Culture as Sensemaking

This chapter outlines the Semiotic Cultural Psychology Theory (SCPT). SCPT defines culture as the dynamics of sensemaking enacted by a social group defined by common participation in a given environment (e.g. a territory, a system of action, a communication setting). Such a dynamics of sensemaking is channelled by embodied, generalised, affect-laden meaning (Symbolic Universes, according to the SCPT terminology) that are active within the cultural milieu. The SCPT view of culture leads us to focus on the processes of interpretations through which social actors shape, react and act upon the socio-political, institutional and economic reality as well as on the way the symbolic fields generated by these processes shape their form, in a recursive semiotic dynamic. Emphasis is placed on how the focus on the recursive linkage between sensemaking and symbolic fields enables us to go beyond the essentialist and descriptive view of the role of culture in society and economy as well as to bridge micro and macro levels of analysis.