What Does Love Mean? Exploring Network Culture in Two Network Settings

Abstract

Meaning matters in the way people form social ties. Adopting an unconventional analytic technique - the Galois lattice analysis - I show how researchers can uncover relational meanings using conventional research techniques (i.e., closed-ended surveys). Galois lattice analysis also inspires new ways of conceptualizing relational meanings in terms of the duality ofpersons and relationships, that is, how actors' understandings of each other as persons define the understandings of their relationships with them, and vice versa. The co-constitution of these dualistic meanings thus defines a network culture. Comparing two communal settings in which the meaning of love is constructed, I demonstrate that different cultures produce different meaning structures that guide how actors relate to one another, resulting in different degrees of group stability. Social researchers often speak of networks in terms of their structures, as configurations of social relationships or ties constructed by social participants. Due to different methodological constraints (e.g., those of closed-ended survey questions), the meanings of social ties are often inadequately understood. Frequently, analysts assume that the meaning of a relationship (e.g., friendship) is self-evident. What people really mean by the word friend is thereby bracketed as a fixed meaning; meanwhile, analysis goes on to focus on networks as patterns of meaningfully unified ties. Although it is certainly plausible to think of all members sharing a common understanding of social relationships within groups, this assumption is more problematic when we try to address comparisons across different settings. In a different group context, friendship may mean one thing in one group and something else in another. It is therefore necessary for social researchers to examine not only the structural configuration of ties (i.e., properties) but also the meaning structures of different groups. We must ask how culture affects the ways in which people relate to one another and how these culturally configured relationships bring forth certain social outcomes (Fine and Kleinman 1983). Culture exists in many forms. Depending on researchers' theoretical orientations, they may concentrate on material productions, ideology, beliefs, typifications, practices, and so on (Sewell 1999). Focusing on what people really mean by having this or that relationship with some persons taps into the subjective aspect of culture (Wuthnow and Witten 1988:54). These meanings and their structures also link culture to cognition (DiMaggio 1997). Recently, researchers have shown increased interest in the cognitive aspects of social networks by examining the difference between the social networks in the minds of actors and the