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otherwise arbitrary signs and symbols are made meaningful via their grounding in embodied experience and their web of positively and negatively charged interrelations. The relevance of this conception of culture to collective action is perhaps best captured by Weber, who conceived of the social influence of ideas in his famous metaphor of a railway "switchman." Here the social forces that influence collective action only do so insofar as they are interpreted, collectively, in terms of meaningful symbols and binary oppositions that, like switchmen, "determine the tracks along which action has been pushed" (1946: 280). Emotive, interrelated symbols-not brute social and economic forces-channel thought and direct groups toward, or away from, action. 1 The transcripts record the stewards' speech in excruciating detail. What may appear to be errors in transcription in the portions quoted below are in fact verbatim and correct. 2 It is interesting to not the co-occurence of emotive metaphors (of fighting and violence) with discussion of social solidarity. The question of how this Durkheimian finding of "effervescent" symbols reinforcing social bonding is socially constituted may be a worthwhile topic of future research (e.g. Ignatow 2007).
Ignatow, Gabriel.Metaphoric Analysis of a Shipyard Union Dispute: Theory and Method in the Cultural Analysis of Collective Action,
chapter,
February 2009;
[Farnham, United Kingdom].
(https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc78308/m1/24/:
accessed April 25, 2024),
University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu;
crediting UNT College of Arts and Sciences.