Structural Tightness and Cross-Cultural Research

Abstract

Traditional,simple/complex" typologies for categorizing societies have proven inadequate to allow a meaningful ordering and interpretation of data generated by cross-cultural research. Another dimension of social structure is gradually coming into focus to amend this inadequacy, namely structural tightness/looseness. As presently conceived, however, it is not entirely clear what the structural referents of tightness/ looseness are, resulting in some ambiguity in the literature utilizing the concept. In order to achieve greater conceptual clarity, therefore, a definition of tightness is proposed which recognizes role relatedness (rather than diversity) as its major structural referent, and specifies one particular dimension of relatedness (the imposed and received nature of role expectations) as primary in determining degree of tightness.