Is Culture a Network or a Landscape?

How, and why, does culture change? DiMaggio’s influential call to take cognition seriously helped reorient answers to this question toward the ways people mentally represent cultural knowledge, especially the idea that meanings inhere in webs of schematic association. Such a perspective pushes analysts toward a systemic approach, rather than a focus on isolated cultural elements. In this article, I juxtapose two system-level representations of culture that have developed largely in parallel. The first, now influential in cultural sociology, models culture as a network of semantic associations among cultural elements, showing how meanings can be measured, compared, and tracked over time. The second, imported from the NK model in evolutionary biology and widely used in organizational theory, models culture as a landscape of possible configurations whose topography constrains cultural movement. I argue that these representations are best treated as complements. Networks recover individuals’ interpretative architectures and their heterogeneity, while landscapes represent the cognitive constraints that render some cultural configurations more cognitively viable than others. Social processes of learning and influence can then be modeled as movement through this rugged, constrained configuration landscape. This integrated approach can provide a systemic account of how interpretative structure and cognitive constraint jointly produce cultural inertia and occasional, punctuated transitions.