Professor Dress
87
was too unconventional, and may have involved too much (and, of course,
conflicting) culture.
Table 2: Incidence Percentages by Condition
Condition
Trials
Incidence
Tie
28
11.5%
No tie
36
5.0%
floral
13
4.5%
Non-Floral
51
8.7%
No Floral or tie
25
5.9%
Floral and tie
12.5%
Attire and Cultural Distance
Attire is one aspect of culture, which also includes dance and music,
medicine and food, floral arrangement and architecture, and much else in
between. Because the term is so far-reaching, and because it has been
understood to mean something “super-individual” and amorphous, the idea of a
Cultural Sociology was long ago considered impossible (Abel, 1930). However,
culture need not be seen as something amorphous and incalculable. Rather,
culture can be counted, and measured (Black, 1976:63). It can even be used
geometrically, to locate social actors or agents, as well as to identify distances
between them. Various aspects of this approach—its epistemology of pure
sociology (Black 1979, 1995), its explanatory strategy of social geometry (Black
1990:854, 1995:851), and its theory of social control (Black, 1976)—have been
used to study a wide range of settings, including executives (Morrill, 1995), the
mentally ill (Horwitz, 1984), children in a day-care center (Baumgartner, 1992),
and even reality show interactions (Godard, 2004).
Black has theorized two types of cultural distance, resulting from variations
in amount and in degree of conventionality. Black uses these distances to predict
legal behavior, variation in the application of law (1976:3) In the first type, legal
action is greater in a direction towards less culture—such as from a professor
towards a student—rather than the reverse (Black, 1976:65). In the second type,
law is greater in a direction towards less conventionality—such as from a
professor towards a palm reader—than towards more (Black, 1979:69).
Professors are thus more likely to apply law against a student or palm reader,
than either would against a professor. Professors, then, have theoretically high
immunity to law, due both to their high cultural quantity and their relative
cultural conventionality. Moreover, both the predictions about law and the
summary expectation of professorial immunity are enhanced as cultural distance
increases: A professor would be even more immune from legal complaints by an
elementary school student. But law varies inversely with other forms of social
control (1976:9), all of which are explained with the same body of theory. A
professor with maximal cultural distance from potential complainants might thus
be more exposed to gossip, ridicule, or simply avoidance.
This body of t