I really enjoyed Ursula Le Guin's scifi for those reasons. The technology in Le Guin's stories basically doesn't matter; her stories revolve around relationships and culture. As an example, a story that focuses on a 2 planet system that has a slavery based society. On one planet, the slaves rebel. But even after their successful rebellion, the freed slaves fail to acknowledge that their women are essentially still slaves since they lack all basic human rights. Another story is about a planet/moon system where a few hundred years prior an anarchist culture secedes from the planets staunchly capitalistic culture, and then moves to the moon. The story follows a physicist/mathematicians life in an anarchist society. Another story deals with the toll that war has on people with telepathy. They have empathy for their enemies, but none the less they are in a situation in which they must kill those they have a telepathic connection with.

All the plot lines I talk about are in the collection of books belonging to the "Hainish cycle" series. Every book in the series is very good.