Cultural SR: SR Cultural Coordination Theory

Abstract

Cultural SR studies how meanings, norms, and practices are transmitted, stabilized, contested, sanctioned, masked, fragmented, and revised across defined populations and networks. Its unit is a population-network-context over a stated period. The field preserves subgroup composition, network position, institutional exposure, private and public response, practice, dissent, and change through time. A country, ethnicity, profession, generation, organization, or platform is not a unitary cultural actor unless internal variation and the mechanisms that connect members are measured. SR Cultural Coordination Theory defines a bounded cultural system, a person-level transition under network and contextual inputs, a subgroup state distribution, a component record, a private-public masking gap, and cultural drift under matched population and network conditions. The theory distinguishes endorsement from behavior, sanction from preference, coordination from consensus, fragmentation from diversity, transmission from common exposure, and stability from legitimacy. Its measures are local to a population, network, context, practice, and time horizon. Cultural SR survives only where its component architecture improves causal discrimination, held-out prediction, intervention choice, or change detection beyond cultural sociology, anthropology, cultural evolution, social norms research, diffusion studies, network science, political behavior, organizational culture, and domain models. Narrative SR supplies accounts entering circulation; Symbolic SR supplies categories and representational systems; Identity SR receives recognition and commitment effects; Infrastructure Science governs carriers and constraints; Ethical SR governs legitimacy.