Central to the entire research project has been the concept of culture. Culture, as the fundamental category in the construction of community, cannot solely be seen as a phenomenon manifested in symbols. At the same time, and on another level, it is also a process for observing and evaluating this organisation. Culture is a selection process for the reduction of complexity, this reduction being unavoidable for the creation of frames of interpretation and community. During the discussions in the project it has become clear that a certain tension exists between culture and modernisation, continuity and discontinuity as well as symbolic construction respective representation.
History reveals the risks of an ideologised, community charged concept of culture.
The solution, which this research project would like to suggest goes in the direction of modernisation research where the historical and semiotic analysis of the construction of community is combined with a social scientific analysis of society and social organisation. The cultural and radically constructivist approach of this project aimed at the promotion of a new social and political history, clearly distinct from historiographic trends with their roots in the 1980s, because it reconsidered the importance of political and social issues in problem formulation and research interest.