Linking Social Structure and Interpersonal Behavior: A Theoretical Perspective on Cultural Schemas and Social Relations

Abstract

To explain how interpersonal behavior in relational contexts usually reproduces but sometimes modifies macro structural patterns, I outline a conceptual framework within which to understand existing theories and evidence and to develop new ones. Actors create and enact structure by means of several types of shared cultural schemas (“ordering schemas”) that represent or imply relations between specific or abstract actors. “Modular” ordering schemas such as fundamental sentiments, social identities, or status beliefs disaggregate the meanings of identities, settings, and events from their embedded contexts and represent them in abstract form. Generative theories view actors as possessing shared “vocabularies” of modular ordering schemas and shared schemas for combining those modular meanings to generate interpersonal behavior that responds flexibly to situational contingencies. The generated behavior largely reproduces structural patterns represented in modular schemas, but can produce novel patterns through unique combinations of cultural information. I then discuss how modular ordering schemas develop and become widely shared.