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theses

Using a networks and culture lens, I investigate the micro-level processes underlying the production of order in social contexts or locations that are relationally-defined and meaningful, but lack cultural cues to action and interpretation or are in the early stages of acquiring such meaning. Drawing on neoinstitutionalist theory, I refer to such social structures as less-institutionalized. To explain order in the absence of situational cultural cues literature in social network analysis has traditionally attributed regularities to situational structural tendencies that preclude shared understandings and/or subjective engagement. Recent literature in the sociology of culture that revives overarching moral intuitions as a basis for action similarly rejects the explanatory value of situational cultural cues. Arguing that culture is neither irrelevant nor implicated in an overarching way in culturally less-institutionalized situations, I posit that order can be linked to individuals’ tacit and discursive use of cultural repertoires acquired over the life-course through involvements in multiple networks of interaction and domains of shared meanings or ‘netdoms.’ I analytically distinguish between three categories of less-institutionalized situations of the basis of the degree of uncertainty in interpretation and action they impose upon their occupants: high, intermediate, and absence/low. I demonstrate my argument using three examples of less-institutionalized situations/positions from distinct sociological fields: (1) rapid labor-force feminization in South Asia (high-uncertainty); (2) an emergent area of knowledge production (intermediate-uncertainty); and (3) falling average sibship-size implicated in worldwide fertility decline (low/absent uncertainty). Elaborating upon three cross-netdom mechanisms - analogizing, contrasting, and spillovers – and using a mixture of interpretive techniques, multilevel statistical models, and exponential random graph models, I show that occupants use cultural repertoires discursively in high-uncertainty less-institutionalized positions, tacitly in low-uncertainty situations, and in a combination of tacit and deliberative ways under conditions of intermediate uncertainty. I also develop a mathematical model to show how less-institutionalized practices/interpretations can come to be institutionalized over time through management of uncertainty within homophilous networks. Lastly, positing a duality between the cultural repertoires of individuals and those of social locations, I conclude with a discussion on how less-institutionalized positions offer a unique window into investigating processes of emergence and social change.

ETD_4647

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Neha Gondal

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000068861

doi:10.7282/T3ZK5F9Z

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.