Teaching Social Structure: Relationships, Representations, and Rules

By Emelia Richey (2024 SHECP Intern)

On October 10, 2025, SHECP hosted Dr. Jonathan Eastwood, Professor of Sociology at Washington and Lee University, and Dr. Howard Pickett, Professor of Ethics and Poverty Studies at Washington and Lee University, for a Pedagogy & Practice event focused on Eastwood’s new book, Social Structure: Relationships, Representations, and Rules.

During the Fall 2020 semester, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Eastwood began recording video lectures for his students. As he compiled these lectures, he challenged himself to explore the material more deeply. “The words were just hanging in the air,” Eastwood said. “I heard what I was saying about these social theorists differently than I’d ever heard it before.”

These reflections ultimately inspired Eastwood’s book Social Structure, in which he presents a practical theory that offers students a set of tools for addressing social problems they care about. At the center of this framework is the concept of social structure, which Eastwood explains as emerging from individual actions that both enable and constrain future choices. His theory is organized around the Three Rs — Relationships, Representations, and Rules — which function as interdependent components of social life. Eastwood defines relationships as recurrent types of exchange or interaction between two or more people, representations as shared categories of meaning, and rules as prescriptions against certain actions. Rather than positioning the framework as purely philosophical, Eastwood designed it as a heuristic device that helps students identify core forms of social structure across different contexts. He has found that this accessible approach resonates strongly with students.

At the heart of Eastwood’s approach is an emphasis on interconnectedness, illustrating how individual actions, relationships, and social rules weave together to form larger social patterns. The Three Rs enable students to develop a more comprehensive understanding of social structures by revealing how these elements are complexly interlaced. “Most of the social structures that we meet in the world are complexly laced,” Eastwood explained. “We’re going to best understand those structures by breaking them down into their smaller parts.” He described a process that moves from identifying a complex structure, to recognizing it as a pattern of interwoven Rs, and finally to tracing those patterns back to the individual actions from which they are composed. In practice, this means examining how relationships, representations, and rules connect and influence one another, and then analyzing the everyday actions that create and sustain those connections. This process allows students to understand how social systems function not only in theory, but in practice.

For Eastwood and his colleagues, this deeper understanding translated into more focused and insightful student research. When implementing the Three Rs framework in his undergraduate courses, Professor Pickett observed a clear improvement in the quality of students’ thinking and analysis. He noted that the framework broadened students’ perspectives, enabling them to identify and examine multiple social structures, including those that contribute to harm. In this way, the Three Rs expanded students’ analytical skills while also deepening their awareness of how individual actions shape broader social realities. As Pickett explained, “Recognizing structures is a pretty good way of empowering individuals and also collaborating with those individuals to navigate the structures that are constraining certain actions and enabling others.” The framework helps students see how even small acts of resistance to dominant expectations, norms, or representations can produce larger ripple effects within society.

Eastwood’s work ultimately encourages systemic thinking by revealing how actions that seem separate are actually interwoven within a broader network of interdependent structures. “My thought is we need a simple language for articulating how it is that individual choices scale up into structures,” Eastwood said. Those structures, he noted, “then feed back on enabling and constraining subsequent action.” While Eastwood acknowledges that the Three Rs draw on longstanding sociological ideas, he emphasizes that the framework repackages them in a way that is both accessible and practical. By underscoring that social structures are created through human action, the theory also highlights the possibility for change: if structures are made by people, they can be remade by people.

Eastwood’s Three Rs framework offers students a practical and empowering way to understand the intricate relationship between individual actions and social structures. By breaking down complex systems into relationships, representations, and rules, students gain both analytical clarity and a sense of agency in recognizing how their actions ripple outward into the world. This approach has not only transformed classroom learning but also sparked broader conversations about teaching and social theory. It demonstrates that understanding social structures is not just an abstract exercise but rather a tool students can use to imagine and work toward meaningful change. You can watch the full conversation with Professors Eastwood and Pickett here.

Pedagogy & Practice events are designed to facilitate collaboration and sharing of best practices across SHECP Member Schools.

About the Book:

“Social structure is arguably the central concept of sociology, and in recent years a much wider public has taken up with fresh vigor the sociological idea that persistent inequalities are rooted in social structures. Yet there seem to be as many definitions of the term as there are sociologists, and we often struggle to articulate accessible yet precise accounts of structures that can guide empirical research and other kinds of action.

"Jonathan Eastwood offers a set of pragmatic strategies for thinking about social structures, emphasizing ways in which we can approach them as complex lacings of relationships, representations, and rules. He then teases out a variety of implications of these strategies for qualitative and quantitative research, the analysis of social problems, and the implementation of social policies. Written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as fellow scholars, this insightful book contributes to our understanding of this fundamental and dynamic ingredient of social life.”

Read more about the book here: https://www.politybooks.com/blog-detail/what-is-social-structure.

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About the Speakers: 

Dr. Jonathan Eastwood

Jonathan Eastwood is a Professor of Sociology and the current department head for the Sociology and Anthropology department at Washington and Lee University. He is also a core faculty member in the Shepherd Program at Washington and Lee University. "Professor Eastwood is a social theorist who also has a strong interest in quantitative methods. He teaches seminars on classical and contemporary theory as well as a series of courses that train students how to use quantitative and computational tools to answer sociological questions." (https://www.wlu.edu/profile/eastwood-jonathan)

Dr. Howard Pickett

Howard Pickett is a Professor of Ethics and Poverty Studies and the director of the Shepherd Program at Washington and Lee University. "Professor Pickett teaches poverty studies courses on dignity and human rights, oppression and privilege, human capability and Martin Luther King Jr. He researches ethics, poverty, distributive justice and modern religious thought." (https://www.wlu.edu/profile/pickett-howard)

The Shepherd Program at Washington and Lee University "integrates thought and action to prepare students from different majors, career paths, backgrounds, passions, and political perspectives to understand and address the complex causes and consequences of poverty and inequality in ways that respect the dignity of every person.

Students weave together poverty-related courses across campus (economics, education, law, philosophy, politics, sociology, and more) and related service and internship experiences across the county, the country, and the world. Those pursuing a minor in poverty studies also complete capstone research that connects their concerns about poverty and inequality with their future civic and professional lives." (https://my.wlu.edu/the-shepherd-program/about)