Semiotic Shifts: How Culture Shapes Religious Students’ Navigation of a Secular Institution (under review)

Abstract: A central debate in cultural sociology is how culture shapes action. I advance scholarship on this question by theorizing how strategies of action evolve in the face of semiotic shifts, which occur when people enter institutional contexts and encounter new meanings for their preexisting beliefs.

I draw on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 49 interviews with conservative Protestant students attending an elite, secular university to empirically demonstrate how variation in forms of religious culture links to divergent strategies of action.

When religion takes the form of common sense, the dominant institutional culture brings about a semiotic shift and students’ distance from and reckon with their faith.

When religion takes the form of tradition, religious subculture brings about a semiotic shift and students bridge secular and religious meanings and spaces. Finally, when religion takes the form of ideology, students reject new semiotic axes and burrow into religious subcultures.

Bringing cultural and institutional theorizing into dialogue, this paper deepens our understanding of how culture matters as individuals learn to navigate new organizational contexts.