UC Davis

The relationship between culture and institutions has been a longstanding interest in social sciences. The field of communication provides a new approach to understanding this relationship as a dynamic process that emerged from communication behavior. This dissertation attempts to analyze the relationship and dynamics between institutions and culture in the current media environment through three studies. The first study focuses on the emergence and maintenance of cultural and economic disparities and proposes solutions to shift cultural norms that reinforce structural inequality. The second study investigates the coevolution between institutions and culture, establishing the causal relationship between institutional assimilation and cultural assimilation among online communities. The third study dives into the reasons that drive institutional evolution in its environment. In the three papers, I incorporate formal and agent-based modeling with network science to provide a systematic analysis of how institutional outcomes can be influenced by cultural values, norms, and strategies and how individual choices influences group-level cultural and institutional results.