Mechanisms and Meaning Structures

This article proposes a model of cultural mechanisms based on the premises of structuralist cultural sociology and symbolic interactionism. I argue that the models of cultural mechanisms provided by the developing analytical sociology movement are inadequate, while the dominant theories of culture in action from cultural sociology are limited by their adoption of the individual as the primordial unit of analysis. I instead propose a model of culture in action that takes social situations as its primordial unit and that understands culture as a system of meanings that actors laminate into the situations they face through interactive processes of interpretation and performance. I then illustrate and develop the model through an analysis of the Great Stink of London in 1858, a sewerage crisis that triggered significant institutional transformations.