Terence E. McDonnell

McDonnell here offers some startling new ways to think about propaganda, specifically about health campaigns. He uses HIV/AIDS media campaigns in Ghana as his case, laying out efforts to control and organize how local communities make sense of the disease. Using media to change people s sexual practices involves evidence-based design, opinion leaders in the design process, and getting all organizations behind a single message. But these campaigns hardly ever work. Why? They are subject to cultural misfires: they are disrupted by misinterpretation and misuse. Enter cultural entropy this concept identifies a process through which intended meanings and uses of propaganda (and other cultural objects) fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. The book shows with exquisite ethnographic details how the AIDS media campaigns succumb to cultural entropy: e.g., how people turn female condoms into bracelets, AIDS posters go missing from public postings and become home decor, and red ribbons fade into pink ribbons under the sun. Cultural entropy is a disruption process that affects things as well as symbols. Cultural entropy offers a new explanation for the failure of AIDS campaigns specifically and modern interventions broadly."

Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns

Best Laid Plans

We see it all the time: organizations strive to persuade the public to change beliefs or behavior through expensive, expansive media campaigns. Designers painstakingly craft clear, resonant, and culturally sensitive messaging that will motivate people to buy a product, support a cause, vote for a candidate, or take active steps to improve their health. But once these campaigns leave the controlled environments of focus groups, advertising agencies, and stakeholder meetings to circulate, the public interprets and distorts the campaigns in ways their designers never intended or dreamed. In Best Laid Plans, Terence E. McDonnell explains why these attempts at mass persuasion often fail so badly. McDonnell argues that these well-designed campaigns are undergoing “cultural entropy”: the process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. Using AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana, as its central case study, the book walks readers through best-practice, evidence-based media campaigns that fall totally flat. Female condoms are turned into bracelets, AIDS posters become home decorations, red ribbons fade into pink under the sun—to name a few failures. These damaging cultural misfires are not random. Rather, McDonnell makes the case that these disruptions are patterned, widespread, and inevitable—indicative of a broader process of cultural entropy.

Christopher A. Bail

Frederick F. Wherry

Iddo Tavory

John W. Mohr

Margaret Frye

Jennifer C. Lena

Omar Lizardo

Ann Mische

Social scientists seek to develop systematic ways to understand how people make meaning and how the meanings they make shape them and the world in which they live. But how do we measure such processes? Measuring Culture is an essential point of entry for both those new to the field and those who are deeply immersed in the measurement of meaning. Written collectively by a team of leading qualitative and quantitative sociologists of culture, the book considers three common subjects of measurement—people, objects, and relationships—and then discusses how to pivot effectively between subjects and methods. Measuring Culture takes the reader on a tour of the state of the art in measuring meaning, from discussions of neuroscience to computational social science. It provides both the definitive introduction to the sociological literature on culture as well as a critical set of case studies for methods courses across the social sciences.

Measuring Culture

Terence E. McDonnell

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