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It is undisputed in sociological literature that cultural cues play a crucial role in orienting action and thought (eg Bourdieu 1992, DiMaggio and Powell 1991, Swidler 1986, Zerubavel 1997). Cultural cues, then, help people in coming up with appropriate strategies in response to‗ what is going on here.‘In this chapter, I focus on a different type of social situation and ask: what accounts for regularities in outcomes in social locations or situations that lack prefabricated cultural cues to thought and action and what are its implications for the emergence of new social orders? Specifically, I focus on the types of relationally-defined social locations with‗ undeveloped ‘or emergent cultural aspects but to which we can nevertheless attribute relational order. As such locations do not amount to culturally meaningful categories, I refer to them as (culturally) lessinstitutionalized.

It is instructive to compare roles to less-institutionalized positions. This is because, in sociology, roles are generally conceptualized to lie at the nexus of cultural and relational structure. Roles are cultural because the behavioral expectations associated with them (eg Berger and Luckmann 1967 [1966], Popitz 1972) and likewise the takenfor-granted or institutionalized logics of practice and representation associated with other role-like positions (Bourdieu 1992, DiMaggio and Powell 1991) act as powerful guides orienting cognition and action. At the same time, roles also involve relational regularities in the forms of patterns of relations with others (Nadel 1969 [1957], Parsons 1991 [1951]). While the cultural and relational aspects of roles may harmonize reasonable smoothly in many cases …