Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)

IV. Die Eisenbahn-Technik / Railway-technics - Manfred E. A. Schmutzer: Iron Rules Rule Iron Rails. Cultures and Their Technologies

N. Elias, himself no adherent of Parsonian Theory, shows with rich historical evidence that social and cultural developments are intrinsically linked.'

P. Bourdieu proceeds in the same manner even if his arguments and empirical material are quite distinct.* 6

F. H. Tenbruck enriches this perspective by stressing the trivial observation that societies are not homogeneous, but in themselves divided by division of labour. This points once more to a plurality of lifestyles within one particular society and destroys at the same time the meaningfulness of regional differentiation.7

The sociology of science and of knowledge adds evidence by rediscovering the work of L. Fleck, who demonstrated the cultural and social loadedness of cognition and theories even in scientific research.8

Quite independently of these scholars M. Douglas in the sixties and seventies developed her grid-group analysis which was enriched by Cupertino and others and is nowadays marketed under the label of Cultural Theory. In Douglas’s own words the content of this approach may be characterised in the following manner:

The guiding assumption is that judgments of value emerge as justifications of distinctive forms of organization. [...] Furthermore, that there is only a limited number of possible organizations, and also that each develops its own cultural set, a cognitive and moral bias that contributes to reflexivity to the social organization, affects conceptions of time and space, and the functioning of memory.9

Cultural Theory surpasses most of the previously mentioned contributions insofar, as it aims at a reduction and classification of possible factions resulting from the division of labor. It achieves this by doing what system-theorists of any brand - from biology to mathematics - do when characterizing systems: They focus attention on two variables, on the control of external borders and on internal structure.

The first of these variables is labeled “group” and the second one “grid“. Invoking thus the principle of parsimony a fourfold scheme results, which was surprisingly often

Iron Rules Rule Iron Rails. Cultures and Their Technologies

' E 1 i a s, Norbert: Überden Prozess der Zivilisation. Frankfurt am Main 1976 (Orig. 1969).

6 Bourdieu: Die feinen Unterschiede.

7 Tenbruck, Friedrich H.: Die kulturellen Grundlagen der Gesellschaft. Der Fall der Moderne. Opladen 1989.

8 Fleck, Ludwik: Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Frankfurt am Main 1980 (Orig. 1935).

9 D o u g 1 a s, Mary; gridgroup.listserv, March 10, 1998

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