Do we need a concept of culture?

The social sciences face four enduring problems in understanding and explaining behaviour. First is how to account for both continuities and change over time within societies. Second is to explain the connection between microlevel changes and the larger, macro level. Third, and related, is how to explain the connection between individual decisions and the aggregate behaviour of a society as a whole. Fourth is the relationship between the hard facts of the social world and the way in which these are interpreted by people. Several chapters of this book broach these issues. Methodological individualism focuses on the individual and seeks to account for collective behaviour as the sum of individual actions. Chwaszcza's chapter shows how this is done through game theory, but also the limitations of this form of explanation. Pizzorno takes a different approach, by locating the individual within society in a set of reciprocal understandings. Kratochwil argues that our understanding of the world is shaped by the conceptual apparatus that we use.

This chapter seeks to make the link through the concept of culture. Cultural explanations of social phenomena go directly to the collective level, they are essentially social and in many respects (but not quite all) they represent a challenge to methodological individualism. They also seek to bridge external explanation, by reference to the social world, and internalist explanations, which rely on individual interpretation and decision.