Introduction: Structures, institutions, and cultural analysis

Introduction: Structures, institutions, and cultural analysis

POETICS ELSEVIER Poetics 27 (2000) 57-68 www.elsevier.nl/locate/poetic Introduction: Structures, institutions, and cultural analysis John W. M o h r...

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POETICS ELSEVIER

Poetics 27 (2000) 57-68 www.elsevier.nl/locate/poetic

Introduction: Structures, institutions, and cultural analysis John W. M o h r * Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9430, USA

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. © 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

I. Introduction The papers assembled here signal the emergence of a new structuralist project in cultural analysis. Like previous structuralist movements, proponents share a commitment to the idea that analysis must focus on relations rather than objects, and a concern with identifying deeper, underlying structural patterns that find expression in surface level cultural forms (see Caws, 1988). But these papers are different, both theoretically and methodologically, from the more traditional structural analyses typified by the work of Claude Lrvi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, or Michel Foucault. Perhaps most obviously, the research is more mathematically oriented and data driven. In part, this reflects the fact that the authors are embedded within the intellectual tradition and methodological habitus of contemporary American social science where these practices are highly prized. However, this is not the whole story. The methodological orientation of these authors is an extension of the network *

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analysis tradition. It is distinctively structuralist in nature, and quite different from the more probabilistic linear model approach which characterizes most quantitative social science. The analytical goal of this style of research is (1) to map out the pattern of relations which link cultural elements together as either similar or different and, (2) to analyze the resulting pattern in such a way as to be able to discern the deeper organizing principles that generate meaning structures (see Mohr, 1998). At its best, the resulting analytic technology can serve to bring together the interpretative insights of a good semiotician with the hypothesis testing replicability of a formal scientist. But this is not simply the old structuralism wrapped up in a new 'high tech' package. There are important theoretical differences as well. In contrast to the traditional structuralist understanding of culture as discourse, the authors represented here have a number of altemative theories of culture. While there is still little consensus on this issue, many of the authors share a connection with or have been influenced by the new institutionalism in American sociology. For these scholars, the objects of investigation are conceived to be institutions and their underlying logics rather than texts, ideologies, or social structures. Institutions are understood from this perspective to be historically contingent sets of social arrangements, shaped by power, politics, historically specific path dependencies, and the inertial effects of institutionalized forms of knowing and acting (see the essays collected in Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). The institutions are governed by logics which are composed of both meanings and practices, both interpretations of reality and the social structures that order it, and each is seen to be co-constituted by the other (Friedland and Alford, 1991). Grounded as it is in the principles of practice theory (Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1979; Ortner, 1994), this conceptualization shifts the focus away from the study of disembodied texts toward the analysis of key institutional principles. It also changes the methodological focus, pushing scholars to adopt dualistic methodologies that look for the connections that link multiple domains together, the subjective with the objective, the cultural and the practical, the more interpretative with the more social structural dimensions of social life. In this introductory easy I briefly trace out the intellectual lineages of social network analysis and the new institutionalism, and show how the two traditions have come together in the papers collected here to produce something new, a project that might best be described as a structural institutionalism. Like earlier structuralist endeavors, the work is important because it holds out the promise of linking recent advances in social scientific theory and method to the types of insight oriented cultural interpretations that are an inevitable and necessary component of the human sciences.

2. Social networks and structural analysis Many of the authors in this special issue have made their careers in the field of scholarship known as social network analysis. Network analysis emerged as an identifiable interdisciplinary community of research scholars in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Mullins, 1973). Its principal focus is on the measurement of social networks

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which are conceived to be communities of individuals (though sometimes organizations, groups, or even nation-states are analyzed) which are connected to one another by various types of relationships. These connections (or ties as they are referred to in the literature) can include social interactions (asking advice, going to lunch, marrying), cognitions (likes, dislikes, respects) or, as in the study of organizational linkages, shared institutional locations (legal affiliation, market position, professional identification). Ties can be measured as present or absent, strong or weak, positive or negative, bi-directional or unidirectional. Information regarding the ties that link a group of social entities together provides the foundation for structural analysis. Researchers analyze the pattern of ties (the relations of the relations) in order to identify structural properties of the network. In this respect, network analysis closely parallels the analytical theory that motivated classical structuralism. The linkage between the two traditions is, however, somewhat obscure. There are some common ancestral figures such as Cassirer. ~ Cross fertilization also occurred though it was often conducted at ann's length. This is especially apparent in the early work of Harrison White. White, who is a contributor to this special issue, was a founder of the social network approach who has remained one of the field's key proponents and personalities over the years. 2 With a background in mathematics and physics, White became intrigued by a reference in a mathematics textbook to Andr6 Weil's methodological appendix to L6viStrauss (1949) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Taking up the problem posed there, White went on to to develop a more precise algebra for analyzing kinship roles that made use of the kinds of relational information that L6vi-Strauss had employed in his structuralist theory of marriage rules (White, 1963a,b). Shortly thereafter, White began working with Franqois Lorrain, a Harvard graduate student who also had ties to Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss. One outcome of this relationship was a collaboration (Lorrain and White, 1971) that led to the development of a very important line of research on the theory and measurement of structural equivalence (White et al., 1976; Boorman and White, 1976).

Lacob Moreno's (1934) invention of the 'sociogram' for mapping out the system of relations that linked a small number of individuals in group therapy is often credited as the origin of modem network analysis. But a number of other streams of research were influential. The anthropological study of social relationships, especially as represented in the work of L6vi-Strauss (1969a) and Nadel (1957) was instrumental in establishing the linkage between the formal mathematics of relational algebras and the analysis of social structure. The work of British urban anthropologists such as Barnes (1954) and Bott (1957) was significant because they sought to measure urban social networks and to demonstrate their impact on social life. Theoretically, the work of Lewin was important because he sought to develop an approach to empirical research that would capture the essence of Cassirer's 'relationism' (see Emirbayer, 1997). The resulting 'field theory' of social relations was reworked in graph theoretics terms by Harary et al. (1965) and brought into the heart of network theory. See Mohr (forthcoming) for a fuller discussion of this lineage. 2 While a professor of sociology at Harvard during the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, White trained a core group of network scholars and developed numerous key theoretical and methodological innovations (including, for example, blockmodelling and the theory of structural equivalence). Several of the authors in this special issue (Bearman, Breiger, DiMaggio and Pattison) were significantly influenced by White while working, training or visiting at Harvard during these years.

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In spite of these kinds of early connections, however, network analysis and French style structuralist scholarship went in two very different directions. In France, much of the most important work came to focus on the structural logic of discourse systems, taking off, as it were, from L6vi-Strauss's analysis of myth (1963, 1969b) and developing into a full blown interpretive science of semiotics as represented for example, in the work of Roland Barthes (1967, 1972). In contrast, network analysts have traditionally been wary of this type of interpretative endeavor. Network ties and the structural logic that they embody were often seen to be the real foundation of social processes, while cognitions, interpretations, and other subjective states were more likely to be viewed as determined by and thus derivative of this objective social order. Indeed, network scholars have often taken a certain epistemological comfort in their embrace of ties as a primary source of data, especially when their analysis is based entirely on the presence or absence of socially observable interactions. This inclination toward empiricism in the gathering of data, coupled with the commitment to formal scientific procedures, and a heavy reliance on mathematical logic as a basis for interpretation certainly suggests a strong positivistic current. However, it is also important to point out that, at least within the context of American social science, networkers have also cherished a certain outlaw status. They have consistently embraced a radical relationism and have been critical of what they perceive to be the atomistic individualism that is presupposed by more mainstream quantitative methodologies. As a result, network scholars have traditionally been a relatively insular community. Like Macintosh computers users in a DOS driven world, they have founded their own journals, congregated at their own conferences, and developed their own software packages. An important benefit of this isolationism was the creation of an intellectual milieu that encouraged a certain focus and commitment to a relatively limited set of theoretical and methodological problems. 3 During the 1970s and 1980s, network scholars identified, isolated, and solved a whole host of critical intellectual problems that enabled them to build up a strikingly robust methodological machinery for tackling the formal analysis of relational structures. The publication of Wasserman and Faust's (1994) textbook documenting the range of network analytic problems and solutions is a good marker of the sophistication that the field had achieved by that date.

3 In this sense, network scholars have in some ways resembled the kind of scientific communities that characterize the natural or physical sciences. A striking indication of this tendency was the repeated use over the years of a relatively limited set of classic network datasets, In part this practice is a reflection of the methodological focus and scientific ethos of the field. But it also says something about the remarkable portability of network data that derives from the fact that the phenomena lends itself to an analysis of relatively small communities of individuals (though it is also true that researchers have been constrained to study smaller networks because analytic complexity increases exponentially as the size of the network increases). Moreover the data themselves can often be easily summarized in a relatively small matrix. It is thus not unusual to see scholars publishing their entire dataset as an appendix to a research article. These matrices are also distributed along with software packages and republished as, for example, the appendices in Wasserman and Faust's (1994) text.

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But the accomplishments were not only technical in nature. Throughout this period of time, network scholars were applying relational technologies to the analysis of significant social scientific problems and showing that structuralist interpretations yielded powerful new insights. These endeavors include the work of White (1970) on vacancy chains, Granovetter (1974) on the employment process, Breiger (1981, 1990) on occupational mobility, White (1981) on market structures, Boorman and Levitt (1983) on complex legal statutes, Galaskiewicz (1985) on the nonprofit sector, DiMaggio (1986) on organizational fields, Lauman and Knoke (1987) on policy domains, Mizruchi and Schwartz (1987) on organizational interlocks, White and McCann (1988) on scientific innovations, Burr (1992) on economic competition, Padgett and Ansell (1993) on Italian politics during the Renaissance, Bearman (1993) on the origins of capitalism, and Gould (1995) on political mobilizations leading up to the Paris Commune. Many other examples could be cited. The cumulative effect of these developments was that by the early 1990s, network analytic ideas emphasizing the importance of relational perspectives began to be widely accepted and diffused within American sociology? At the same time, and more importantly for the current story, a number of network scholars began to feel constrained by the limitations of the social networks project. 5 Once again, Harrison White was a trend-setter. In his book Identity and control (1992) White unabashedly embraced cultural (as well as many other) intellectual influences. While still structuralist in orientation, the realist and empiricist bent of traditional network scholarship was jettisoned in favor of a far more complex and free-flowing interchange of ideas. White's comments on his adoption of this new perspective are instructive. In an essay published a few years later he wrote: " M y theme proper is that mathematical and interpretative approaches should become indispensable to one another, partly because of this increasing scope and flexibility of mathematics ... It is equally evident that, in avoiding and sidestepping the interpretative - and thus any direct access to the construction of social reality - mathematical models have come to an era o f decreasing returns to effort. Another way to say the same thing is that interpretative approaches are central to achieving a next level of adequacy in social data ..." (White, 1997: 57-58). In his contribution to this special issue, White puts this agenda into practice. Arguing that economists have constructed an enormous fiction in their explanation of market behavior, White proposes an alternative research agenda based on his understanding of markets as socially constructed systems of discourse. Drawing on linguistic theory and an updated conception of social networks as being enacted through shared systems of understanding. White shows how structuralist principles

4 One marker of the growing acceptanceof the network approach was the incorporationof a 'network' module in the 1985 VORC General Social Survey. The response to network analysis should not, however, be taken out of context. It was also true that there was an increasing level of reflexive skepticism about quantitative methodologies within the profession as a whole (witness, for example, Abbott's critique of 'General Linear Reality' (1988)). 5 Some early examples of this trend include Bearman (1993), Carley (1994), and Mohr (1994). See Mohr (1998) for a more complete review.

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can be used to reformulate the empirical study of production markets. In doing so he does not turn his back on the insights of formal mathematics. Rather he shows how a more genuinely relational formal analysis might be employed to analyze the actions of firms and markets that are constituted by the shifting character of discourse streams. If White's essay illustrates the kinds of projects that begin to come into focus when network theory is linked to cultural analysis and applied to significant social scientific questions, the Bearman and Stovel paper offers a more precise illustration of the kinds of analytic work that can be accomplished when network tools are redeployed to analyze cultural materials. Bearman and Stovel take as their data a set of life stories told in 1934 by early joiners of the German Nazi (NSDAP) Party. They analyze one of these stories by transforming it into a network in which every discrete element of the narrative is represented as a node which is connected to other nodes by the narrative clauses within the story. A tie exists between two nodes whenever one narrative element 'leads to' another. Once the narrative has been rendered in network form its structural characteristics are easily revealed. Bearman and Stovel make a number of interesting discoveries in the process. They show, for example, the sub-narrative about 'becoming' a Nazi is notably different from the sub-narrative concerning 'being' a Nazi, a difference which they explain in terms of the shifting character of personal identity that is involved in this transformation. They are also able to demonstrate how certain kinds of meanings (chaos, order, anti-Semitism, and so on) have very different structural functions within the two types of narratives. One of the striking features of the Bearman and Stovel paper is the richness of the theoretical interpretation within which the analysis is embedded. Questions about the nature of identity, social action, and the intrinsic narrativity of social existence are all brought to the fore. This is not an idiosyncrasy of Bearman and Stovel's research. On the contrary, as we have already seen in the work by Harrison White, the network scholars who are making the move toward culture are by and large doing so out of a frustration with the limitations of an over-simplified model of social structure. It is the pursuit of a more adequate and satisfying theoretical framework that drives these projects. Indeed, a large part of what makes the articles in this special issue so interesting is that each reflects the attempt of its authors to solve a larger and more complex theoretical conundrum.

3. Institutions, logics and duality While there is as yet no consistent or coherent overarching theoretical agenda which characterizes this new structuralist project, there is a certain emergent commonality of interest in the study of institutions and their logics. It is at this juncture that a second strand of recent sociological research comes into play. The interest in institutions is, of course, a longstanding concern of sociologists. But it is the particular approach of the 'new institutionalists', especially those associated with the field of organizational analysis, that is relevant here. The new institutionalism began to take shape in the late

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1970s and early 1980s. Unlike social network analysis, the new institutionalists have always been concerned with the study of culture and meaning. Indeed, it was in reaction to the unapologetically realist orientation of the dominant organizational projects such as resource dependency theory that the new institutionalism found its footing. The article that is generally acknowledged as having started it all was entitled 'Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony' (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). In this essay the authors argued that an important part of organizational life had to do with the spinning of carefully orchestrated representations of reality. This essay and a number of others published during this period by John Meyer and his colleagues were important because they pointed the way toward a style of organizational research that was fully sensitive to the complex interplay of cultural and social structural dualities, while at the same time, preserving the model of quantitatively oriented empirical research. Over the years the new institutionalism has developed into one of the most important and intellectually rich research paradigms in American sociology.6 In part this is due to the fact that the research has tended to stay focused on 'big picture' types of questions such as how particular institutions come into existence and how they change. But it is also due to the fact that practitioners have continued to work away at thorny theoretical problems such as how meanings and practices, cultural forms and social structures are co-constitutive of one another, and they have done so within the framework of a quantitatively oriented style of empirical research that is highly valued within American social science. It is from here that the notion of an institutional logic has emerged as a key research topic. As specified in the classic essay by Friedland and Alford, an institutional logic consists of "a set of material practices and symbolic constructions" (Friedland and Alford, 1991: 248) which provide the organizing principle for a given institutional domain. While this formulation has stimulated a good deal of interest the question of how to go about actually measuring and analyzing institutional logics remains very much an open issue. This is the topic that DiMaggio and Mullen take up in their contribution to this special issue. Although he has long been peripherally involved in the field of social network analysis, DiMaggio is more well known for his seminal contributions as a new institutionalist.7 In the paper published here, DiMaggio and Mullen are far less obviously 'structuralist' in their methodologies than are most of the other contributors. But the paper nonetheless fits with the broader research agenda represented here because, like so many of the other authors, the central focus concerns the establishment of an empirical approach to the study of institutional logics which recognizes that any such endeavor demands an appreciation of the relations which inhere between multiple orders of social phenomena. 6 For a survey of some of the more importantworks in the field see Powell and DiMaggio(1991). For a samplingof more up to date works, see Powell and Jones (forthcoming). 7 Amongother contributionsDiMaggioco-authoreda classic paper with Powell (1983) on institutional theory and also served as co-editor with Powell of the (1991) volume which effectivelyinstitutionalized the project.

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The paper focuses on the events of National Music Week in 1924. Using data on types of celebrations that occurred in 419 different cities and towns spread across the United States, DiMaggio and Mullen raise the question of how the kinds of civic rituals that occurred in these localities reflected (and constituted) alternative institutional logics. They focus on three analytical dimensions - the types of actors involved (churches, schools, recreational associations, professional groups, etc.), the types of actions taken (lectures, slide show, recitals, parades, etc.), and the objects of action (or types of audiences) that were targeted (children, members of particular church or ethnic communities, the general public, etc.). What they discover is that there were clear differences in the ways in which communities organized their ritual activities. Some rituals were constructed in such a way as to ratify the existing social order while others were organized so as to draw citizens into either a broader civic mass public or into alternative corporate identities. In the process, DiMaggio and Mullen lay out in an especially lucid fashion a number of challenging methodological and theoretical dilemmas that must be confronted by any researchers seeking to study the character of institutional logics. One of the most critical issues in the analysis of institutional logics concerns the structural analysis of dualities. A hallmark of the structuralist project was the development of methodological tools for analyzing social structures as relational constructs in which no single object, person, or network node would have significant meaning outside of its embeddedness within a broader system of relationships. This same analytical ideal can also be applied to the study of institutions but doing so involves recognizing that neither culture nor social structure, system of meaning nor mode of practice, should be privileged in the analysis. Rather these multiple orders of social life need to be given equal weight and each should be seen as being constituted by its embeddedness within the other. This is the problem of the duality of culture and practice (Mohr and Duquenne, 1997). A formal approach to the study of dualities was introduced by Ronald Breiger (1974) in his analysis of the relation between individuals and groups. In his contribution to this special issue Breiger extends his analysis to the study of structural dualities in the sociology of culture. Breiger's paper works at a number of different levels. On the one hand, he provides one of the best discussions that can be found of the theory and practice of analyzing structural dualities. He does this by comparing and contrasting the methodology of Galois lattices with correspondence analysis (as utilized, for example, by Bourdieu) and the formal logic of James Coleman's 'mathematics of social action'. Breiger applies each technique to a case study of the ideological and structural locations of the nine justices on the United States Supreme Court as expressed by their professional behavior between 1991 and 1993. In this context he explains the assumptions, usages, and interpretative implications of these three dualistic techniques in a clear and practical way. But Breiger actually does a great deal more than this in his paper. He also makes an explicit linkage between the French structuralists as represented in the work of Bourdieu and the American structuralist tradition of social network analysis as represented in the work of Coleman and shows that there are important and unrecognized similarities between the two traditions as well as some surprising differences. In the process he draws our attention to the

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theoretical implications of statistical practices. Breiger persuasively demonstrates that what we are able to know about the social world is shaped at a very fundamental level by the kinds of techniques that we employ for seeing and representing that world. The problem of analyzing the duality of culture and practice is also taken up in the paper by Mische and Pattison. Here, however, the focus is on the duality of political discourse and organizational structure as manifested in the 1992 Brazilian impeachment movement. Mische and Pattison raise the question of how a broad array of political actors (from labor unions to various religious, professional, business, and student groups) managed to effectively come together around the issue of turning President Collor out of office. Mische and Pattison employ Galois lattices to analyze the movement of groups and their discourse through time based on a measurement of the political underpinning of a series of significant contentious gatherings. Here again, the analysis of structural dualities is strategically employed to understand the shifting character of an emergent institutional logic. Aside from providing a fascinating example of how effective this style of analysis can be in answering large scale sociological questions, the Mische and Pattison article charts new methodological terrain by presenting a method (tripartite lattices) for incorporating a third structural component (in this case, temporally ordered events) within the calculus of the co-constitution of alternative domain spaces. Thus, the paper moves us beyond the goal of assessing structural dualities to a more generalized analytic strategy of studying the structural isomorphisms of various types of institutional components. The last paper, by John Martin, represents yet another pioneering effort in the analysis of institutional logics by the application of a method for assessing structural dualisms. In this case the two orders are jobs and animal species as represented in Richard Scarry's classic children's text, What do people do all day? Martin argues that children's literature is a critical site for analyzing the origins of naturalized cultural understandings of systems of social hierarchy. Though he differs from most of the other contributors to this special issue in that his intellectual roots are perhaps less clearly located in the field of social networks, the logic of his analysis is very much the same. Simply put, Martin argues that the meaning of jobs in Scarry's book can only be understood with reference to the kinds of animals who occupy them while, at the same time, the social meaning of various animal species can only be understood within the context of the types of jobs to which they are assigned. Though his analysis focuses on one children's picture book, it is clear that the implications of Martin's analysis are far reaching. On the one hand Martin marshals evidence that suggests that animal species are themselves a natural vehicle for the early inculcation of classificatory logics of social distinctions and that in this respect Durkheim's analysis of totemic logic was essentially backwards. But, more than this, he brings this insight back around and uses it to critique Pierre Bourdieu's explanation about the origins of a social habitus. According to Martin, Bourdieu goes wrong in failing to understand the complex structural duality that links the material and the symbolic orders together. Children have a cognitive predisposition that enables them to see and understand difference

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(as manifested, for example, in animal species) and it is this classificatory orientation that is deployed in the service of establishing naturalized categories of social hierarchy. Martin sees his analysis of Scarry's work as a provisional test of this hypothesis. I see it as more than this. I see it as being yet a further example of the power that comes from analyzing cultural materials in such a way that the structural dualities of institutional systems are revealed. In closing, I think it is appropriate to say something about the relationship between the papers presented here and the work of Bourdieu for there is a sense in which Bourdieu serves as the absent (and sometimes not-so-absent) 'other' throughout much of what is being argued here. Just as there is a certain intellectual homology between traditional (French-style) structuralism and social network analysis, so too is there an isomorphism between Bourdieu's 'field theory' and the style of 'field theory' that developed among the new institutionalists. Once again, the connections are hardly accidental as there has always been a steady flow of influence moving (at a minimum) from the East to the West. 8 My hope is that these papers might begin to provide something of a counter-balance to this flow of intellectual capital and, to the extent that this is true, I would emphasize that the greatest contribution of these papers is to be found in their furtherance of a genuinely structuralist methodology. In this sense it is worth adding that the greatest limitation that I see in Bourdieu's intellectual project is that his research practice (at least in the realm of formal analysis) is significantly less relational than his theory would seem to demand (see Mohr, forthcoming). Finally let me just add that it is somewhat presumptuous of me to have so blithely gathered all of these papers together in this introduction under the banner of a new structuralist movement in cultural analysis. No doubt some of these authors will be surprised to find themselves included in such a designation. But I believe that the description is truly not very wide of the mark. The key ideas which I have highlighted throughout this essay - on structuralist methods, institutional logics, and the structural dualities that serve to bring the two areas of research together are, I believe, quite likely to provide the foundation of an important new research tradition in cultural analysis and it is this emergent trajectory that I have sought to highlight here.

References Abbott, Andrew, 1988. Transcending general linear reality. Sociological Theory 6, 169-186. Barnes, J.A., 1954. Class and committees in a Norwegian island parish. Human Relations 7, 39-58. Barthes, Roland, 1972 (1957). Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.

8 Consider, for example, that DiMaggio who has been a key player throughout the history of the new institutionalism was also one of the first American sociologists to actively embrace Bourdieu's intellectual project, both in his work on cultural capital (DiMaggio, 1982; DiMaggio and Mohr, 1985) as well as in his efforts to theorize organizational fields (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; DiMaggio, 1986). For a more complete discussion of this connection, see Mohr (forhcoming).

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Barthes, Roland, 1967 (1964). Elements of semiology. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang. Bearman, Peter, 1993. Relations into rhetorics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Boorman, Scott A. and Harrison C. White, 1976. Social structures from multiple networks: II. Role structures. American Journal of Sociology 81, 1384-1446. Boorman, Scott A. and Paul R. Levitt, 1983. Blockmodeling complex statues: Mapping techniques based on combinatorial optimization for analyzing economic legislation and its stress points over time. Economics Letters 13, 1-9. Bott, Elizabeth, 1957. Family and social network. London: Tavistock. Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breiger, Ronald L., 1974. The duality of persons and groups. Social Forces 53: 181-190. Breiger, Ronald L., 1981. The social class structure of occupational mobility. American Journal of Sociology 87, 578-611. Breiger, Ronald L., 1990. Social mobility and social structure. New York: Cambridge University Press. Burt, Ronald S., 1992. Structural holes: The social structure of competition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carley, Kathleen, 1994. Extracting culture through textual analysis. Poetics 22, 291-312. Caws, Peter, 1988. Structuralism: The art of the intelligible. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. DiMaggio, Paul J., 1982. Cultural capital and school success: The impact of status culture participation on the grades of U.S. high school students. American Sociological Review 47, 189-201. DiMaggio, Paul J., 1986. Structural analysis of organizational fields. In: Barry Staw and Lawrence Cummings (eds.) special issue, Research in Organizational Behavior 8, 335-370. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. DiMaggio, Paul J. and John Mohr, 1985. Cultural capital, educational attainment and marital selection. American Journal of Sociology 90(6), 1231-1261. DiMaggio, Paul J. and Walter W. Powell, 1983. The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review 48, 147-160. Emirbayer, Mustafa, 1997. Manifesto for a relational sociology. American Journal of Sociology 103, 281-317. Friedland, Roger and Robert R. Alford, 1991. Bringing society back in: Symbols, practices and institutional contradictions. In: Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio (eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis 232-263. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Galaskiewicz, Joseph, 1985. Social organization of an urban grants economy. New York: Academic Press, Giddens, Anthony, 1979. Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gould, Roger V., 1995. Insurgent identities: Class, community, and protest in Paris from 1848 to the commune. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Granovetter, Mark, 1974. Getting a job: A study of contacts and careers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harary, Frank, R.Z. Norman and Dorwin Cartwright, 1965. Structural models: An introduction to the theory of directed graphs. New York: Wiley. Laumann, Edward O. and David Knoke, 1987. Organization state: Social change in national policy domains. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Levi-Strauss, Claude, 1969 (1949). The elementary structures of kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon. Levi-Strauss, Claude, 1963 (1955). The structural study of myth. In: Structural anthropology, 206-231. New York: Basic Books. L6vi-Strauss, Claude, 1969 (1964). The raw and the cooked. Transl. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row. Lorrain, Francois and Harrison C. White, 1971. Structural equivalence of individuals in social networks. Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1, 49-80. Meyer, John and Brian Rowan, 1977. Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology 83,340-363.

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John Mohr is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has long been interested in the application of relational methodologies to the study of culture. He has also published articles on the history of the welfare state, on historical method, and (with Paul DiMaggio) on cultural capital. He is currently editing a volume (with Roger Friedland) for Cambridge University Press on cultural theory.