Dualities of Culture and Structure: Seeing Through Cultural Holes

Abstract

Just three decades ago, Peter Blau declared that “social structure is not culture.” Blau averred that the study of the quantitative dimensions of social structure had long been neglected, “two exceptions being Harrison C. White and Bruce H. Mayhew,” and moreover that the quantitative dimensions constitute the core of social structure and “distinguish it from culture” (Blau 1977: 245). Indeed, the oft-proclaimed “breakthrough” in the 1970s that “firmly established” network analysis as a method of structural analysis (Scott 2000: 33-37) defined itself in opposition to culture. White and his coauthors, of whom I was one (White et al. 1976: 734), seemed to take pride in announcing that “the cultural and social-psychological meanings of actual ties are largely bypassed…. We focus instead on interpreting the patterns among types of tie.”