Integrating Cultures: An Introduction

In Sociology, the concept of formal model of culture refers to “an output from a quantitative study of collected data that seeks to describe, explain, interpret, or otherwise represent some feature, aspect, or content of culture. As a model, the output has been transformed into a summary or a representation (in reduced form) of the data that purports to be analogous (in some fashion) to the phenomena under consideration” (Mohr and Rawlings 2010). However, different disciplines in the Social Sciences take a very different approach to culture and to its influence in social behaviour. Thus it is difficult to compare and integrate the different models that are used in social science. It is also not easily possible to establish a reference model to which all the other models can be compared, because the requirements for such a reference model are very diverse, not precise and not agreed upon. Besides that the concept of culture is very abstract and vague and thus it will be impossible to give a model containing all relevant concepts (an ontology) explaining all possible relations and influences culture has on society. Therefore we advocate a more limited approach in this volume.