The recent cultural turn in American sociology has inspired a number o
f more scientifically oriented scholars to study the meanings that are
embedded within institutions, practices, and cultural artifacts. I fo
cus here on research that (a) emphasizes institutional (rather than in
dividual) meanings, (b) uses a structural approach to interpretation,
and (c) employs formal algorithms or quantitative procedures for reduc
ing the complexity of meanings to simpler structural principles. I dis
cuss two core methodological issues-the assessment of similarities and
differences between items in a cultural system and the process by whi
ch structure-preserving simplifications are found in the data. I also
highlight the importance of two-mode analytic procedures and I review
some of the perceived benefits and criticisms of this style of researc
h.