Cultural structuralism is a theoretical approach within the sociology of culture, and it was created by American sociologist Robert Wuthnow. Wuthnow advocates a positivist and empiricist approach to culture. He presented his approach in detail in the books: Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (1987), Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment and European Socialism (1989), and Vocabularies of Public Life: Empirical Essays in Symbolic Structure (1992). Wuthnow criticizes the dominant approach in the sociology of culture, which he calls the "subjective" approach, which focuses on the beliefs, attitudes, and values ​​of an individual. The goal of this approach is to gain insight into what symbols mean to a particular person. Wuthnow thinks that it is difficult to gain insight into a person's inner mental state, and therefore, what some symbols mean to that person. Instead, one should focus on patterns of symbolic codes that can be empirically observed, such as words and text, social movements, visual symbols, cultural products, and the like. For this type of cultural structuralism, each individual symbol must be produced by a specific person, in a specific environment.

In that sense, it is necessary to examine the origin and spread of cultural symbols. This process has three stages: 1) in the first stage the production of certain symbols takes place, 2) in the second stage there is a selection - some symbols are rejected and others spread because they affect the environment in which they originated and use the resources of that environment to spread further; 3) in the third stage, some symbols are institutionalized, by creating routine mechanisms for their constant reproduction. Some symbols become so institutionalized that society creates a large number of interconnected institutions that serve to spread and reproduce these symbols, and they begin to be perceived as "reality". One such system of symbols is science. According to Wuthnow, the goal of theoretical and empirical research on symbols and culture should be to identify, as systematically and exactly as possible, the environmental factors that contributed to each of the three stages of the spread of symbols.

Authors: Wuthnow, Robert.

Books:

Wuthnow. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (1987)

     -     Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment and European Socialism (1989)

     -     Vocabularies of Public Life: Empirical Essays in Symbolic Structure (1992).