How Interaction Becomes Culture: A Relational-Analytic Approach

In response to formative work by DiMaggio and others, scholars of culture in sociology eagerly took up the task of describing, measuring, and integrating schemas and cognitive processes into accounts of culture. I offer an extension of DiMaggio’s framework that centers not the lessons from cognitive psychology, but those from social psychology, for studying culture. A relational-analytic approach to culture utilizes the concept of mechanisms from analytical and pragmatist sociology, and recenters relational processes as core mechanisms in the study of culture. I propose that sociologists of culture attend to both synchronizing and separating relational mechanisms to understand how shared meanings develop in social collectives beyond the interaction itself. I illustrate the types of questions a relational-analytic research approach would take.