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This paper presents a new “epistemological” theory of culture that explains how individuals enhance their sense of security in the world by creating and maintaining culture as knowledge of the world. Using cognitive and affective processes previously ignored by culture theorists, the theory posits three dimensions of cultural production: we articulate, typify, and orient our experiences to make them meaningful. The theory asserts that we produce culture because it allows us to feel as if we understand our world, and to perceive it as ordered; this in turn triggers an aesthetic response of knowledge-based affect. The theory explains how cultural production is motivated by the pursuit of meaningfulness as well as material interests. The theory describes how an oppressive culture can be reproduced unintentionally, even by the groups it oppresses. The theory also identifies connections between social structure and culture where conditions of ambiguity or control have implications for how meaning can be created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about structural sociology as practiced by one of the more important sociologists and social thinkers-Harrison White. The author has chosen this topic because structuralist thinking is an important feature of contemporary social thought; because Professor White's approach to the study of social structure is particularly influential, and because of the author's misgivings about certain features of the structuralist program. The principal claim that is made in "Social Structure" is that preexisting sociology has failed to understand social structure properly. The presently existing, largely categorical descriptions of social structure have no solid theoretical grounding. Furthermore, network concepts may provide the only way to construct a theory of social structure. Categories, White argues, are loose ways of talking about empirically existing structure, which appears only in the form of networks. The author comments on the topic of "culture marginalized." Specifically, it concerns the problematic implications of defocalizing the cultural bases of network structures. He also comments on "culture embedded" and "cultural absence."