From my first quarter at the University of Chicago, in the Fall of 1968, I was taken by the complexity of the conversation about "culture" that anthropology, in concert with other disciplines, had conducted over more than a century. I have never let go of this concern with culture theory and have continued publishing some of my ethnographic work to contribute directly to it.

Published Works of relevance to culture theory

forth	"The Production of Difference in Interaction: On Culturing Conversation through Play" in IADA proceedings (with the collaboration of Mary Cotter )
2006	"Reconstructing Culture in Educational Research" in Innovations in educational ethnography , ed. by G. Spindler and L. Hammond, 3-31. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (with Ray McDermott)
1998	"Diversity as American cultural category." in Democracy and difference, ed. by C. Greenhouse. State University of New York Press.
1998	Successful failure: The School America build (with Ray McDermott). Boulder, CO: Westview.
1996	"Culture, development, disability" (with McDermott, R. P.) in Ethnography and Human Development, ed. by R. Jessor, A. Colby and R. Shweder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1995	"Culture as disability" Anthropology and Education Quarterly (with McDermott, R. P.), 26: 324-348.
1995	"The social facting of education: Dukheim's legacy." in Journal of Curriculum Studies, 27: 373-389.
1992	"America and I." in American Culture: Outsiders Looking In, ed. by J. Armstrong and P. DeVita, 29-38. Wadsworth Publishing Co.
1989	"A Confusion of Signs: The Semiosis of Anthropological Ireland," in Semiotics, Self and Society, ed. by G. Urban and B. Lee, 121-152. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
1987	"Talk and Real Talk: The Voices of Silence and the Voices of Power in American Family Life," Cultural Anthropology 2: 369-394. "Analytic Ambiguities in the Communication of Familial Power," in Power through Discourse, ed. by L. Kedar, 129-151. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.
1984	"Collective Representation in American Anthropological Conversations about Culture: Culture and the Individual," Current Anthropology 25: 281-300.
1981	"Family, Language and Education: The Sociolinguistic Model of Restricted and Elaborated Codes," Social Science Information 20: 187-228. (with C. Hill) "A New Direction in Community Studies: One French Village--Three Books," Reviews in Anthropology 8: 105-119.
1978	"Culture as Rhetoric: The Patterning of the Verbal Interpretation of Interaction between Teachers and Administrators in an American High School," American Ethnologist 5: 635-650.