Reproduction of Social Structures

Abstract

Social structure is viewed as interaction animated by culture. Culture is modeled as comprising a system of transindividual Piagetian schemata guiding social action. Such a schema is reinforced when the action it mandates in some social setting yields the reactions from other people guided by their own schemata that fit its goal and expectations. An enduring social structure is a pattern of action that reproduces itself by stimulating and reinforcing the schemata animating its actions. These concepts are operationalized by a program written in PROLOG. The program takes as a knowledge base a representation of the preferences and judgments of social causality of subjects in some historical situation. It assembles schemata from this knowledge base that are stimulated by past actions of other subjects, and that then monitor the flow of action to see if the desired reactions to their action are forthcoming. The model is illustrated by simulating Skocpol's analysis of China's sociopolitical structure in the 1930s and O'Donnell's analysis of the Latin American bureaucratic-authoritarian structure of the 1960s.