Introduction: Structures, institutions, and cultural analysis

doi:10.1016/S0304-422X(00)00002-4

Poetics

Volume 27, Issues 2–3, March 2000, Pages 57-68

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-422X(00)00002-4 Get rights and content

Abstract

The papers in this special issue are introduced as exemplars of a new structuralist project in cultural analysis. The work is situated with respect to two sociological traditions, social network analysis which lends a style of structuralist methodology and the new institutionalism which provides a conception of institutions as objects of analysis. The problem of structural duality is highlighted, both in terms of how it relates to the study of institutional logics and in terms of the structuralist methods that can be used for analyzing mutually constitutive orders of institutional systems.

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This is crucial, not the least, because the consequences of interplay between cultural patterns and social ties, scattered across time and space, often evade researcher’s eyes, which makes formal and statistical analyses essential (de Nooy, 2009; Crossley, 2010; Basov, 2020). Such analyses demand structural data on culture as having an “equal weight” to social network structure (Mohr, 2000). Up until now there has been a lack of approaches that would draw on in-depth qualitative inquiry into cultural context to produce structural data for explanatory analysis of how this context and social ties constitute each other.
What social ties are and how they operate depends on the cultural context constitutive of their meaning. Pursuing an explanatory account for the cultural embeddedness of social ties, we draw on Verstehende sociology and rely on in-depth insight into subjective perceptions developed by social network actors throughout their practice to represent symbolic and material contexts of social ties structurally. We put forward a new mixed data collection and processing approach that ethnographically maps interconnected three-layer socio-cultural networks of individuals, signs, and material objects. Opening cultural contexts to application of formal and statistical techniques, this approach allows for an 'interpretive explanation' of social ties. Illustrating the approach with our own longitudinal study of five European art groups, we discuss the peculiarities of three-layer socio-cultural data collection and processing, the new discoveries enabled, the challenges encountered, the solutions we came up with, and the utility of this approach for conducting 'Verstehende network analysis' in various fields of application.
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To explicate our claim regarding the notion of the formal instability of bridging vs. bonding capital, we draw on the Simmelian notions of duality of person and group used by Breiger (1974) and inspirational to Mohr. Following Breiger's classic work on persons and groups (1974, also see 2000), Mohr (2000; for examples, see Breiger & Mohr, 2004; Mohr & Duquenne, 1997; Mohr & Friedland, 2008) proposed that the core principle of duality was fundamental for sociological theorizing. This approach can also be used to clarify the dynamics of social capital, starting with the issue of bridging social capital.
We here bring together two different traditions of thinking about social capital. One, the Tocquevillian, looks to associations and group memberships as the core of social capital. The other, the Colemanian, looks to interpersonal networks as the core of social capital. We argue that the most common way of articulating how humans use these types of relationships in different ways—the distinction between “bridging” and “bonding” social capital—is epistemically unstable. What might be possible, however, is to use the insights developed by Ronald Burt regarding tie non-redundancy to study associational social capital. We do this by drawing on the insights of the approach consistently adopted and developed by John Mohr, which emphasizes duality and diversity, to develop measures of group affiliation-based social capital. We accordingly, for both Tocquevillian and Colemanian social capital, distinguish measures that focus on the mass of social capital from those that focus on its diversity. To illustrate, we use de-identified data from 77 Million U.S. Facebook Groups users to measure their degree of all resulting types of social capital. We show that our understanding of who has the most social capital varies greatly by whether we are considering Tocquevillian or Colemanian capital, and whether we are focusing on mass or diversity.
Cultural logics: Toward theory and measurement
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Researchers have increasingly used the concept of “logics” to study and explain cultural phenomena. Yet aside from the institutional logics perspective – which mostly focuses on organizations and uses a neo-institutional framework – there has been little guidance on how to define and measure logics. Examining fifty years of research, I find that analysts have tended to theorize and operationalize logics in two conflicting ways – as organizing principles for decision-making and/or as well-reasoned justifications. I propose a new definition of logics, as shared, internalized, cognitive structures which are fundamentally evaluative in nature, and distinguish them from other cultural constructs like “frames” and “schemas.” I advocate for a measurement strategy in which logics are operationalized as an evaluation with a unique set of criteria, with each criterion having a particular importance as well as direction of importance. I then provide some practical guidelines for collecting and analyzing data on logics. I illustrate the potential of this approach in two cases studies: a qualitative case using simulated college admissions decisions, and a quantitative case using original data on views toward poverty. I find evidence for previously-overlooked distinctions between liberals’ and conservatives’ bases for poverty policy support, revealing the power of a logics approach.
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The goal, then, is to assign each word a single vector such that the “gradedness in distributional representations correlates with gradedness in semantic phenomena” (Boleda, 2020, p. 228).8 Inferring a word's meaning by summarizing its (linguistic) context aligns with relational theories of meaning—pioneered by John Mohr (Kirchner & Mohr, 2010; Mohr, 1998, 2000), along with Pierre Bourdieu, Ron Breiger, Ann Mische, Harrison White, Viviana Zelizer and many others (Mische, 2011; Pachucki & Breiger, 2010; Zelizer, 2012)—as well as pragmatic, embodied, connectionist, and practice-theoretic approaches to cultural learning (Arseniev-Koehler & Foster, 2020; Ellis, 2019; Erk, 2016; Glenberg & Robertson, 2000; Ignatow, 2007, 2016; Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lizardo, Sepulvado, Stoltz, & Taylor, 2019; Strauss & Quinn, 1997). Accordingly, social scientists are beginning to use word embeddings (e.g., Boutyline, Arseniev-Koehler, & Cornell, 2020; Hofstra et al., 2020; Jones, Amin, Kim, & Skiena, 2020; Linzhuo, Lingfei, & Evans, 2020; Ornaghi, Ash, & Chen, 2019; van Loon & Freese, 2019).
Using the frequency of keywords is a classic approach in the formal analysis of text, but has the drawback of glossing over the relationality of word meanings. Word embedding models overcome this problem by constructing a standardized and continuous “meaning space” where words are assigned a location based on relations of similarity to other words depending on how they are used in natural language samples. We show how word embeddings are commensurate with prevailing theories of meaning in sociology and can be put to the task of interpretation via two kinds of navigation. First, one can hold terms constant and measure how the embedding space moves around them—much like astronomers measured the changing of celestial bodies with the seasons. Second, one can also hold the embedding space constant and see how documents or authors move relative to it—just as ships use the stars on a given night to determine their location. Using the empirical case of immigration discourse in the United States, we demonstrate the merits of these two broad strategies for advancing important topics in cultural theory, including social marking, media fields, echo chambers, and cultural diffusion and change more broadly.
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2020, Poetics
The social and the cultural orders are dual – that is, they constitute each other. To understand either we need to account for both. Socio-semantic network analysis brings together the study of relations among actors (social networks), relations among elements of actors’ cultural structures (their semantic networks), and relations among these two orders of networks. In this introductory essay, we describe how the duality of the social and semantic networks that constitute each other, as well as other related dualities (including material / symbolic, micro / macro, computational / qualitative, in-presence contexts / online contexts, ‘Big’ data / ‘thick’ data), have evolved in recent decades to mold socio-semantic network analysis into its present form. In doing so, we delineate the current state of the art and the main features of socio-semantic network analysis as highlighted by the papers included in this Special Issue. These articles range from in-depth analysis of ‘thick’ data on small group interactions to automated analysis of ‘Big’ online data in contexts extending from Renaissance parliamentary discussions to cutting-edge global scientific fields of the 21^st century. We conclude by delineating current problems of and future prospects for socio-semantic network analysis.
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Modern advances in transportation and communication technology from airplanes to the internet alongside global expansions of media, migration, and trade have made the modern world more connected than ever before. But what does this bode for the convergence of global culture? Here we explore the relationship between centralization in social networks and contraction or collapse in the diversity of semantic expressions such as ideas, opinions and tastes. We advance formal examination of this relationship by introducing new methods of manifold learning that allow us to map social networks and semantic combinations into comparable hyperbolic spaces. Hyperbolic representations natively represent both hierarchy and diversity within a system. In a Poincaré disk—a two-dimensional hyperbolic embedding—radius from center traces the position of an actor in a social hierarchy or an idea in a semantic hierarchy. Angle of the disk required to inscribe connected actors or ideas captures their diversity. We illustrate this method by examining the relationship between social centralization and semantic diversity within 21^st Century physics, empirically demonstrating how dense, centralized collaboration is associated with a reduction in the space of ideas and how these patterns generalize to all modern scholarship and science. We discuss the complex of causes underlying this association, and theorize the dynamic interplay between structural centralization and semantic contraction, arguing that it introduces an essential tension between the supply and demand of difference.

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Introduction: Structures, institutions, and cultural analysis

Abstract

Transcending general linear reality

Sociological Theory

Class and committees in a Norwegian island parish

Human Relations

Mythologies

Elements of semiology

Relations into rhetorics

Social structures from multiple networks: II. Role structures

American Journal of Sociology

Blockmodeling complex statues: Mapping techniques based on combinatorial optimization for analyzing economic legislation and its stress points over time

Economics Letters

Family and social network

Outline of a theory of practice

The duality of persons and groups

Social Forces

The social class structure of occupational mobility

American Journal of Sociology

Social mobility and social structure

Structural holes: The social structure of competition

Extracting culture through textual analysis

Poetics

Structuralism: The art of the intelligible

Cultural capital and school success: The impact of status culture participation on the grades of U.S. high school students

American Sociological Review

Structural analysis of organizational fields

Cultural capital, educational attainment and marital selection

American Journal of Sociology

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields

American Sociological Review

Manifesto for a relational sociology

American Journal of Sociology

Bringing society back in: Symbols, practices and institutional contradictions

Social organization of an urban grants economy

Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social theory

Insurgent identities: Class, community, and protest in Paris from 1848 to the commune

Getting a job: A study of contacts and careers

Structural models: An introduction to the theory of directed graphs