ABSTRACT
Social science is steeped in dualisms: culture and structure, change and stability, dynamics and statics, methodological individualism and collectivism, voluntarism and determinism, nature and nurture, macro and micro, materialism and idealism, facts and values, objectivity and subjectivity, rationality and irrationality, and so forth. Cultural theory shows that there is no need to choose between, for instance, collectivism and individualism, values and social relations, or change and stability. Institutional arrangements do, as methodological collectivists contend, constrain individual behavior, but it is also true, as methodological individualists insist, that institutional arrangements are held together and modified by individual action. Individuals continually confront novel situations requiring a great deal of effort to maintain their familiar pattern of social relations. In recent decades, the social sciences have witnessed a dissociation between studies of values, symbols, and ideologies and studies of social relations, modes of organizing, and institutions.
