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In contrast to these working-class men, many white-collar professionals work in environments where the daily behaviors of those around them conform to the success model more than daily behaviors on the factory floor
conform to this model. For these professionals, then, their daily observations and social practices reinforce explicit ideological learning in regard to the cultural model for success. For them, in contrast to the working-class men
Strauss studied, the success model, not the breadwinner model, is seen as “an inescapable fact of life,” and, thus, for them, this model determines not just their self-esteem, but many of their actual behaviors.
The working-class men Strauss studied are, in a sense, “colonized” by the success model we are all, in fact, ‘‘colonized” by a good many cultural models that have come to us without much reflection on our part about how
well they fit our interests or serve us in the world. They use it, a model which actually fits the observations and behaviors of other groups in the society, to judge themselves and lower their self-esteem. But, as we have seen, since
they fall to identify themselves as actors within that model, they cannot develop the very expertise that would allow and motivate them to practice it. In turn, they leave such expertise to the white-collar professionals, some of whom
made the above worker work on Sunday against his own interests and wishes. On the other hand, many of these white-collar professionals fail to see that their very allegiance to the success model is connected to their failure to be
substantive actors in their families or larger social and communal networks.
4.6 Different sorts and uses of cultural models
What Strauss’s work leads us to see is that we need to distinguish between cultural models based on how they are put to use and on the effects they have on us. We can distinguish between, at least, the following sorts of cultural
models in regard to these issues:
l
Espoused models, that is models which we consciously espouse;
l
Evaluative models, that is models which we use, consciously or unconsciously, to judge ourselves or others;
l
Models-in-interaction, that is models that consciously or consciously guide our actions and interactions in the world.
Furthermore, cultural models can be about “appropriate” attitudes, viewpoints, beliefs, and values; “appropriate” ways of acting, interacting, participating, and participant structures; “appropriate” social, cultural, and institutional
organizational structures; “appropriate” ways of talking, listening, writing, reading, and communicating; “appropriate” ways to feel or display emotion; “appropriate” ways in which real and fictional events, stories, and
histories are organized and end, and so on and so forth.
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Cultural models are complexly, though flexibly, organized. There are smaller models inside bigger ones. Each model triggers or is associated with others, in different ways in different settings and differently for different
socioculturally defined groups of people. And, we can talk about “master models,” that is sets of associated cultural models, or single models, that help shape and organize large and important aspects of experience for particular
groups of people, as well as the sorts of Conversations we discussed in Chapter 2.
It is not uncommon that cultural models are signaled by metaphors Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980. Very often people are unaware of the full significance of these metaphors, which usually have come to be taken for
granted. Sometimes these metaphors are connected to “master models” in the sense that the tacit theories they imply are used widely to organize a number of significant domains for a given culture or social group.
Consider, in this respect, Naomi Quinn’s studies on how people talk about marriage and divorce Quinn 1987; Strauss and Quinn 1997: Chs 6 and 7. Quinn finds that people organize a good deal of their thinking, acting, and
interaction around marriage and divorce in terms of a small set of interlocked metaphors, e.g. ‘‘marriage is a form of effortful work like a job” or “marriage is an investment like investing money.” For instance, consider the
following remark by a woman, whom Quinn calls “Nan,” talking about why she would not leave her marriage Quinn 1987: 176:
Why in the world would you want to stop and not get the use out of all the years you’ve already spent together? Notice that Nan makes a series of metaphorical equations here. She equates marriage with time spent in it. The
phrase “time spent” here, then triggers the well-known metaphor in our culture: “time = money,” so that time spent in marriage is being treated as an “investment” of time like an investment of money. In terms of the investment
metaphor, if we invest moneytime, we are entitled to a “return.” So, according to this model, it is silly not to wait long enough, having made an investment, to see it “pay off” and be able to “get the use out of” the timemoney that
has been invested rather like a retirement fund.
The whole idea of seeing things like effort and time as “investments” that will “pay off” is a master cultural model that is used widely across a number of significant domains. Here it is being used to talk about marriage, but the
same model crops up in talk about careers, children, education, and so forth.
Metaphors are a rich source of cultural models, though, of course, most cultural models are not signaled by metaphors. Another example of a cultural model signaled by a set of metaphors is the way in which many people in
our culture treat argumentation as a form of warfare: e.g. “she couldn’t
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defend her argument,” “I defeated his argument,” “she retreated from her claims,” “he wouldn’t give up his claim,” “she marshaled her evidence,’’ etc. This can become a master model, as well, when people begin to extend it to
think about personal, institutional, and political relationships, as many, in fact, do.
4.7 Cultural models can be partial and inconsistent
