This chapter is devoted to the argument that a dualistic approach to cultural analysis can deliver the theoretical goods which conflationism failed to produce. Eventually I hope to show that the advantages of approaching the structural domain by distinguishing analytically between System and social integration also accrue in the cultural realm, yielding similar improvements in the explanation of stability and change. The whole enterprise thus looks towards a promising land where the theoretical unification of structural and cultural analysis might be accomplished.

This promise was one which none of the theorists already examined ever under-valued. It was the golden apple which the downwards and upwards conflationists thought they could grab by their familiar tactic of rendering one the virtual epiphenomenon of the other and which the central conflationists thought they could graft by their usual strategy of elision. But in theoretical development there are never easy pickings: like those who borrowed the mechanical analogy, the organic analogy or even the cybernetic analogy, the conflationists are punters with their ‘formula’ for breaking the bank Thus my hope for unification is just that – not an expectation – and my procedure is correspondingly different It is not an argument by analogy with a particularly fruitful form of structural analysis; it merely starts by making an analogous analytical distinction. The elements so distinguished then have to be conceptualized in their own terms and a set of theoretical propositions formulated about their interconnections. Succeeding chapters thus grope towards a reconceptualization of the cultural domain, utilizing analytical dualism, but until this has been completed it is impossible to determine whether the resulting propositions will parallel those advanced by Lockwood in the structural realm.