How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as "collective representations"-vocabularies, symbols, or codes-that structure people's abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of "group style," showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter collective representations. The result is "culture

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... in interaction," which complements research in the sociology of emotion, neoinstitutionalism, the reproduction of inequality, and other work, by showing how groups put culture to use in everyday life. Communication is at the core of recent scholarship in the sociology of culture. Culture, this current work says, is a set of publicly shared codes or repertoires, building blocks that structure people's ability to think and to share ideas. A society's collectively held symbolic system is as binding and real as a language (see, e.