“[these understandings] could only be achieved, Williams claimed, through a study of the complex interrelations, rather than comparisons, between the shifting agendas of social phenomena, their: “elements of persistence, adjustment, unconscious assimilation, active resistance, alternative effort …” (1961) and the patterns of activity that can be traced therein. He draws on Ruth Benedict’s anthropologically inspired “patterns of culture” to elaborate what he finally phrased society’s “structure of feeling”: a term that embodies both the rigidity of institutionalised codes and behaviours, as well as the more indefinable, “delicate” and “intangible” social norms in which one is almost imperceptibly immersed.”

(my MCT MA assignment 2010:4 quoting from Storey 2009:35, drawing on Williams)