
rhetoric as representing differences in what the general public believes, he
also assumes that people act upon the discourses that are conveyed in that
rhetoric. Whether people draw upon a particular discourse during the course
of action is an empirical question, not one that can simply be implied. For
example, political ads often present candidates as polar opposites. An ad
might attempt to scare viewers by saying that a Democratic candidate is
going to raise their taxes, socialize their healthcare, and grant amnesty to
undocumented immigrants who have come into their country. The same ad
might present the Republican candidate as fiscally responsible, committed to
competition in the marketplace, and willing to do what it takes to preserve
border security. The question for researchers is: What does the meaning conveyed in this ad represent? Hunter’s error is that his approach encourages
researchers to interpret the difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates made in this ad as representative of what the broader US
public believes. He further compounds this error by claiming that the polarization demonstrated in this type of ad has become permanent; that based
on their adherence to particular moral systems, people will continue to act
in ways that perpetuate this cultural conflict. Had Hunter revised his claims,
to state that the discursive patterns he identifies are just that, discursive patterns, and not proof that cultural systems have become, in his own words,
sui generis, then we would be having a different discussion altogether.
Emerging Alternatives. Had Hunter limited his claims and matched them to
the type of data he collected, more likely than not, his work would resemble
George Lakoff’s Moral Politics. Lakoff (2002), who uses a value-based
approach, presents the cultural divide between Democrats and Republicans

8

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as relating to competing moral systems. He identifies both “liberal” and
“conservative” ideological positionings as radial categories (or umbrella
concepts) and then searches for a coherent organization that runs throughout
each. He concludes that the moral differences between liberals and conservatives can be reduced to people adhering to different understandings
of the family. Liberals apply a “nurturing parent” model of the family to
their broader political beliefs (implicating a role for programs providing
a social safety net), while conservatives do the same with a “strict father”
model (emphasizing self-reliance over social provision to those in need).
The main difference between this argument and the culture war thesis is
that Lakoff limits his discussion to the discursive systems. He also makes
it clear that people can use either model in various ways. In this sense,
Lakoff acknowledges the diversity of opinion within each radial category
and also remains open to the possibility that people could move between
the different models. So, rather than making claims about a new form of
permanent polarization in US politics, Lakoff provides us with the analytical
tools to examine how miscommunication and breakdown in dialogue occurs
between liberals and conservatives.
Moving past the dichotomy between value-based approaches and
inequality-based approaches, scholars today are investigating the relationship between cultural conflict and other historically significant social
divisions that occur along economic, racial, religious, linguistic, or educational lines. Notably, these scholars are doing away with the assumption
that polarization occurs along one central cleavage. Instead, by investigating
how different moral views or contrasting cultural beliefs map onto existing
social differences, these scholars are able to develop understandings of how
conflict develops along multiple, smaller cleavages. For example, Claude
Fischer and Greggor Mattson (2009) review claims made between 1970 and
2005 to understand whether America is becoming more polarized, or using
their terminology, more fragmented. While they find little support for claims
that fragmentation is increasing along racial or ethnic lines, they argue that
there is a widening gap in social class—whether measured by educational
attainment or income. Furthermore, they contend that Americans are
becoming more concentrated in “little worlds” defined by contrasting ways
of life.
Scholars researching institutions are also actively challenging the assumptions made in value-based approaches, namely, that belief alone determines
action. For example, Amy Binder and Kate Wood (2013) set out to understand how two groups of people with similar political ideologies can engage
in very different styles of political action. Comparing conservative political
clubs at two US universities, they find that the universities themselves have

Cultural Conflict

9

distinct institutional cultures that help shape the political action of conservative students on each campus. This speaks to the situated nature in which
political action takes place. People do not act only in response to a single cultural system, but are nested within various institutions, organizations, and
social relationships that shape action to varying degrees.
Political scientists are developing new accounts of how polarization occurs
amongst political parties. For example, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2005)
question whether we should view Democrats and Republicans as mirror
images of each other. Treating each party as a distinct community, or what
they refer to as separate social configurations, they find that political polarization is increasing, but that it is due largely to changes in the Republican
Party, not the Democratic Party. More specifically, they argue that during
George W. Bush’s presidency, a slim majority of the Republican Party gained
control and pushed the party’s agenda further to the political right, while
Democrats maintained their previous political positions. Research in this
mode demonstrates quite clearly that researchers should not view cultural
conflict as equally created by “both sides,” but rather that we must view
political and organizational interests, and sources of power, as central to the
discussion.
Lastly, in what is perhaps the most promising of recent approaches, sociologist Rogers Brubaker (2013) compares how language and religion, as significant domains of cultural activity, each lead to political conflict. To do so,
he first compares each domain of cultural activity to see how they are similar and different. Second, he compares the ways in which particular activities
that regulate private behavior within each domain become manifested within
political claims addressing such matters as gender, sexuality, family, education, social policy, and economy. Investigating liberal societies, he argues
that linguistic pluralism has become a less significant source of political conflict in recent times, whereas, religious pluralism has become more deeply
institutionalized and increasingly politicized, which has begun to lead to
more robust forms of diversity and political conflict. Brubaker’s work further demonstrates the usefulness of comparing various domains of cultural
activity in order to understand the relation of culture to conflict.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
As I have argued here, scholars developed the value-based approaches to
cultural conflict in the 1990s in order to understand how cultural beliefs contribute to contentious relationships between people, large-scale groups, organizations, and civilizations. Ironically, the major contribution and limitation
of these value-based approaches is that they analytically severed the link

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

between culture and structural conditions. By viewing culture as an independent system, value-based conflict theorists presented themselves as able to
assess the independent causal attributes of culture leading to the occurrence
of conflict. However, as indicated by the large body of criticism being waged
against value-based accounts of cultural conflict, they go too far toward one
logical extreme. Researchers cannot isolate culture as an independent causal
factor that is detached from all material or socioeconomic conditions without making questionable epistemologically claims that decreases the usefulness of their investigations. In other words, the simplified accounts provided
by scholars deploying value-based approaches have the potential of obscuring our understandings of how conflict occurs in today’s world. Specifically
value-based approaches to cultural conflict limit our understandings of how
culture relates to conflict because:
Culture is always seen as causing conflict. Scholars can only observe causation as unidirectional. They cannot reverse the causal order or investigate the possibility of a dialectic relationship between culture and conflict.
Existing cultural differences are always seen as causing conflict and then
the occurrence of that conflict is seen as reinforcing those preexisting
cultural differences. This not only leads to tautological explanations,
it also discourages scholars from investigating how instances of conflict between cultural groups can lead to the emergence of new cultural
forms.
Conflict is always seen as occurring along one central cleavage. This
assumption prevents scholars from considering the possibility that
more than two cultural groups are involved in a conflict. This assumption also obscures smaller, more fragmentary, cleavages that may
occur.
Cultural groups are viewed as homogeneous communities. This encourages scholars to negate the possibility of internal divisions leading to
internal conflicts that are either resolved, persist, or lead to the formation of new cultural groups or subgroups.
Cultural differences, and therefore cultural groups, are always presumed
to exist before the occurrence of conflict. This can lead to misidentifying
cultural groups that have emerged during a conflict as having existed
before the conflict.
These limitations must be taken seriously if scholars are to develop new
insights and understandings of cultural conflict. This does not mean eliminating concepts such as cultural conflict; it simply suggests that scholars need
to revaluate how they consider culture within their investigations of conflict.

Cultural Conflict

11

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE STUDY OF CULTURAL CONFLICT
The studies presented in this entry speak to the challenges of studying
conflict. Scholars emphasizing material or socioeconomic conditions often
neglect how culture, in the forms of peoples’ understandings of the world,
leads to disagreements and contentious relationships between groups. At
the same time, researchers granting primacy to culture as an independent
causal force, independent from material or socioeconomic conditions, go
too far in the other direction by assuming culture to be the most significant
factor driving conflict. Scholarship in this area could benefit from taking
the middle ground between inequality-based and value-based approaches
and attempt to develop comprehensive approaches that account for both
structural and cultural factors.
The challenge to developing a comprehensive approach (or approaches)
is that it requires researchers to do away with particular assumptions about
how culture relates to material or socioeconomic conditions. Researchers
should not assume that culture is epiphenomenal, nor should they consider
it to be completely independent. In other words, whether material and
socioeconomic conditions or culture lead to conflict is not a zero-sum proposition. Instead, whether underpinning social conditions, culture, or some
linkage between the two leads to conflict should always be an empirical
question. It is plausible that structural factors will seem more significant in
some instances but not others, and the same for culture.
Researchers must also do away with the belief that identifiable cultural
groups actually represent homogeneous communities. The degree of homogeneity, solidarity, sense of commonality, or even degree of connectivity
between members, must also be an empirical question. One way to do this
is to initially conceptualize cultural groups as broad categories such as
“Democrat” or “Republican.” Then, whether researchers read accounts of a
particular categorical group or conduct their own field research, they can
begin to characterize the degree to which the people associated with a category are actually a group (Brubaker 2004). Doing so will lead to empirically
grounded understandings of the relationships and dynamics in and between
“groups” of people, as well as the salience that particular categories have
in their lives. This should not only prevent researchers from jumping to
conclusions about whether a broader political discourse represents a cultural
group or not but it also challenges researchers to consider people as more
multidimensional. Individuals do not belong to a single cultural group; they
are nested within numerous cultural groups. With this complexity in mind,
researchers need to understand how individuals become involved in some
cultural conflicts but not others.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

After doing away with these old assumptions about the relation between
material or socioeconomic conditions and culture, in addition to the assumption that cultural groups are homogeneous, there are four areas of research
that promise to provide new insights and understandings of how culture is
related to conflict.
Constructing longer chains of succession between culture and conflict.
If culture can contribute to the occurrence of conflict, and conflict can
produce new cultural understandings and practices, then we need
long-term empirical cases that follow development of various cultures
and conflicts as they relate to each other.
Investigating the ways that people participate in particular conflicts and
how those experiences affect their participation in others.
Studying the relationship between smaller conflicts (or cleavages) in order
to understand if there are broader, more central conflicts. How do temporary alliances in smaller conflicts either tell us about those smaller
conflicts or speak to the presence of a broader, more pervasive conflict?
Examining internal conflicts within a cultural group. How do contentious
relationships within a cultural group lead to the emergence of new
groups or subgroups?
Pursuing these research agendas will be much easier if scholars engage
in cross-disciplinary dialogue. This not only means engaging in discussions
across the humanities and social sciences, it also means reaching out to others
in the technological sciences in order to develop new data collection methods. The more types of information scholars can bring in, the better they will
be at understanding how culture contributes to conflict. For example, sociologists are beginning to partner with computer scientists to develop new
techniques that can collect vast amounts of information from the Internet in
an instant. While few sociologists know how to write a program for doing
this, few computer scientists would know how to interpret that information
sociologically. Together they can produce new modes of data collection that
will open new areas of investigation. Through these joint efforts, scholars are
sure to develop new understandings and insights into the relation between
culture and conflict.
REFERENCES
Abbott, A. (2004). Methods of discovery: Heuristics for the social sciences. New York, NY:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Binder, A., & Wood, K. (2013). Becoming right: How campuses shape young conservatives.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cultural Conflict

13

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice,
Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Brubaker, R. (2013). Language, religion and the politics of difference. Nations and
Nationalism, 19(1), 1–20.
Collins, R. (1985). Four sociological traditions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
DiMaggio, P., Evans, J. H., & Bryson, B. (1996). Have American’s social attitudes
become more polarized? American Journal of Sociology, 102(3), 690–755.
Fiorina, M. P., Abrams, S. J., & Pope, J. C. (2010). Culture war?: The myth of a polarized
America (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Longman.
Fischer, C. S., & Mattson, G. (2009). Is America fragmenting? Annual Review of Sociology, 35, 435–455.
Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2005). Off center: The republican revolution and the erosion of
American democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hunter, J. D. (1991). Culture wars: The struggle to define America. New York, NY: Free
Press.
Hunter, J. D. (2006). The enduring culture war. In E. J. J. Dionne & M. Cromartie
(Eds.), Is there a culture war?: A dialogue on values and American public life. Washington DC: Brookings Institute Press.
Huntington, S. P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New
York, NY: Touchstone.
Joas, H., & Knöbl, W. (2009). Social theory: Twenty introductory lectures. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think (2nd ed.). Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C. W. (1951). White collar: The American middle classes. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. New York, NY: Free Press.
Parsons, T., & Shils, E. A. (1951). Toward a general theory of action. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Wolfe, A. (1998). One nation, after all: What middle class Americans really think about god,
country, family, racism, welfare, immigration, homosexuality, work, the right, the left, and
each other. New York, NY: Viking Penguin.

IAN MULLINS SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ian Mullins is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California,
San Diego. He researches conservative politics in Southern California and the
history of explanation in sociology. http://sociology.ucsd.edu/graduate/
Mullins.shtml; http://ianmmullins.com

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

RELATED ESSAYS
Mediation in International Conflicts (Political Science), Kyle Beardsley and
Nathan Danneman
Culture and Cognition (Sociology), Karen A. Cerulo
Micro-Cultures (Sociology), Gary Alan Fine
Culture and Social Networks (Sociology), Jan A. Fuhse
Group Identity and Political Cohesion (Political Science), Leonie Huddy
Herd Behavior (Psychology), Tatsuya Kameda and Reid Hastie
Culture and Movements (Sociology), Francesca Polletta and Beth Gharrity
Gardner
Curriculum as a Site of Political and Cultural Conflict (Sociology), Fabio Rojas
Economics and Culture (Economics), Gérard Roland
Production of Culture (Sociology), Vaughn Schmutz and Candace N. Miller
Culture and Globalization (Sociology), Frederick F. Wherry



Media

Cultural Conflict