V. Structure and Culture

From Rosa’s perspective, one of the key tasks of a sociology of our relationship of the world is to study society by combining the analysis of structural constituents (from a third-person perspective) with the analysis of cultural constituents (from a first-person perspective). On this view, the interplay between structures and institutions, on the one hand, and cultural forces, on the other, is central to the constitution, development, and functioning of any social formation. The validity of Rosa’s distinction between ‘structural’ and ‘cultural’ dimensions of social existence, however, is questionable—not least because all cultures have socio-structural dimensions, just as all social structures have cultural dimensions.