Ann Swidler

Swidler argues that culture supplies habits, skills, symbols, stories, and styles that people use to build strategies of action. She presented this influential account in the 1986 article "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies."

During settled periods, people draw selectively on familiar cultural habits without continually rethinking their worldview. During unsettled periods, explicit ideologies can organize action more forcefully because established routines no longer provide sufficient guidance.

Her toolkit model rejects a simple chain in which people first adopt values and then act on them. It asks which cultural resources people possess and how they assemble those resources into practical strategies.

Swidler was one of the five co-authors of Habits of the Heart, published in 1985. The book used interviews to examine American individualism, relationships, civic commitment, and the moral languages people use to describe their lives.