Most sociologists seem to believe that meaning-making is at the center of cultural sociology (e.g., Spillman 2020). But I have never encountered a coherent definition of what meaning-making is supposed be. It is mostly an empty signifier that stands in for all sorts of overlapping concepts—e.g., narrative, habitus, classification, repertoire, norm, script, preference, skill, belief, value, prototype, perception, representation, etc.
The idea of meaning-making is somehow more ambiguous than the concept of culture. It cannot be the center of gravity for an entire subfield and we should really consider getting rid of it altogether.
In the meantime this how I have to come to make sense of meaning-making.
Anything that can be described as an expressive activity produced within some authoritative “cultural” domain, such as art, music, film, literature, dance, and so on.
This is not what most most cultural sociologists have in mind when they think of meaning-making. But it is what the production of culture perspective is all about (Peterson and Anand 2004).
Information-processing.
We hear some spoken message, we smell something. We then react quickly, perhaps unconsciously, on the basis of some habitual way of seeing things that is grounded in personal experience. In other words, we interpret a stimulus via categorization and association (Goldberg and Singell 2024).
Is that thing a bird? Or is it a plane? This is categorization (Rosch 1975). In turn, the bird can elicit all sort of “connected” concepts, such as food, disease, sacred, dinosaur, and so on. This is semantic association.1
Purpose.
“Meaning” is also something people try to find as they go around “making sense” of their everyday lives and the choices the make.
Sociologists usually take one of two common approaches. First, the meaning-as-motive approach seeks to understand action in terms of goals and values. Second, the meaning-as-justification approach focuses on understanding the reasons people give to why-questions. The former finds the “true springs of action” in motivational concepts (e.g., desires, interests, values), whereas the latter sees “meaning” as something that works retroactively (e.g., narratives, accounts).2
So we have two different ways of thinking about “purpose” that do not always overlap: cause and reason.
Note. The meaning-as-motive approach should not be deny the importance of “habits” or “unawareness.” Motives do not have to operate consciously to be causal (Vaisey 2009).
In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to “be aware” of it in a vague sense than he is to “know” what he is doing or be explicitly self-conscious about it. In most cases his action is governed by impulse or habit. Only occasionally and, in the uniform action of large numbers, often only in the case of a few individuals, is the subjective meaning of the action… brought clearly into consciousness. The ideal type of meaningful action where the meaning is fully conscious and explicit is a marginal case.
Weber (1978, pp. 21–22)
If you combine information-processing and meaning-as-motive you end up with a modern rendition of Max Weber’s (1978) interpretative sociology. This should be the actual “center of gravity” for cultural sociologists.