Knowledge and Culture in a Globalized World

In this panel, we focus on the role of knowledge, culture and its complex interrelations for explaining social phenomena. Any given research project in the social or political sciences today is unlikely to not touch upon at least one of the terms, since both have continually increased in importance and today are crucial categories for understanding societies in a globalized world. Sociological attention to the role of knowledge is fairly recent, yet terms like “knowledge society” or “expert knowledge” are already widely used today. Culture has been a frame of analysis for much longer, and while primarily used in an anthropological sense in its formative years, the sociology of culture has since continually widened its scope. The term has been adopted by such diverse fields as research in globalization, communication or studies on organizations, and in this panel we shall employ it for such diverse concepts as epistemic cultures or knowledge cultures, organizational cultures, cultural economics and so on.

Which definitions for knowledge and culture can be used, and how are they to be operationalized in a research design? In what ways can they be employed as dependent or independent variables in a quantitative design? From an epistemological viewpoint, is there a micro-macro divide in reflections on knowledge and culture? How do specific types of knowledge pan out in a research design – scientific knowledge, tacit knowledge, religious knowledge and so on? What types of knowledge cultures are there, and in what ways are acquisition, treatment and transferal of knowledge influenced by a person’s cultural background? 

Culture and knowledge and its interrelations will thus serve as focal points in the four discussion panels. We will discuss how to introduce, operationalize and maintain a perspective on knowledge and culture in a research design, putting a strong focus on the participants’ research projects. Our panel speakers will discuss theoretical and empirical approaches and give practical examples from their work, relating to issues such as the use of concepts in a cross-cultural research design, epistemological questions on micro and macro or how to tackle the issue of causality in a field of complex and overlapping variables. Aimed at doctoral candidates of qualitative and quantitative methodological backgrounds alike, this module aims to equip participants with a deeper understanding of concepts of knowledge and culture, and to discuss their roles and possible challenges for participants’ research projects.