Social Grammar for Culture: Reply to Steven Brint

Abstract

Professor Brint sees my basic point that vacancies reveal structure. Where his interpretation is a bit skewed is that for me vacancies reveal specifically social structure, at middle range, so that they do not provide a general mechanism for revealing cognitive or cultural process. I do see Brint's general point, and indeed I have one book in press and one in manuscript that work exactly toward embedding culture and identity into social structure and its processes of agency, but Brint and I disagree on how to think about embedding. The core idea of blockmodels, which Brint argues are central to my vision of structuralism, is structural equivalence: each set of actors, who are similarly connected (in several types of ties, and through indirect paths as well as by direct ties) with respect to other such sets in a partition, exhibits similar behavior, whether or not much direct connection exists within that set. (Finding the sets is quite a trick, for which John Boyd [1991] provides a definitive mathematical and statistical exposition. He also shows in this exposition that one need not impose a strict partition.) Professor Brint observes, in his second comment (of five), that this approach of mine misses direct impacts from cultural embeddings evinced in attributes of the actors. I should hope so! Did Steven Brint also complain when his English teachers explained grammar, and in particular syntax, separately from the content, be it detective novel or geography? Brint prefers to blockmodel constructs (his note 10). Catnet is a term from an introductory course (Soc Rel 10) that I taught in the 1960s; this term is very useful for stuffing culture in with social form. But I now argue (forthcoming, end of chap. 2) that catnets are found only in contexts without clear social disciplines. The possibility of making just such discriminations was a chief reason for the rigorous abstraction of social structure separately from cultural structure. (This is a reason understood also by the anonymous reviewer quoted by Brint in his note 9.) Brint (in his third comment) complains of a lack of propositions resulting from blockmodels research. Brint himself brilliantly supplies several trial propositions in the two paragraphs following his X-ray metaphor. Other, even more explicitly grammatical propositions come from blockmodeling as role algebra, which was introduced in Boorman and White (1976) and is brought to full mathematical rigor by Boyd (1991). Lorrain and Boorman's First Letter-Last Letter Law (see Boyd 1991) was only the first payoff from these social grammars for culture. Brint slights this algebraic formulation of blockmodeling, which came first and was pursued technically by Bonacich and McConaghy (1979), and Kim and Roush (1978), and from which Breiger and Pattison (1978) derived propositions about elites. Overviews are given by Kim and Roush (1980, 1987) and by Wasserman and Faust (1991). In his fifth comment, Brint bemoans the disappearance of idiographic social science. Surely this is rhetoric, which signals (by analogy to his argument about my rhetoric) that idiography in fact is making a comeback. The political scientist Lucien Pye (1991) provides