The crucial pages constructing 'culture' in terms of the individuals learning and transmitting. These are the protypes of the statements about culture that all of my work has attempted to counter-act.
Patterns of value-orientation have been singled out as the most crucial cultural elements in the organization of systems of action. It has, however, been made clear at a number of points above that value-orientation is only part of what has been defined as culture. Before entering into a more detailed consideration of the nature of value systems and their articulation with the other elements of action, it will be useful to attempt a somewhat more complete delineation of culture than has yet been set forth.
THE PLACE OF VALUE-ORIENTATION PATTERNS IN THE ORGANIZATION OF CULTURE
Culture has been distinguished from the other elements of action by the fact that it is intrinsically transmissible from one action system to another from personality to personality by learning and from social system to social system by diffusion. (p. 159)
This is because culture is constituted by "ways of orienting and acting," these ways being "embodied in" meaningful symbols. Concrete orientations and concrete interactions are events in time and space. Within the personality these orientations and interactions are grouped according to the need-dispositions denoting tendencies which the concrete orientations and interactions exhibit. Within the society they are grouped according to roles and role-expectancies denoting requirements which the concrete orientations and interactions both stipulate and fulfill. Both need-dispositions and role-expectancies are, in another sense, postulated entities, internal to personalities, and internal to social systems, controlling the orientations which constitute their concrete referents. As such, they cannot either of them be separated from the concrete actions systems which have and exhibit them. A need-disposition in this sense is an entity internal to a personality system which controls a system of concrete orientations and actions aimed at securing for the personality certain relationships with objects. A system of role-expectancies is a system of need-dispositions in various personalities which controls a system of concrete mutual orientations and interactions aimed by each actor at gaining certain relationships with other social objects, and functioning for the collectivity in which it is institionalized to bring about integrated interaction. In either case, the postulated entity is internal to and inseparable from the system of action which it helps to regulate. Cultural objects are similar to need-dispositions and role-expectations in two senses: (1) since they are way of orienting and acting, their concrete referent consists in a sec of orientations and interactions, a set which follows a certain pattern. (2) In another sense cultural objects are postulated entities controlling the orientations which constitute their concrete referents. However, unlike need-dispositions and role-expectations, the symbols which are the postulated controlling entities in this case are not internal to the systems whose orientations they control. Symbols control systems of orientations, just as do need-dispositions and role-expectations, but they exist not as postulated internal factors but as objects of orientation (seen as existing in the external world along side of the other objects oriented by a system of action). (p. 159-60)
Because of the internal character of need-dispositions and role-expectations, they cannot exist, except insofar as they represent actual internal (structural) factor in some concrete action system.
This holds both for elemental need-dispositions and role-expectations and for complex patterned need-dispositions and role-expectations (these being complex structures of the simplex ones). Elemental symbols are similarly tied to concrete systems of action, in the sense that no external embodiment is a symbol unless it is capable of controlling certain concrete orientations in some action systems. (This means that each elemental symbol must have its counterpart in terms of need disposition on the part of an actor to orient to this object as a symbol, and thus m orient in a certain way wherever this symbol is given.) On the other, hand, a complex "manner of orienting" (which can be termed either a complex cultural object or a complex symbol, the two terms meaning the same thing) can be preserved is an external symbol structure even though, for a time, it may have no counterpart in any concrete system of action. That is, symbols, being objectifiable in writing and in graphic and plastic representation, can be separated from the action systems in which they originally occurred and yet preserve intact the "way of orienting" which they represent for, when they do happen to be oriented by an actor (to whom each element meaningful) they will arouse in him the original complex manner of orientation. (p. 160)
the punch lines: note the emphasis on "same" and the conclusions: symbols, though externalized, have the same status as "expectancies" and "dispositions" as entities internal to personalities and social systems (see above)
By the same token, a complex external symbol structure[...] can bring about roughly the same type of orientation in any or all of the actors who happen to orient to it.
And since the concrete referent of the symbol is not the external object but rather the "way of orienting" which it controls, we may say that complex symbols are transmissible from actor to actor (i.e., from action system to action system). That is, by becoming a symbol, a way of orienting can be transmitted from one actor to another. [...] Thus symbols differ from need-dispositions and role expectations in that they are separable from the action systems in which they arise, and in that they are transmissible from one action system to another. Both of these differences derive from the fact that they have external "objective" embodiments, rather than internal "unobservable" embodiments. On the other hand, insofar as they ways or patterns of orienting and acting and insofar as their concrete referent is a set of orientations (which follow a pattern, or better, of which the pattern is an ingredient), they have exactly the same status as role-expectancies and need-dispositions. (p. 160-1)
[...]
We have already suggested that a "way of orienting" may be exemplified not only at different times within the same personality system, but also within different personality systems and this may be a systematic and not a random occurrence if the various persons within whom the way of orienting occurs controlled by the same complex symbol system.
Thus, we say, symbolization allows "interpersonalized" generalization. It is this very capacity fo”interpersonal-generalization" which is the essence of culture. And, in turn, this capacity is the prerequisite of its crucially important role in system of action; for it implies the transmissibility of ways of orienting from person to person, and hence a dimension of development which is known only rudimentarily among nonhuman species of the biological universe. In other words, communication, culture, and systems of human action are inherently linked together. (p. 162)
[...]
The consistency of pattern of such a system will exist to the extent to which the same combination of value judgements formulated in these terms runs consistently throughout the actors' responses to diferent situation ... A type of moral system then will be characterized by the dominance in all major types of situation of a particular pattern-variable combination. (p. 172)
This final sentence, for me, is a direct echo of a quote from
Dewey I have always found most objectionable (1966
[1916]: 4-5)