In the previous post, we saw culture as value-driven coordination, an emergent orchestration of relational dynamics across social fields. We now turn to social norms, the subtle mechanisms through which relational potentials are constrained, modulated, and made interpretable as shared meaning.
Norms as relational regulators
Social norms do not exist as fixed rules encoded in brains or texts. Instead, they are dynamic modulations of relational fields:
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Norms arise from repeated patterns of interaction, stabilising behaviours that preserve social viability.
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They operate implicitly, often below conscious awareness, guiding what is feasible, expected, or permissible within a community.
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Their enforcement is value-driven, not symbolic: deviations are managed to maintain the field’s stability rather than to punish abstract transgressions.
Semiotic modulation
Norms act as a semiotic lens within relational fields:
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They frame potentialities, highlighting some actions or interpretations as meaningful and downplaying others.
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They mediate semiotic thresholds, determining when relational dynamics are sufficient to support shared construal.
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They allow communities to sustain coherent meaning without reducing life to rigid symbolic codes.
Examples in practice
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Ritual etiquette: The gestures, timings, and sequences of ritual behaviour guide participants into coordinated patterns of actualisation, making the ritual intelligible without prescribing every thought.
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Language conventions: Grammar, pronunciation, and shared idioms constrain communicative potential, enabling interpretation without fixed meaning.
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Moral expectation: Community responses to behaviour channel relational potential toward viable social configurations, maintaining cohesion.
The generative tension
Social norms do not eliminate creativity or variation; they mediate it. By constraining some possibilities while leaving others open, they create a landscape for semiotic actualisation. Innovation, interpretation, and meaning-making arise within these modulated fields, illustrating the ongoing interplay between relational dynamics and semiotic thresholds.
Understanding social norms in this way helps us see human meaning as emergent and distributed, grounded in value-driven coordination, rather than as a pre-existing symbolic structure imposed on society.
In the next post, we will examine Memory, Narrative, and the Construction of Self, showing how individuals navigate these semiotic landscapes, accumulate experience, and co-actualise personal and collective meaning.
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