Social Relationships between Communication, Network Structure, and Culture

Abstract

Sociological network research and the recent advances in “relational sociology” view social relationships as the constituent elements of social structure. Considerations about what social relationships actually are, how they form and evolve, and how they connect to wider layers of the social (like culture or networks) remain curiously rare or even absent. Much network research abstracts from the concrete meaning embodied in social relationships, taking them and their empirical significance as given (Holland and Leinhardt, 1977, p. 387), and focusing exclusively on the structure of their connections. This perspective may have its merits, but it ignores that social structures are always symbolic constructions of expectations and thus filled with “culture” (Yeung, 2005, pp. 392ff). This interweaving of network relations and culture is the main concern of relational sociology, as advanced by Harrison White, Mustafa Emirbayer, Charles Tilly, Ann Mische, and others (Pachucki and Breiger, 2010; Mische, 2011). In spite of producing a number of studies on processes in social networks, relational sociology has not developed a thorough account of social relationships. Social psychological research on personal relationships, in contrast, offers numerous insights into the processes in ties. But it does not relate them systematically to the wider social context—to the level of culture and to the immediate network of relationships around alter and ego (Duck, 1997).