Citations related to SOCIOLOGY (works cited listed at bottom):

“In Bellah’s account, ‘society’ is, for Durkheim, an immensely complicated, multilayered reality. Sometimes ‘society’ refers to specific social groups, but other times it is, in Durkheim’s words, ‘a composition of ideas, beliefs, and sentiments of all sorts which realize themselves through individuals. Foremost of these ideas is the moral ideal which is its principal raison d’etre.’ In Bellah’s words, ‘Not only is society not identical with an external ‘material entity,’ it is something deeply inner, since for Durkheim it is the source of morality, personality, and life itself at the human level.... Durkheim uses the word ‘society’ in ways closer to classical theology than empirical science.’

“Bellah uses the idea of society in a similarly wide and deep range of senses. He tends not to focus on specific social groups but, rather, seeks to explicate the moral sinews at the base of social relations. In Bellah’s work (and work deply influenced by him)–unlike work more centrally influenced by Marxist and Weberian traditions–one seldom sees interest groups in zero-sum conflict. Instead, there are persons misunderstanding or failing to understand (in part, because they hold more or less wealth or power but also because they simply do not have a requisite conceptual vocabulary) their fundamental interdependence. Like Durkheim, Bellah’s aim is to deepen this common understanding of interdependence and to awaken the sense of mutual responsibility that this entails.” Madsen, Richard. “Comparative Cosmopolis: Discovering Different Paths to Moral Integration in the Modern Ecumene.” pp. 105-123. Madsen, Richard et al. Meaning and Modernity: Religion Polity and Self. University of California Press. 2002. p. 107.


"I sit in a room without windows, participating in a ritual etched into twentieth-century tribal memory. I have been here thousands of times before, literally. I am in a meeting, trying to solve a problem. Using whatever analytic tool somebody has just read about or been taught at their most recent training experience, we are trying to come to grips with a difficult situation. Perhaps it is poor employee morale or productivity. Or production schedules. Or the redesign of a function. The topic doesn't matter. What matters is how familiar and terrible our process is for coming to terms with the complaint.

"The room is adrift in flip chart paper--clouds of lists, issues, schedules, plans, accountabilities--crudely taped to the wall. They crack and rustle, fall loose, and, finally, are pulled off the walls, tightly rolled, and transported to some innocent secretary, who will litter the floor around her desk so that, peering down from her keyboard, she can transcribe them to tidy sheets, which she will mail to us. They will appear on our desks days or weeks later, faint specters of commitments and plans, devoid of even the little energy and clarity that sent the original clouds--poof--up onto the wall. They will drift into our day planners and onto individual 'to do' lists, lists already fogged with confusion and inertia. Whether they get 'done' or not, they will not solve the problem.

"I am weary of the lists we make, the time projections we spin out, the breaking apart and putting back together of problems. It does not work. The lists and charts we make do not capture experience. They only tell of our desire to control a reality that is slippery and evasive and perplexing beyond comprehension. Like bewildered shamans, we perform rituals passed down to us hoping they will perform miracles. No new wisdom teacher has appeared to show us how to fit more comfortably into the universe. Our world grows more disturbing and mysterious, our failures to predict and control leer back at us from many places, yet to what else can we turn? If the world is not linear, then our approaches cannot work. But then, where are we?...

"Several years ago, organizational theorist Karl Weick called attention to enactment in organizations--how we participate in the creation of organizational realities. 'The environment that the organization worries about is put there by the organization,' he observed, adding that if we acknowledge the role we play in this creation, it changes the things we talk and argue about. If we create the environment, how can we argue about its objective features, or about what's true or false? Instead, Weick encouraged us to focus our concerns on issues of effectiveness, on questions of what happened, and what actions might have served us better. We could stop arguing about truth and get on with figuring what works best.

"Weick also suggested a new approach to organization analysis. Acting should precede planning, he said, because it is only through action and implementation that we create the environment. Until we put the environment in place, how can we formulate our thoughts and plans? In strategic planning, we act as though we are responding to a demand from the environment; but, in fact, Weick argued, we create the environment through our own strong intentions. Strategies should be 'just-in-time..., supported by more investment in general knowledge, a large skill repertoire, the ability to do a quick study, trust in intuitions, and sophistication in cutting losses.'"...

"The participatory nature of reality has focused scientific attention on relationships. Nothing exists at the subatomic level, or can be observed, without engagement with another energy source. This focus on relationships is also a dominant theme in today's management advice. For many years, the prevailing maxim of management stated: 'Management is getting work done through others.' The important thing was the work; the 'others' were nuisances that needed to be managed into conformity and predictability. Managers have recently been urged to notice that they have people working for them. They have been advised that work gets done by humans like themselves, each with strong desires for recognition and connectedness. The more they (we) feel part of the organization, the more work gets done.

"This, of course, brings with it a host of new, relationship-based problems that are receiving much notice. How do we get people to work well together? How do we honor and benefit from diversity? How do we get teams working together quickly and efficiently? How do we resolve conflicts? These relationships are confusing and hard to manage, so much so that after a few years away from their MBA programs, most managers report that they wish they had focused more on people management skills while in school.

"Leadership skills have also taken on a relational slant. Leaders are being encouraged to include stakeholders, to evoke followership, to empower others. Earlier, when we focused on tasks, and people were the annoying inconvenience, we thought about 'situational' leadership--how the situation could affect our choice of styles. A different understanding of leadership has emerged recently. Leadership is always dependent on the context, but the context is established by the relationships we value." Wheatley, Margaret, Leadership and the New Science; Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1993, pp. 25, 37, 144.


"For the Greeks it is not because it is care for others that it is ethical. Care for self is ethical in itself, but it implies complex relations with others, in the measure where this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others....

"What I wanted to know was how the subject constituted himself, in such and such a determined form, as a mad subject or as a normal subject, through a certain number of practices which were games of truth, applications of power, etc. I had to reject a certain a priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis of the relationships which can exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power and so forth.

"Question: That means that the subject is not a substance?

"It is not a substance; it is a form and this form is not above all or always identical to itself. You do not have towards yourself the same kind of relationships when you constitute yourself as political subject who goes and votes or speaks up in a meeting, and when you try to fulfill your desires in a sexual relationship. There are no doubt some relationships and some interferences between these different kinds of subject but we are not in the presence of the same kind of subject. In each case, we play, we establish with one's self some different form of relationship. And it is precisely the historical constitution of these different forms of subject relating to games of truth that interest me....

"The thought that there could be a state of communication which would be such that the games of truth could circulate freely, without obstacles, without constraint and without coercive effects, seems to me to be Utopia. It is being blind to the fact that relations of power are not something bad in themselves, from which one must free one's self. I don't believe there can be a society without relations of power, if you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behavior of others. The problem is not of trying to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give one's self the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination." Interview with Michel Foucault, January, 1984, Bernauer and Rasmussen, The Final Foucault, MIT Press, 1988, pps 7, 10, 18.


"Researchers negotiate their results with the actors and their method with the research community. A method must be systematic and explicit, but also much more: It must be open for debate and the influence of fashions and politics.

"This is not a common picture of the process, however. The social science community is guilty of several hypocrisies concerning its own conduct. One is the claim that there are objective and external criteria of acceptability; although one might allow for 'pluralism,' one never admits 'politics of meaning.' The result is a strong conviction that a good method unerringly leads to good results, whereas in fact the two are negotiated in two different and separate arenas. A good method gives at least a decent result, but not always a very good one, and sometimes good results are achieved by a faulty method. The two are loosely coupled.

"Another hypocrisy is that the heroes of the field never follow the prescriptions of the field. Weber, Marx, and Freud were truly poets; students are advised to write uninspiring prose. Moreover, students are encouraged to follow existing methods and schools of thought, whereas the laurels go to those who abolish them." Czarniawska-Joerges, Barbara, Exploring Complex Organizations; A Cultural Perspective, Sage Publications, 1992, p. 221.


"The word culture has many meanings and connotations. When we apply it to groups and organizations, we are almost certain to have conceptual and semantic confusion...

"Commonly used words relating to culture emphasize one of its critical aspects--the idea that certain things in groups are shared or held in common. The major categories of such overt phenomena that are associated with culture in this sense are the following:
1. Observed behavioral regularities when people interact: the language they use, the customs and traditions that evolve, and the rituals they employ in a wide variety of situations.
2. Group norms: the implicit standards and values that evolve in working groups, such as the particular norm of 'a fair day's work for a fair day's pay'...
3. Espoused values: the articulated, publicly announced principles and values that the group claims to be trying to achieve, such as 'product quality' or 'price leadership'.
4. Formal philosophy: the broad policies and ideological principles that guide a group's actions toward stockholders, employees, customers, and other stakeholders, such as the highly publicized 'HP Way' of Hewlett-Packard.
5. Rules of the game: the implicit rules for getting along in the organization, 'the ropes' that a newcomer must learn to become an accepted member, 'the way we do things around here'.
6. Climate: the feeling that is conveyed in a group by the physical layout and the way in which members of the organization interact with each other, with customers, or with other outsiders.
7. Embedded skills: the special competencies group members display in accomplishing certain tasks, the ability to make certain things that gets passed on from generation to generation without necessarily being articulated in writing.
8. Habits of thinking, mental models, and/or linguistic paradigms: the shared cognitive frames that guide the perceptions, thought, and language used by the members in the early socialization process.
9. Shared meanings: the emergent understandings that are created by group members as they interact with each other.
10. 'Root metaphors' or integrating symbols: the ideas, feelings, and images groups develop to characterize themselves, that may or may not be appreciated consciously but that become embodied in buildings, office layout, and other material artifacts of the group. This level of the culture reflects group members' emotional and aesthetic responses as contrasted with their cognitive or evaluative response." Schein, Edgar H., Organizational Culture and Leadership, Jossey-Bass, Second Edition, 1992, pp. 7-10.


“Different theorists tend to approach society from one perspective or the other. Someone like John Rawls would, implicitly at least, consider society from a lifeworld perspective, looking for the overlapping consensus that participants in a political community might share and communicatively reproduce. Conversely, theorists such as Emile Durkheim and Niklas Luhmann adopt, indeed develop, the systems-theoretic approach, ‘realistically’ looking at the constraints and imperatives that various subsystems impose upon social actors....

“Yet even as he integrates both the lifeworld and the system perspective into his analysis, Habermas notices that there has been an increasing differentiation or decoupling between the system and life-world aspects of society.” McAfee, Noelle. Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship. Cornell U. Press. 2000. p. 86-7.


“Noise is always in formation; there can be neither form nor formation without noise. When information is understood as a process rather than a product, the line separating it from noise is difficult to determine. Noise is not absolute but is relative to the systems it disrupts and reconfigures, and, conversely, information is not fixed and stable but is always forming and reforming in relation to noise. Forever parasitic, noise is the static that prevents the systems it haunts from becoming static. Static makes systems shifty. If, on the one hand, structures become too rigid to adapt to changing circumstances, the systems they support collapse; if, on the other hand, there are no systems to process data, noise becomes fatal. Life is lived on the shifting margin, boundary, edge between order and chaos, difference and indifference, negentropy and entropy, information and noise. The interplay of noise, which is informative, and information, which is noisy, creates the conditions for emerging complexity, which is the pulse of life.” Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. University of Chicago. 2001. p. 123.


“Insofar as myths and the networks of symbols comprising them function as complex adaptive systems, they form something like what E. O. Wilson labels a ‘superorganism,’ which is both independent of and lives in and through individual minds.” Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. University of Chicago. 2001. p. 214.


“Because the human mode of cultural organization is so distinctive when compared with those of others animal species, because raising nonhuman animals within a cultural context does not magically transform them into human-like cultural beings, and because there are some humans with biological deficits who do not participate fully in their cultures, the ineluctable conclusion is that individual human beings possess a biologically inherited capacity for living culturally.” Tomasello, Michael. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press. 1999. p. 53.


“‘Grid’ refers to the system of classification used in a society to determine roles and statuses, rights and responsibilities. A society with ‘strong grid’ is highly regulated, with strong institutions. Its system of rules and distinctions is comprehensive in scope and highly coherent in form. Everyone has a specified place and faces clearly defined regulations. A society with ‘weak grid’ is one in which the rules and classifications are indistinct and/or in which clearly defined rules only apply to limited sectors of life.

“By ‘group,’ Douglas refers to the capacity of a society to put social pressure on its members. This capacity is strongest, obviously, when persons are confined to small groups with strong boundaries, so that they cannot escape scrutiny from and interaction with other group members. This is what Douglas calls ‘strong group.’ In contrast, the capacity to exert social pressure is weakest when people live in large, open, mobile societies where they can voluntarily choose associates. This is ‘weak group.’” Madsen, Richard. “Comparative Cosmopolis: Discovering Different Paths to Moral Integration in the Modern Ecumene.” pp. 105-123. Madsen, Richard & William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven Tipton. Meaning and Modernity: Religion Polity and Self. University of California Press. 2002. p. 113.


“There is agreement within the discipline [of sociology] today that the point of departure for all systems-theoretical analysis must be the difference between system and environment. Systems are oriented by their environment not just occasionally and adaptively, but structurally, and they cannot exist without an environment. They constitute and maintain themselves by creating and maintaining a difference from their environment, and they use their boundaries to regulate this difference. Without difference from an environment, there would not even be self-reference, because difference is the functional premise of self-referential operations. In this sense, boundary maintenance is system maintenance.” Luhmann, Niklas. “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems” in Essays on Self-Reference. Columbia University Press. 1990. Quoted in: Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. University of Chicago. 2001. p. 91.


“In every case, including Europe but more seriously outside of Europe, development destroys, more or less rapidly, local solidarities and original traits adapted to specific ecological conditions.

“One must not, of course, idealize cultures. One must recognize that all evolutions involve leaving something behind, that all creation involves destruction, and that every historical gain is paid for with a loss.” Morin, Edgar. Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for a New Millennium. 1999. Hampton Press. p. 62.


"A long time ago when cultures were more stable, initiation of young men was carried out by the fathers' and uncles' laying a hand on the shoulder and saying 'You're a man. Go out and do what you want.' Today the situation is reversed. Now that the chain of initiation from fathers to sons is broken, young men spend a lifetime in pursuits trying to prove that they are men, to gain acceptance. Before it was acceptance and then the pursuit of the activities of life. Now it is an endless pursuit of activities in the vain quest for acceptance." Paraphrased from Bly, Robert, poet, Mendocino, 1983.


“The notion that culture is transmissible from one generation to the next as a corpus of knowledge, independently of its application in the world, is untenable for the simple reason that it rests on the impossible precondition of a ready-made cognitive architecture. In fact, I maintain, nothing is really transmitted at all. The growth of knowledge in the life history of a person is a result not of information transmission but of guided rediscovery, where what each generation contributes to the next are not rules and representations for the production of appropriate behavior but the specific conditions of development under which successors, growing up in a social world, can build up their own aptitudes and dispositions.” Oyama, Susan et al, ed. Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. MIT Press. 2001. Ingold, Tim. “From Complementarity to Obviation.” P. 272.



“... social systems are ‘designs for living in particular environments’, while Culture, along with history and the conditions of the environment, is what causes social systems. Methods of subsistence, settlement patterns, even the relationships in which people engage, are all aspects of the social system, which is the embodiment of the interaction between Culture, history and environment.” Plotkin, Henry. The Imagined World Made Real: Towards a Natural Science of Culture. Rutgers University Press. 2003. P. 103.


“Culture is reserved for that something shared through learning. Culture, to be sure, gives rise to material objects, such as stone tools or clothes, immaterial objects, such as United Nations resolutions or acts of parliament, and social organizations, like schools and labour unions. In short, Culture has consequences, and those consequences, out there in the world, are commonly referred to as ‘social this’ and ‘social that.’” Plotkin, Henry. The Imagined World Made Real: Towards a Natural Science of Culture. Rutgers University Press. 2003. P. 104.


“At the heart of this is the notion that humans have a genetic predisposition to choose between cultural variants, be these beliefs, attitudes, values, specific overt behaviours or anything else that can be culturally transmitted, on the basis of the frequency with which they occur in a group or population. This bias must not simply reflect the relative frequency of occurrence of a cultural variant. Rather the naive individual must be disproportionately likely to choose and act on the variant which is more common.” Plotkin, Henry. The Imagined World Made Real: Towards a Natural Science of Culture. Rutgers University Press. 2003. Pps. 240-1.


“Both Bourdieu and Giddens argue that people’s daily routines are rooted in a taken-for-granted world. In general, people know how to act in accordance with the implicit, shared rules which make up that world. They draw upon these rules, and in so doing they unintentionally reproduce them.” Baert, Patrick. Social Theory in the Twentieth Century. New York University Press. 1998. P. 4.


“In other words, we do what we do in part because of the position we occupy in our surrounding social structure and in part because of our innate preferences and characteristics. In sociology, these two forces are called structure and agency, and the evolution of a social network is driven by a trade-off between the two. Because agency is the part of an individual’s decision-making process that is not constrained by his or her structural position, actions derived from agency appear as random events to the rest of the world.” Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. 2003. W.W. Norton. P. 72.
 

“Strictly speaking, we observe transactions, not relations. Transactions between social sites transfer energy from one to another, however microscopically. From a series of transactions we infer a relations between the sites: a friendship, a rivalry, an alliance, or something else.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. P. 7.


“Overall, it [a figure diagram] analyzes the transformation of collective identities: shared answers to the questions ‘Who are you?’ ‘Who are we?’ or ‘Who are they?’ Such identities, it indicates, center on boundaries separating us from them. On either side of the boundary, people maintain relations with each other: relations within X and relations within Y. They also carry on relations across the boundary: relations linking X to Y. Finally, the create collective stories about the boundary, about relations within X and Y, and relations between X and Y. Those stories usually differ from one side of the boundary to another, and often influence each other. Together, boundary, cross-boundary relations, within-boundary relations, and stories make up collective identities. Changes in any of the elements, however they occur, affect all the others. The existence of collective identities, furthermore, shapes individual experiences, for example, by providing templates for us Croats and distinguishing us from those Serbs.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. Pp. 7-8.


“Crudely speaking, general descriptions and explanations of social processes divide into three categories; systemic, dispositional, and transactional. Systemic accounts posit a coherent, self-sustaining entity such as a society, a world-economy, a community, an organization, a household, or at the limit a person, explaining events inside that entity by their location within the entity as a whole. Systemic descriptions and explanations have the advantage of taking seriously a knotty problem for social scientists: how to connect small-scale and large-scale social processes. They have two vexing disadvantages: the enormous difficulty of identifying and bounding relevant systems, and persistent confusion about cause and effect within such systems.

“Dispositional accounts similarly posit coherent entities–in this case more often individuals than any others–but explain the actions of those entities by means of their orientations just before the point of action. Competing dispositional accounts feature motives, decision logics, emotions, and cultural templates. When cast at the level of the individual organism, dispositional descriptions and explanations have the advantage of articulating easily with the findings of neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary analysis. They have the great disadvantage of accounting badly for emergence and for aggregate effects.

“Transactional accounts take interactions among social sites as their starting points, treating both events at those sites and durable characteristics of those sites as outcomes of interactions. Transactional accounts become relational–another term widely employed in this context–when they focus on persistent features of transactions between specific social sites. Transactional or relational descriptions and explanations have the advantage of placing communication, including the use of language, at the heart of social life. They have the disadvantage of contradicting common sense accounts of social behavior, and thus of articulating poorly with conventional moral reasoning in which entities take responsibility for dispositions and their consequences.

“Systemic, dispositional, and transactional approaches qualify as metatheories rather than as directly verifiable or falsifiable theories. They take competing ontological positions, claiming that rather different sorts of phenomena constitute and cause social processes. In the nature of the case, however, sustained competition between social scientific explanations usually takes place within one of these ontological lines rather than across them; systemic explanations compete with other systemic explanations, and so on.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. Pp. 14-5.


“As represented by manuals, courses, and presidential addresses, approved social science doctrine generally favors some combination of dispositional and covering law explanations: to explain political action means not only to reconstruct accurately the state of an actor–especially, but not exclusively, intentions of a cogitating individual–at the point of action, but to locate that state as a special case of a general law concerning human behavior. Such a doctrine rests on an implausible claim: that ultimately all political processes result from extremely general uniformities in the propensities of human actors, especially individual actors. Despite more than a century of strenuous effort, social scientists have securely identified no such uniformities. But they have, in fact, recurrently identified widely operating causal mechanisms and processes. Rather than continuing to search for disposition-governing covering laws, it would therefore make sense to switch wholeheartedly toward specification of mechanisms and processes.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. Pp. 27-8.


“Less obviously, democracy depends on a degree of articulation between public politics and networks of interpersonal commitment organized around trade, religious practice, kinship, and esoteric knowledge. In networks of these kinds, people carry on long-term, high-risk activities whose outcomes depend significantly on the performances of others; in that sense, they qualify as trust networks.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. P. 55.


“Social ties entailing significant rights and obligations grow up from a wide variety of activities: birth, common residence, sexual relations, mutual aid, religious practice, public ceremonial, and more. Some of those ties ramify into networks of identity and trust: sets of social ties providing collective answers to the questions ‘Who are you?’ ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Who are they?’ as well as becoming sites of high-risk, long-term activities such as reputation building, investment, trade in valuables, procreation, and entrance into a craft. Trade diasporas, Landsmannschaften, credit circles, lineages, religious sects, and journeymen’s brotherhoods provide salient cases in point.

“Networks thus formed and reinforced acquire strong claims over their members. Gossip, shaming, and threats of expulsion multiply their effectiveness in such networks. Since the very connections among members become crucial resources, external threats to any member become threats to the high-risk, long-term activities of all members. As a result, external repression operates on networks of identity and trust in two rather different modes. It damps collective action when it concentrates on raising the cost of any new action but incites collective resistance when it threatens survival of the network and its associated identities.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. P. 57.


“Participation in contentious politics consists of conversational interaction within networks in the context of collectively constructed stories.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. P. 58.


“Scripts provide models for participation in particular classes of social relations. Shared local knowledge, in its turn, provides means of giving variable contents to those social relations. Among our basic mechanisms, emulation relies chiefly on scripting, while adaptation relies heavily on accumulation of local knowledge.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. P. 81.


“Scripts alone promote uniformity; knowledge alone flexibility; their combination, flexibility within established limits.

“With little scripting and local knowledge available, actors either avoid each other or follow shallow improvisations such as the maneuvers pedestrians on a crowded sidewalk adopt in order to pass each other with a minimum of bumping and blocking. Scripting can be extensive and common knowledge meager, as when a master of ceremonies directs participants to applaud, rise, sit, and exit; let us entitle this circumstance thin ritual. Here only weak ties obtain. Thin ritual absorbs high transaction costs for the social results that it accomplishes; most people reserve it for very special occasions, and escape it when they can.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. P. 81.


“Wherever powerful parties gain from the segregation and coordination of two networks, equal or not, paired categories provide an effective device for realization of that gain.” Tilly, Charles. Identities, Boundaries, & Social Ties. 2005. Paradigm Publishers. P.87.


"I shall discuss two concepts of social order: that of stable, regular, predictable patterns of behaviour and that of cooperative behaviour. Correspondingly, there are two concepts of disorder. The first, disorder as lack of predictability, is expressed in Macbeth's vision of life as 'sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing'. The second, disorder as absence of cooperation, is expressed in Hobbes's vision of life in the state of nature as 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'....

"What is it that enables people to predict each other's behaviour? What is it that enables them to cooperate with one another? The partial answers I have provided are several sizes smaller than the questions. altruism, envy, social norms and self-interest all contribute, in complex, interacting ways to order, stability and cooperation. Some mechanisms that promote stability also work against cooperation. Some mechanisms that facilitate cooperation also increase the level of violence. Each society and each community will be glued together, for better and for worse, by a particular, idiosyncratic mix of these motivations. But the basic ingredients that go into the cement seem to be more or less the same in all societies, even if they can be combined in innumerable ways." Elster, Jon. The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order. Cambridge University Press. 1989. Pp. 1, 287.


“In this oeuvre [actant-network theory], which emerged from new theorisations of the relations between people and technology, objects are constructed by particular power relations, and in turn also actively construct such relations. In this tradition, known as actant-network theory, objects are produced by particular networks of cultural and political discourses and, in conjunction with humans, act to reproduce such relations. So, the discourses and networks which connect people to objects are not only inextricable as if they are one actor, but may in fact be ‘made of the same stuff.’” Woodward, Ian. Understanding Material Culture. 2007. Sage Publications. P. 12. Subquote is from MacKenzie and Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology. 1999, Open University Press, P. 25.


“‘Actant’ is a term developed from recent approaches in the sociology of science and technology which refers to entities – both human and non-human – which have the ability to ‘act’ socially. By dissolving the boundary between people who ‘act’ and objects which are seen as inanimate or ‘outside’, the term ‘actant’ is designed to overcome any a priori distinction between the social, technological and natural worlds, and emphasises the inextricable links between humans and material things.” Woodward, Ian. Understanding Material Culture. 2007. Sage Publications. P. 15.


“Identities, which are the nodes, trigger out of struggles for control as they seek footing with each other, and so co-evolve along with networks in one and another tangible domain of activity.” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. P. xviii.


“A higher-level network can grow, for example, among nodes that are disciplines. A style is itself recognizable as a new level, an identity with a new sort of internal constitution. The publics induced and presupposed in constructing identities and networks in chapters 1 and 2, can also be seen as a zero level. The possibilities are myriad, and dizzying, as indeed they must be for an accounting of our vast ‘river.’” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. P. xix.


“If we assume with Luhmann that all events are fugitive and that they are the elements of social systems, then control becomes the attempt to constrain the possible events.” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. Note on P. 7.


“Triggerings of identities also invoke communication with others as an aspect of seeking footings. Repeated communication between some pair can get recognized as a continuing relation when its frequency rises above chance expectancy in that context. The pattern of such ties across identities can become seen as a network engraved in some sort of public space with an identity of its own. Influences flowing through ties, and their impacts, are shaped by the network and in turn can reshape it.

“Baldassarri and Bearman model how this may transpire when political issues that are already active in participants’ minds are the subjects of communications. Repeated communication will include arguments and attempts at influencing the opinion of the other participant in a tie. A threefold stochastic model is proposed for showing how the choice of what issue to discuss, and with whom, shift along with the existing divergence of opinion. Baldassarri and Bearman ran large numbers of massive simulations of the resulting distribution and location of opinions in that public, across the menu of issues.

“The point is to see how an extreme partisan polarization can come about even within a public most of whom take moderate stands on most issues. The crux of the study’s findings is that, even with the majority moderate on most issues, this public can sift itself into rather segregated and homogeneously partisan blocs of opinion on one or a few hot-button issues. The simulations were run over hundreds and thousands of periods of discussion, and the output provided the full network on each issue at each period, noting the opinion level of each actor at each stage. Not always, but often, an issue or two sorted themselves out as hot-button without attribution of particular content.” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. P. 21. [Reference is Baladassarri, Delia & Bearman. 2006. “Dynamics of Political Polarization.” ISERP Working Paper. 06-07. Columbia University.]


“A story is at root an authority, a transfer of identity, which explains its binding to network.” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. P. 31.


“Granovetter derived from Rapoport’s results the conclusion that ties and network were intertwined in a manner that was, at first sight, paradoxical. Ties that were intrinsically weaker, more casual, yielded higher connectivity across the network: weak ties are strong. That is, the way in which weak ties spread themselves around is such that they connect a larger fraction of a world together than do the same number of strong ties spread out in their way.

“Strong ties, ties given precedence by the issuers, are weak in the broader context because they do not bind as large a fraction of a world into a corporate whole in connectivity. Granovetter elaborated all the nuances implied. Strong ties did fit into strong, if tiny, corporates so inwardly turned as only to choose each of the few intimate others again and again without attention to the larger context of persons. Sum it up abstractly: Close-knitness of a network is highly correlated with involuteness.” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. Pp. 43-4. [Reference is Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78:1360-1380.]


“James Coleman reports on corporates with equal richness from a smaller and more specialized canvas, the American high school. In Coleman’s account, it is initial networks among youngsters feeding in from diverse elementary schools and family clusters, which are overtaken by corporates that emerge among the children in straggly fashion. Coleman’s substantive theme is the preoccupations and machinations of identities situated in these networks to become assimilated to the ‘right’ sorts of corporates. These are the ‘in’ crowds on a social level, specializing variously around clothes and clubs and hangouts and sports and so on. Of course, there can be more or less bullying too, correlating with differences in architectures across corporates.” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. P. 46. [Reference is Coleman, James. 1961. The Adolescent Society. Free Press.]


“Structural equivalence is a more general concept than membership or network. It includes as a special case, but may be contrasted with, the cohesion of corporate interconnection . It concerns mutual positioning: what partition into sets of identities would signal what partition of types of tie? Note the duality. Blocks of structurally equivalent identities are built according to tie profiles. For an explicit definition, consult Breiger, Boorman, and Arabie.

“There may be no ties at all between structural equivalents. Two lonely kids alike isolated on the fringes of a playground illustrate the pervasiveness of marginality in networks. Romo analyzes this as the ‘Omega Phenomenon.’ Also structurally equivalent are two ‘stars’ who each reach out to gather the other kids into their respective orbits but have little to do with each other. Or structural equivalence can be abstracted from the particular others, so that two quarterbacks are equivalent even though there is no overlap between the kids in their orbits. The result is positions.

“The central point is to look for a partition of a population, such that the nodes in each set tend to relate to the rest of the sets in much the same way: in the pure case, they have the same incidence of the same sort of ties into each other set. According to this principle, just call it streq, those in a set see the rest of the world the same way but need not even be aware of each other, much less be tied as a clique.” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. P. 54. [Reference is to Breiger, Ronald, Boorman & Arabie. “An Algorithm for Clustering Relational Data with Applications to Social Network Analysis and Comparison with Multidimensional Scaling.” 1975. Journal of Mathematical Psychology 12:328-83.]


“Institutions and rhetorics are akin to networks and stories, in that spaces of possibilities for the ordinary in life, of what will be taken for granted, derive from each pair. Rhetorics make institutions explicit just as stories make networks explicit. Rhetoric is the garb of a realm, much as story-set clothes type of tie [sic]. An institutional system has come to accommodate a wide range of disciplines and styles as well as networks within a realm, along with the particular institutions. They are gathered together with rhetorics that constitute that realm. And yet institutional systems also precede and influence, as well as build from, these constituents. Within each system, stories must continue to accompany local enclaves at the scale of disciplines and yet be configured so as to transpose across network populations and styles. The stories become mutually shared accounts when they muster through publics into rhetorics.” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. Pp. 171-2.


“So language is coordinate to processes that lead to stories and to types of tie being discerned and factored out as separate patterns, networks. Only the human species elaborates ties in stories. Social accountings ground social networks in a somehow-ordered heap of stories, only some of whose constituents map into biophysical space. The generation and spread of these accountings presuppose social contexts able to support language as structuring.” White, Harrison. Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge, Second Edition. 2008. Princeton University Press. P. 343.


“Socially established communication patterns are identified by social systems theory as the individual elements that constitute society. Society consists of social systems, of certain communicational ‘organisms’ that emerged and have established their own specific types of operations. These can connect to each other and continue the operations of this communicational organism–similar to a cell that by its bio-chemical operations creates its own autopoietic ‘being.’ A social system ‘is’ nothing else but the autopoietic reproduction of itself. A social system, such as the economy, consists of nothing but economic communication that connects to itself. It is only by economic communication that the economy continues and further constructs itself–and thus builds its own communicational ‘membrane’ by which economic communication can be distinguished from other types of communication.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. Pp. 23-4.


“According to social systems theory, society has evolved to a state in which it consists of a variety of large communication systems that can be identified by the functions they perform. Such function systems are, for instance, economy, politics, law, and mass media: buying a meal is communication functioning economically; the casting and counting of a vote is communication functioning politically; presenting an argument in court is communication functioning legally. Since all these systems are operationally closed, they are the intrasocial environment of the others. They are ‘subsystems’ of society. Each function system has its own social perspective and creates its own social reality.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 24.


“In the terminology of social systems theory, function systems can be identified by their respective codes. The legal system, for instance, operates on the basis of the legal/illegal code.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 25.


“In order to be actually communicated, a code cannot do without programs. In the system of science, to give another example, the code of true/false on which scientific communication is based, must be applied in connection with certain scientific theories, methods, and so on. Without relation to these programs you cannot argue scientifically for something to be true of false. Only in the context of, for instance, a theory or a method, can a scientific statement be called scientifically true or false.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 25.


“Luhmann says in regard to organizations: ‘As a result there comes into being an autopoietic system that is characterized by a specific form of operations: It produces decisions by decisions. Behavior is communicated as decision-making.’ The importance of organizations and their specific type of communicative operation–decision making–seems to increase in modern society.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 32.


“There is a coupling between politics and law regulated by constitutions. The economy is coupled to the legal system by ownership and contracts. The coupling between the system of science and the system of education is manifested in the organization of the university. Education and the economy are coupled through academic certificates and diplomas that regulate access to jobs.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 38.


“Structural coupling establishes specific mechanisms of irritation between systems and forces different systems to continuously resonate with each other.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 38.


“Social evolution in the strict sense takes place, according to Luhmann, when a new type of differentiation becomes dominant.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 42.


“This passage makes reference to all four types of differentiation discussed by Luhmann: segmentary differentiation, center/periphery differentiation, stratified differentiation, and functional differentiation.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 42


“In a society strictly based on segmentary differentiation, there is no center of social power–no tribe or segment is generally perceived to be the core–and there is also no established social hierarchy that has gained primacy over these structures.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. Pp. 42-3.


“The increasing power and wealth of one social segment can lead to an overturning of segmentary differentiation. One segment may become so dominant that it establishes the difference between itself and the other segments as the new primary difference of this society. In this case, a center/periphery differentiation would be born–and it would be born by the center itself. The center makes itself the center. An example of a society with a significant center/periphery distinction would be ancient Rome.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 44.


“In a society based on stratified differentiation, social order is perceived to be a direct outcome of distinctions in social status. The subsystems of a stratified society are the different ‘classes’ that constitute the social hierarchy.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 44.


“Contemporary society, as he sees it, is basically the outcome of the replacement of medieval European stratified differentiation with functional differentiation between the sixteenth and eighteenth century.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 45.


“Social function systems (politics, economy, education, and so on) are all ‘equally’ different–they all have different codes, programs, media, and so on but their functional inequality does not go along with a hierarchical inequality. Like the segments of a segmentary society, function systems are neither ranked nor oriented towards one central core. But, like the strata of a stratified society, function systems have separate and mutually exclusive characteristics. While segmentary differentiation is based on the structural equality of its subsystems and center/periphery and stratified differentiations are based on the structural inequality of their subsystems, the subsystems of functional differentiation are equally unequal.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. Pp. 45-6.


“‘Systems operating within the medium of sense can and must distinguish beteen self-reference and other-reference, and this has to be done so that the actualization of self-reference also implies other-reference, and that the actualization of other-reference also implies self-reference as the respective other side of the distinction.’

“Making sense within a horizon constituted of actuality and possibility implies the distinction between the sense maker and that which makes sense for the sense maker–the distinction between the ship and its horizon. A mind that makes sense can distinguish between itself and what it intends. Similarly, communication can distinguish between itself and its context. The expression ‘to make sense’ has a double meaning and always introduces two elements at the same time: this makes sense to me. It makes sense, and I make it make sense. The form of sense therefore goes along with two basic and interconnected structural distinctions: the actuality/possibility distinction and the self-reference/other-reference distinction.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 67. Subquote is from Luhmann, Niklas. Die Gesellshaft der Gesellshaft. 1997. Suhrkamp. P. 51.


“Luhmann highlights its [public opinion’s] functional importance. Public opinion has nothing to do with human subjectivity or with the exercise of human reason; it is a communicative medium that becomes possible through the development of the mass media into an autopoietic and global function system. With the production of a general memory there arises a need for a ‘currency.’ The memory has to somehow take shape; it needs to assume forms. Like the economy needs the medium of money, so a general reality needs a medium to manifest itself. Public opinion is this communicative medium, and it is produced within the mass media system.” Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 2006. Open Court Publishing. P. 138.


“In tighter kinds of sociality, from honeybees to apes, attention to the attention of others becomes progressively more important. First, animals read others’ attention to resources as well as risks: a patch of pollen-rich flowers or ripe fruit, a route to reaching it, a technique to access or process it, a safe territory. Then, as the advantages of social living multiply, creatures attend to others in the group and their mutual attention in order to monitor affiliation and alliance and the rank needed to avoid constant conflict over access to resources.

“As social relationships become still more flexible, as in corvids, dolphins, or chimpanzees, shared attention makes possible open-ended coordination within groups and against rivals or prey. Groups that coordinate swiftly and freely can outdo other groups. To do so, they need to share and check attention and intention as they pursue flexible goals: as Frans de Waal notes, ‘The selection pressure on paying attention to others must have been enormous.’ And in order to motivate complex cooperation, animals need to derive interest and pleasure from attending to each other, as dolphins do in their synchronized play.” Boyd, Brian. On the Evolution of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. 2009. Harvard University Press. P. 102.


“Religion and ritual cannot explain the origin of art, but once art began, traditions of artistic elaboration, including ritual, could be coopted for social cohesion.” Boyd, Brian. On the Evolution of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. 2009. Harvard University Press. P. 118.


“Juvenile play deprivation among both rats and humans correlates with serious social malfunction in later life. Young rats experimentally deprived of play grow up unable to judge how and when to defend themselves and veer between being far too aggressive and far too passive. In humans such experiments have yet to be tried, but in a large-scale study of sociopathic murderers in Texas, researchers were surprised to find no common background factor other than an absence or an extremely reduced amount of play in childhood in 90 percent of the perpetrators.” Boyd, Brian. On the Evolution of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. 2009. Harvard University Press. Pp. 179-80.


“The first wave of social systems theory is Parson’s structural functionalism, the second wave is derived from the general systems theory of the 1960s through the 1990s, and the third wave is based on the complex dynamical systems theory developed in the 1990s.” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. P. 10.


“However, the Gestaltists were more holist than emergentist; their emphasis was on the study of irreducible wholes, and they did not explore how those wholes emerged from lower-level components and other interactions.” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. P. 35.


“Most contemporary social theory likewise rejects the historical positions of both individualism and collectivism. Archer observed that contemporary attempts at unity have taken two forms: the inseparability and process ontology of Giddens’s structuration theory and the emergentist and morphogenetic account of analytic dualism....”

“...Commenting on contemporary social theory, Archer noted that a ‘concern with interplay is what distinguishes the emergentist from the non-emergentist whose preoccupation is with interpenetration.’” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. P. 139.


“Both Castelfranchi and N. Gilbert argued that emergence processes in systems of cognitive agents are qualitatively different than in reactive agent systems because cognitive agents are capable of observing and internalizing emergent macrofeatures of the system, a process that has been called ‘immergence’ and ‘second-order emergence’” ... Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. P. 172.


“All three of these prominent sociological paradigms [reductions to either structure, individual, or interaction] fail to theorize the multileveled nature of society that is brought into focus by artificial societies: individual, communication, and emergent social properties.” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 187-8.


“The Structure Paradigm focuses on the relations between individuals and societies. Parsonsian structural-functionalism is the canonical approach of the Structure Paradigm; this version of the Structure Paradigm was dominant in the 1950s and 1960s, and other forms of the Structure Paradigm continue today. The Structure Paradigm was followed by the Interaction Paradigm. The Interaction Paradigm rejected almost everything central to the Structure Paradigm and proposed a new alternative not considered within the Structure Paradigm: that communicative interaction, not the structure nor the individual, was central to sociological explanation.

“The Emergence Paradigm is a classic synthesis: the inherent tensions of the Interaction Paradigm drive theory’s movement toward it, and it combines the central elements of both the Structure Paradigm and the Interaction Paradigm. The Emergence Paradigm emphasizes both individual-society relations and communicative interaction, arguing that the individual-society relation cannot be explained without recourse to sophisticated theories of communication and of emergence from communication.” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 191-2.


“Interaction can be studied objectively within the positivist tradition, whereas agency is a subjectivist, interpretivist notion.” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. P. 207.


“Agency theorists like Taylor and Giddens are ultimately focused on individuals; they hold that subjective interpretation explains social life and that there is no need for an autonomous science of society. If interpretivists are correct, then the social level of analysis does not exist. Interpretivists have the same attitude about social phenomena as methodological individualists: Social phenomena do not exist, they are mere epiphenomena of human action (and humans in interaction)....

“Contemporary interpretivism is a strange and unstable combination of subjectivist agency theories (e.g., Giddens) and objectivist empirical studies of interaction (e.g., conversation analysis). Interpretivism is unstable because it overlaps both agency theory (part of the Structure Paradigm) and interactionism (part of the Interaction Paradigm).” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. P. 209.


“As a result of inverted neglects – the Structure Paradigm neglecting symbolic interaction, the Interaction Paradigm neglecting structural properties – there has not been any sustained study of the role that symbolic interaction plays in social emergence.” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. P. 210.


The Emergence paradigm introduces two additional levels of social reality: stable emergents and ephemeral emergents. [As levels D and C on a five level pyramid beginning with individuals at level A, Interaction at B, and Social Structure at level E]” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. P. 210.


“To the extent that individuals are influenced and constituted by their social situation, the study of the individual will be a part of the Emergence Paradigm.” Sawyer, R. Keith. Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. 2005. Cambridge University Press. P. 223.


“At the most general level, greed is accentuated in human behavior by civilizations that permit large numbers of people to exist in apparent ‘freedom’ from environmental constraints.” Bennett, John. Human Ecology as Human Behavior; Essays in Environmental and Developmental Anthropology. 1996. Transaction Publishers. P. 9.


“The term ‘socionatural system’ is an empirical generalization that attempts to combine both Nature and Culture. Empirically, socionatural systems can consist of any ongoing relationship between human activities and environmental phenomena in which the humans provide the goals and means and the environment the wherewithal.” Bennett, John. Human Ecology as Human Behavior; Essays in Environmental and Developmental Anthropology. 1996. Transaction Publishers. P. 13.


“The distinctive feature of human social reality, the way in which it differs from other forms of animal reality known to me, is that humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. Examples are pretty much everywhere: a piece of private property, the president of the United States, a twenty-dollar bill, and a professor in a university are all people or objects that are able to perform certain functions in virtue of the fact that they have a collectively recognized status that enables them to perform those functions in a way they could not do without the collective recognition of the status.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 7.


“It is important to distinguish at least two kinds of rules. Our favorite examples of rules regulate antecedently existing forms of behavior. For example, the rule ‘Drive on the right-hand side of the road’ regulates driving in the United States, but driving can exist independently of this rule. Some rules, however, do not just regulate, but they also create the possibility of the very behavior that they regulate. So the rules of chess, for example, do not just regulate pushing pieces around on a board, but acting in accordance with a sufficient number of the rules is a logically necessary condition for playing chess, because chess does not exist apart from the rules. Characteristically, regulative rules have the form ‘Do X,’ constitutive rules have the form ‘X counts as Y in context C.’ Thus, for example, such and such counts as a legal knight move in a game of chess, such and such a position counts as checkmate.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. Pp. 9-10.


“Some facts exist independently of any human institution. I call these brute facts. But some facts require human institutions in order to exist at all. An example of a brute fact is that the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun, and an example of an institutional fact is that Barack Obama is president of the United States. Institutional facts are typically objective facts, but oddly enough, they are only facts by human agreement of acceptance. Such facts require institutions for their existence.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 10.


“An institution is a system of constitutive rules, and such a system automatically creates the possibility of institutional facts.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 10.


“Basic to that formal structure is the distinction between the ‘cognitive faculties’ – perception, memory, and belief–and the ‘conative and volitional faculties’ – desire, prior intention, and intention-in-action. These two sets relate to reality in quite different ways. I have already introduced the notion of direction of fit as a feature of speech acts, but I hope it is obvious that it applies equally well to mental states. Beliefs, like statements, have the downward or mind (or word)-to-world direction of fit. And desires and intentions, like orders and promises, have the upward or world-to-mind (or word) direction of fit. Beliefs and perceptions, like statements, are supposed to represent how things are in the world, and in that sense they are supposed to fit the world; they have mind-to-world direction of fit. The conative-volitional states such as desires, prior intentions, and intentions-in-action, like orders and promises, have the world-to-mind direction of fit. They are not supposed to represent how things are but how we would like them to be or how we intend to make them be. In addition to these two faculties, there is a third, imagination, where the propositional content is not supposed to fit reality in the way that the propositional contents in cognition and volition are supposed to fit, but which nonetheless functions crucially in creating social and institutional reality.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 15.


“Human beings, along with certain other species, have the capacity to impose functions on objects, where the imposition of function creates an intentionality-relative phenomenon, the function. Typically an object will have a function imposed on it when the object is used for a certain purpose. I call these ‘agentive functions.’ Humans create agentive functions to a rather spectacular extent with all of their tools. But even nonhuman animals can have objects that perform certain functions where the function is intended by the users of the object: think of birds’ nests, beaver dams, and primates using a stick to dig food out of the ground. For our present purposes, it is important to point out that functions are always intentionality-relative. This is disguised from us by the fact that in biology we often discover functions in nature. We discover, for example, that the function of the heart is to pump blood (something that was unknown until the seventeenth century), or that the function of the vestibular ocular reflex is to stabilize the retinal image. But when we discover functions in nature, what we are doing is discovering how certain causes operate to serve certain purposes, where the notion of purpose is not intrinsic to mind-independent nature, but is relative to our sets of values. So we can discover that the heart pumps blood, but when we say that the function of the heart is to pump blood, we take it for granted that life, survival, and reproduction are positive values, and that the functioning of biological organs serves these values. But where do the values come from? The clue that there is a normative component to the notion of function is that once we have described something in terms of function we can introduce a normative vocabulary. We can say things like, ‘This is a better heart than that heart,’ ‘This heart is malfunctioning,’ ‘This heart is suffering from disease.’ We cannot do any of these things for stones: stones do not suffer from stone malfunction or stone disease; but if we assign a function to a stone–such as being a paperweight or projectile–we could make evaluative appraisals. To put the point succinctly, if perhaps too crudely, a function is a cause that serves a purpose. And the purposes have to come from somewhere; in this case, they come from human beings. In this sense functions are intentionality-relative and therefore mind dependent.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. Pp. 58-9.


“We have a capacity to create a reality by representing it as existing. The only reality that we can so create is a reality of deontology. It is a reality that confers rights, responsibilities, and so on. However, this is not a trivial achievement because these rights, responsibilities, and so on are the glue that holds human society together.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 89.


“We live in a sea of human institutional facts. Much of this is invisible to us. Just as it is hard for the fish to see the water in which they swim, so it is hard for us to see the institutionality in which we swim.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 90.


“I will define a status function as a function that is performed by an object(s), person(s), or other sort of entity(ies) and which can only be performed in virtue of the fact that the community in which the function is performed assigns a certain status to the object, person, or entity in question, and the function is performed in virtue of the collective acceptance or recognition of the object, person, or entity as having that status.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 94.


“... we can now state the general principles on which institutional reality is created and maintained in existence. We require exactly three primitive notions: first, collective intentionality; second, the assignment of function; and third, a language rich enough to enable the creation of Status Function Declarations, including constitutive rules.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. Pp. 100-1.


“Well, there are two radically different sorts of cases. The literal utterance of the sentence ‘Snow is white’ counts as the making of a statement that snow is white, simply in virtue of its meaning. No further speech act is necessary. But when we count pieces of paper of a particular sort as twenty-dollar bills we are making them twenty-dollar bills by Declaration. The Declaration makes something the case by counting it as, that is, by declaring it to be, the case. It is essential to understand this asymmetry to understand both the nature of language and the nature of institutional reality.” Searle, John. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. 2010. Oxford University Press. P. 101.


“... the presence or absence of reciprocity is fundamentally about the equality of relationships. The degree of transitivity is about the internal organization of some set of relationships. And the degree of preferential attachment is about the degree to which individuals become differentiated from one another within the group.” Martin, John L. Social Structures. 2009. Princeton University Press. P. 70.


“Other animals use rituals, of course, but these tend to be neurologically hard-wired, and confined to very basic adaptive behaviors such as courtship, mating, sexual combat, defense of territories, and other critical activities. In contrast, humans need to use rituals at each and every episode of interaction and to employ them continuously during the course of an interaction in order to sustain focus, emotional moods, and solidarity. Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim recognized this fact of social life a long time ago, and most interpersonal theories build some model of ritual activity into their respective conceptualizations, but none seem to wonder why rituals would have to be so pervasive and prominent in human interaction.

The answer lies, I believe, in our ape ancestry’s penchant for weak ties, mobility, autonomy, and low sociality. Although hominid brains were probably altered in order to increase the ability to mobilize a greater variety of emotions, selection did not wipe out more primal propensities for low sociality. Rather, evolutionary evidence suggests that the expanding capacity to mobilize emotional energy and to use rituals to assure that the requisite level of energy is generated was only laid over older propensities for lower levels of sociality and solidarity. Humans are thus of two minds, as it were, one pushing us to use rituals to mobilize emotional energy, the other asserting the tendencies of our ape ancestors.” Turner, Jonathan. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. 2000. Stanford University Press. Pp. 44-5.


“George Herbert Mead’s concept of role taking captures the essence of how selection was channeled: significant symbols or gestures emitted by others are used by individuals to assume their perspective in order to better coordinate their actions with these others. Ralph H. Turner’s concept of role making captures the reciprocal of this process: gestures emitted by an individual consciously and unconsciously signal to others a line of conduct, as well as the dispositions and moods associated with this conduct. Role making is thus the stuff that makes role taking possible. An increased ability to role-make and role-take was the key for low-sociality animals in desperate need to get organized with others and to reveal more permanent interpersonal attachments, for only in this way could hominids become more attuned to each other.” Turner, Jonathan. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. 2000. Stanford University Press. P. 46.


“Thus, if negative sanctions were to produce associative bonds, it was necessary to wire the brain to produce varied and complex emotions that could take away the dissociative effects of negative sanctioning.” Turner, Jonathan. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. 2000. Stanford University Press. P. 48.


“Of particular importance for social bonding and solidarity is the emotion of pride, which consists mostly of happiness with self shadowed by fear that one might not be able to act in ways that make one proud.” Turner, Jonathan. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. 2000. Stanford University Press. P. 49.


“Pride is especially significant because it is tied to an individual’s feelings about self as an object; and pride comes when expectations imposed by self and others have been met or exceeded. Positive sanctions are essential to the production of pride, but once activated, pride has the capacity to push individuals to meet expectations in the future and to secure the positive sanctions that come with such efforts. Moreover, pride makes individuals act in ways that forge positive social bonds, since pride is basically happiness about self, an emotion that tends to be contagious.” Turner, Jonathan. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. 2000. Stanford University Press. Pp. 49-50.


“Once the brain could generate variants and combinations of such primary emotions as satisfaction-happiness, aversion-fear, assertion-anger, and disappointment-sadness, sanctioning took on entirely new dimensions among our hominid ancestors. Negative sanctions could now avoid disruptive anger-fear-anger cycles and, instead, rely on less volatile affective states like shame, guilt, sorrow, regret, and other emotions built from a base of sadness. Positive sanctions could be increasingly used to heighten cycles of associative affect, for social solidarity among humans cannot be produced without high levels of positive sanctioning. And sadness could be used to mobilize self to seek positive affect from others or to signal to others needs for more positive sanctions.” Turner, Jonathan. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. 2000. Stanford University Press. P. 51.


“If we visualize a relatively low-sociality animal trying to get organized on the African savanna, what would selection have to do to the neuroanatomy of this animal? First, selection would have to enhance this neuroanatomy so that this animal would be alert and highly attuned to the expectations of others. Second, it would have to increase sensitivity to a fuller range of emotions emitted by others. Third, it would have to connect emotions and expectations together in some way so as to generate more general codes (i.e., norms, values) of conduct. The primary emotions of fear, anger, and satisfaction are sufficient to get this process started, and it can be hypothesized that selection expanded these primary emotions into variants in order to give moral codes, and the emotions on which they are built, more complexity and subtlety. Thus, when moral codes were violated, anger towards the violator could be aroused and used by others to demand conformity; and reciprocally, the fear aroused in the violator would mobilize efforts at conformity. When moral codes were obeyed, satisfaction-happiness toward the conformer would provide positive reinforcement for continued conformity. As more subtle variants and combinations of these primary emotions evolved, the codes themselves and the sanctions could correspondingly become more complex, allowing for more flexible social arrangements in tune with hominids’ ape ancestry.” Turner, Jonathan. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. 2000. Stanford University Press. Pp. 52-3.


“Indeed, it could be argued that most codes among hominids were prescriptive, with relatively few negative sanctions; proscriptive codes and negative sanctions are more typical, I believe, of more complex patterns of social organization that emerge after hunting-gathering. Hunter-gatherers–the basic social form that sustained hominids–do not evidence large inventories of prohibitions or much use of negative sanctions; rather, these simple social structures are built primarily around allowing individuals considerable personal autonomy and, at the same time, pulling individuals together in sufficiently structured bands organized by prescriptions backed mostly by low-key positive sanctions or low-intensity negative sanctions such as sarcasm, pointed joking, and ridicule.” Turner, Jonathan. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. 2000. Stanford University Press. P. 56.


“Without shame and guilt, morality has no internal footing within individuals’ cognitive frames and feelings about themselves; in the absence of shame and guilt, then, social control would depend upon constant monitoring and external sanctioning of individuals by others. In contrast, emotions like guilt and shame, especially when they operate in conjunction with pride for having behaved competently and for meeting expectations, locate morality inside the individual and make the individual self-monitoring and self-sanctioning in ways that promote social solidarity–while avoiding the dissociative costs to the group of negative sanctioning.” Turner, Jonathan. On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect. 2000. Stanford University Press. P. 82.


“The individual is the precipitate of past interactional situations and an ingredient of each new situation. An ingredient, not the determinant, because a situation is an emergent property.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 5.


“The term [ritual] has been used in roughly the fashion that I will emphasize by some sociologists, notably Emile Durkheim and his most creative follower in micro-sociology, Erving Goffman: that is, ritual is a mechanism of mutually focused emotion and attention producing a momentarily shared reality, which thereby generates solidarity and symbols of group membership.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 7.


“Deference is what individuals do toward others; demeanor is the other side of the interaction, the construction of social self.... ... Demeanor is a form of action, the work that he [Goffman] calls ‘face work.’ It is not merely one-sided action, but reciprocal. The actor acquires a face or social self in each particular situation, to just the extent that the participants cooperate to carry off the ritual sustaining the definition of the situational reality and who its participants are. There is reciprocity between deference and demeanor.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 19.


“Thus Goffman drew upon his fieldwork that was carried out incognito in the schizophrenic wards of a mental hospital to make the point that one becomes labeled as mentally ill because one persistently violates minor standards of ritual propriety. He went on to draw the irony that mental patients are deprived of backstage privacy, props for situational self-presentation, and most of the other resources by which people under ordinary conditions are allowed to show their well-demeaned selves and their ability to take part in the reciprocity of giving ritual deference to others.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 20.


“Goffman was concerned with sophisticated deviants for the same reason. He studied confidence artists because these are professionals attuned to the vulnerabilities of situations, and their techniques point up the details of the structures of normalcy that they take advantage of in order to cheat their victims. He analyzed spies and counterespionage agents because these are specialists in contriving, and in seeing through, an impression of normalcy; the fine grain of normal appearances becomes plainer when one sees a secret agent tripped up by minor details.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 20.


“Once the bodies are together, there may take place a process of intensification of shared experience, which Durkheim called collective effervescence, and the formation of collective conscience or collective consciousness. We might refer to it as a condition of heightened intersubjectivity. How does this come about? Durkheim indicates two interrelated and mutually reinforcing mechanisms:

1. Shared action and awareness: ‘[I]f left to themselves, individual consciousnesses are closed to each other; they can communicate only by means of signs which express their internal states. If the communication is established between them is to become a real communion, that is to say, a fusion of all particular sentiments into one common sentiment, the signs expressing them must themselves be fused in one single and unique resultant. It is the appearance of this that informs individuals that they are in harmony and makes them conscious of their moral unity. It is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word, or preforming the same gesture in regard to some object that they become and feel themselves to be in unison .... Individual minds cannot come in contact and communicate with each other except by coming out of themselves; they cannot do this except by movements. So it is the homogeneity of these movements that gives the group consciousness of itself .... When this homogeneity is once established and these movements have taken a stereotyped form, they serve to symbolize the corresponding representations. But they symbolize them only because they have aided in forming them.’

2. Shared emotion: ‘When [the aborigines] are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each re-echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others. The initial impulse thus proceeds, growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows in its advance. And as such active passions so free from all control could not fail to burst out, on every side one sees nothing but violent gestures, cries, veritable howls, and deafening noises of every sort, which aid in intensifying still more the state of mind which they manifest.’

“Movements carried out in common operate to focus attention, to make participants aware of each other as doing the same thing and thus thinking the same thing. Collective movements are signals by which intersubjectivity is created. Collective attention enhances the expression of shared emotion; and in turn the shared emotion acts further to intensify collective movements and the sense of intersubjectivity.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 35. Subquotes are from Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 1912/1965. Free Press. Pp. 262-3, 247.


“What is mutually focused upon becomes a symbol of the group. In actuality, the group is focusing on its own feeling of intersubjectivity, its own shared emotion; but it has no way of representing this fleeting feeling, except by representing it as embodied in an object. It reifies its experience, makes it thing-like, and thus an emblem, treated as having noun-like permanence. In fact, as Durkheim underlines, sentiments can only be prolonged by symbols:

“‘Moreover, without symbols, social sentiments could have only a precarious existence. Though very strong as long as men are together and influence each other reciprocally, they exist only in the form of recollections after the assembly has ended, and when left to themselves, these become feebler and feebler; for since the group is no longer present and active, individual temperaments easily regain the upper hand .... But if the movements by which these sentiments are expressed are connected with something that endures, the sentiments themselves become more durable. These other things are constantly bringing them to mind and arousing them; it is as though the cause which excited them in the first place continued to act. Thus these systems of emblems, which are necessary if society is to become conscious of itself, are no less indispensable for assuring the continuation of this consciousness.’” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 37. Subquote is from Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. 1912/1965. Free Press. P. 265.


“... we can see that some individuals are more privileged than others, by being nearer to the center of the ritual than others. Rituals thus have a double stratifying effect: between ritual insiders and outsiders; and, inside the ritual, between ritual leaders and ritual followers.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 41.


“The central mechanism of interaction ritual theory is that occasions that combine a high degree of mutual focus of attention, that is, a high degree of intersubjectivity, together with a high degree of emotional entrainment–through bodily synchronization, mutual stimulation / arousal of participants’ nervous systems–result in feelings of membership that are attached to cognitive symbols; and result also in the emotional energy of individual participants, giving them feelings of confidence, enthusiasm, and desire for action in what they consider a morally proper path. These moments of high degree of ritual intensity are high points of experience. They are high points of collective experience, the key moments of history, the times when significant things happen.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 42.


“Interaction ritual theory provides a theory of individual motivation from one situation to the next. Emotional energy is what individuals seek; situations are attractive or unattractive to them to the extent that the interaction ritual is successful in providing emotional energy. This gives us a dynamic microsociology, in which we trace situations and their pull or push for individuals who come into them. Note the emphasis: the analytical starting point is the situation, and how it shapes individuals; situations generate and regenerate the emotions and the symbolism that charge up individuals and send them from one situation to another.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 44.


“In sum, there are several distinctive ways in which symbols circulate and prolong group membership beyond ephemeral situations of emotional intensity. One is as objects that are in the focus of attention of emotionally entrained but otherwise anonymous crowds. The second is as symbols built up out of personal identities and narratives, in conversational rituals marking the tie between the conversationalists and the symbolic objects they are talking about. These symbols generally operate in two quite different circuits of social relationships; typically, the symbols of audiences, fans, partisans, and followers circulate from one mass gathering to another, and tend to fade in the interim; the symbols of personal identities and reputations are the small change of social relationships, generally of lesser momentary intensity than audience symbols but used so frequently and in self-reinforcing networks so as to permeate their participants’ sense of reality.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 87.


“Garfinkel’s most important contribution is to show that humans have intrinsically limited cognitive capabilities, and that they construct mundane social order by consistently using practices to avoid recognizing how arbitrarily social order is actually put together. We keep up conventions, not because we believe in them, but because we studiously avoid questioning them.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. Pp. 103-4. Reference is to Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1967. Prentice-Hall.


Garfinkel’s mundane reality, for example, is characterized by the feeling–I stress that this is a feeling rather than an explicit cognition–that ‘nothing out of the ordinary is happening here.’ This is an uninteresting emotion, from the point of view of the actor; but if Garfinkel is right, considerable work went into producing that feeling of ordinariness, and, into keeping ourselves from seeing that work itself. Mundane reality is a members’ accomplishment.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 106. Reference is to Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1967. Prentice-Hall.


“Order-takers nevertheless are required to be present at order-giving rituals, and are required to give at least ‘ritualistic’ assent at that moment. They and their boss mutually recognize each other’s position, and who has the initiative in the ritual enactment. Power rituals thus are an asymmetrical variant on Durkheimian interactions rituals.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 113.


“In what ways can individuals differ in their status group participation? Here we need to tease apart four aspects. Two of these are characteristics of the micro-situation itself and the individual’s location within it. Two are meso-level characteristics of the interaction ritual chains: what happens over time as situations repeat.

“First, on the micro-level, we must ask, How successful is the interaction ritual? In other words, does it build up to a high level of collective effervescence, a moderate level, or little emotional entrainment at all? The higher the ritual intensity, the more emotion is generated both in the immediate present and for long-term effects. Ritual intensity thus operates as a multiplier for the other three aspects of ritual effects.

“Again, on the micro-level: Where is the individual located as the interaction ritual takes place? There is a continuum from persons who are on the fringes of the group, just barely members, barely participating; others nearer the core; at the center is the sociometric star, the person who is always most intensely involved in the ritual interaction. This person is the Durkheimian participant of the highest degree, and experiencing the strongest effects of ritual membership: emotional energy, moral solidarity, attachment to group symbols. At the other end, there is the Durkheimian nonmember, who receives no emotional energy, no moral solidarity, and no symbolic attachments. This is the dimension of central / peripheral participation.

“Next, on the meso-level, as interaction ritual chains string situations together: What proportion of their time do people spend in each other’s physical presence? This is the dimension of social density. At one end of the continuum individuals are always in other people’s presence, under their eyesight and in their surveillance; this leads to a high degree of conformity, a feeling of social pressure on oneself, but also a desire to make other people conform as well. At the other end of the continuum individuals have a great deal of privacy (social and physical spaces where others do not intrude; Goffmanian backstages) or of solitude (other people are simply not around). Here pressures for conformity are low. Social density is a quantitative matter, an aggregate of a chain of situations over time....”

“Again on the meso-level: Who are the participants who come together in the aggregate of interaction ritual chains? Is it always the same persons, or a changing cast of characters? This is the dimension of localism / cosmopolitanism. Specifying the argument of Durkheim’s Division of Labor in Society, low diversity should produce local solidarity, strong attachment to reified symbols, literal-mindedness, and a strong barrier between insiders and outsiders. There is high conformity within the group, along with strong distrust of outsiders and alien symbols. At the other end of this subdimension, there is participation in a loose network consisting of many different kinds of groups and situations. Durkheimian theory predicts the result of cosmopolitan network structure is individualism, relativistic attitudes toward symbols, abstract rather than concrete thinking.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. Pp. 115-7.


“Pride is the social attunement emotion, the feeling that one’s self fits naturally into the flow of interaction, indeed that one’s personal sense epitomizes the leading mood of the group. High solidarity is smooth-flowing rhythmic coordination in the micro-rhythms of conversational interaction; it gives the feeling of confidence that what one is doing, the rewarding experience that one’s freely expressed impulses are being followed, are resonated and amplified by the other people present. When Scheff speaks of shame as the broken social bond, I take this to mean that the rhythm is impaired, that one’s spontaneous utterances are choked off–even for fractions of seconds–that there is a hesitancy about whether one is going to be understood, and hence about whether it is possible to formulate a clear or understandable utterance at all.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 120.


“Interaction ritual chains often have a circular, self-perpetuating form. Persons who dominate rituals gain emotional energy, which they can use to dominate future interaction rituals. Persons who are at the center of attention gain emotional energy, which they can use to convene and energize still further gatherings, thereby making themselves yet again the center of attention.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 131.


“We may visualize the stratification of society, not as a matter of who owns what material resources, or occupies what abstract position in a social structure, but as an unequal distribution of emotional energy.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 131.


“Emotional energy generated by experience of group solidarity is the primary good in social interaction, and all such value-oriented behaviors are rationally motivated toward optimizing this good. Since interaction rituals vary in the amount of solidarity they provide, and in their costs of participating, there is a market for ritual participation that shapes the distribution of individual behavior.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 145.


“How does one apply a rationality model to interaction ritual-based emotional solidarity? Solidarity is a good; and individuals are motivated to maximize the amount of solidarity they can receive, relative to costs of producing it. Solidarity, however, is a collective good; it can only be produced cooperatively. But it is a fairly simple type of collective structure. Interaction rituals are not subject to the free rider problem.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 148.


“All these activities involve gradations of skill, which are typically remarked upon by those present and recycled afterward in conversations and thus become part of individuals’ social reputations; some persons are better dancers, better singers, better players at a game whether it be bridge, nineteenth-century English cricket, or twentieth-century American pickup basketball games. Skill in such activities is part of the stock of membership symbols, reminding us that symbols are not things or even merely cognitions, but ways of communicating membership.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 154.


“Another way to say this is that positions in networks are created and sustained on the micro-level by the degree of success of interaction rituals. Networks are not fixed, although it is convenient for us as network analysts to treat them as fixed and preexisting so that we can examine the effects of being in different network positions. Network ties become created by just the kind of matchups of membership symbols and emotional energies that I have been discussing. And network ties vary in their strength, precisely as the situational ingredients that go into them vary.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 166.


“... all cases of altruism are cases of apparent conflict between interests in social solidarity and interests in material goods (including one’s body, seen here as a material good). If the market for interaction rituals is the prime determinant of emotional energy, altruism is not irrational; it is even predictable.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. Pp. 168-9.


“In interaction ritual theory, thinking is the third-order circulation of symbols. It follows upon the first-order creation of symbols in intense interaction rituals, and their second-order recirculation in conversational networks. Thinking is yet another loop, now into imaginary internal conversations, which are themselves interaction rituals taking place in the mind. Perform a gestalt switch: instead of starting with the individual engaged in thinking, start with the overall distribution of symbols among a population of people. Visualize what the pattern would look like if you could see it from the air, through a time-lapse photography in which symbols were marked in colors, so that we could trace where they flow, and follow their emotional energy levels as intensities of brightness. We would see symbols circulating as streaks of light, from person to person, and then–our camera zooming in for a close-up–flowing in chains within a particular person’s mind.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 183.


“Nouns too are Durkheimian collective symbols, for those factions of intellectual networks that circulate them and focus on them as the center pieces of their arguments; they are collective representations of how groups of intellectuals see the world, and are thus the entities that are regarded as most truly existing.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 217.


“Subjectively we live in a world of symbols loaded with membership significance, and with emotional energy levels built up in prior interactions. Woven into the interstices between the external interaction rituals that one goes through with other people are the inner interaction rituals that constitute chains of thought. The guiding principle of these inner chains, too, is emotional energy-seeking. The longer one stays inside one’s own subjectivity in the realm of inner thought, the more the goal becomes not so much direct solidarity with other people but solidarity with oneself. Symbols used in inner thought become decomposed, recombined, tried out for new purposes, aiming at imaginary coalitions not only with persons outside but also coalitions among the parts of oneself. Following the analogy of the intellectual thinker trying out new combinations, the human being in private thought tries out projects, tendering symbolic alliances that are not yet formed, entertaining mere trajectories.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 219.


“Verbal incantations–traditionally, in the form of prayers or magic; contemporarily in the form of pep talks and curses–are just some of the devices with which external rituals are taken into the self. No doubt there are other such inner rituals to be discovered.” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 220.


“The world of thought is generally regarded as a vast territory. So it is; but it may not be so fantastic as it is touted to be. We have a prejudice that thought is free, untrammeled, infinitely open, unapproachable from outside. And yet–if thought is an internalization of rituals from social life, further developed by decomposition and recombination of its symbolic elements, in the train of impulses to externalize them again–how strange can it be?” Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. 2004. Princeton University Press. P. 220.


“Our view is that natural selection enhanced the subcortical areas of the hominin brain before it grew the brain to the threshold where complexes of more cortically based cultural symbols and speech could be used to forge social bonds. In so doing, selection enhanced human emotionality–a far easier route than is necessary for articulated speech and culture. Indeed, if we think about the dynamics of social solidarity for just a moment, speech and culture are far less significant for local group cohesion than the arousal of positive emotions, per se, and their enhancement through interpersonal attunement, rhythmic synchronization, emotional entrainment, reciprocal exchange, positive sanctioning, and rituals.” Turner, Jonathan & A. Maryanski. On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection. 2008. Paradigm. P. 87.


“What shame, guilt, and alienation accomplish is the mitigation of the power inhering [in] anger, fear, or sadness alone. Mixing these emotions together creates entirely new emotions, and these emotions lead individuals to monitor and sanction self in ways that promote (1) competent behaviors that meet expectations, (2) moral behaviors that reaffirm the cultural codes of the group, or (3) behaviors that signal to others that disaffection from the group exists and needs attention from others. By rewiring late hominin neuroanatomy in this way, natural selection reduced the power of variants and first-order combinations of negative emotions, provided teeth for norms and other cultural codes, and created a way for disaffections to be expressed in a non-threatening and low-key manner. These are the emotions of social control, and they significantly increase the power of groups over individuals.” Turner, Jonathan & A. Maryanski. On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection. 2008. Paradigm. P. 102.


“Thus the language that social scientists see as the hallmark of human culture is, we argue, an adjunct to a much more ancient or hardwired language system of emotions. Humans still rely on this system to forge meaningful social bonds, and while these bonds are culturally embellished, the actual mechanisms for bonding are much as they probably were millions of years ago. As unique to humans as culture is, our emotional capacities are equally unique. No other animal on earth can generate and understand so many emotional states. Humans can read face and body to understand each other’s dispositions and likely course of action without ever saying a word, and we can easily read the one hundred or so variations on primary emotions, as well as second-order elaborations, without verbal prompts. We can do this because these abilities are what allowed our hominin ancestors to survive before the brain grew and before culture could share the burden of generating group solidarity.” Turner, Jonathan & A. Maryanski. On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection. 2008. Paradigm. P. 109.


“The classic differentiation here involves the organization of economic activities into markets, hierarchies or networks. Markets are governed by contract or property rights. Goods are exchanged on the basis of price and participants typically seek the lowest cost supplier regardless of past relations. Conflict tends to be resolved through bargaining and, if need be, the law. In contrast hierarchies are defined by an employment relationship. For the most part, employees are committed to their employer and subject to supervision or administrative fiat. Daily routines are conducted in the context of a mostly formal or bureaucratic system. Networks, both within and across organizations, are based on neither transactions nor rules, but on ongoing relationships, embedded in friendship, obligation, reputation and possibly trust. The interdependent and committed parties develop norms of reciprocity that lead to open-ended relationships and mutual benefits. A network form of organizing can allow organizations to simultaneously enjoy the benefits of being small (e.g. responding quickly), while at the same time gaining economies of scale that are typically reserved for much larger organizations.” Porter, Kelley & W. Powell. “Networks and Organizations.” Pp. 776-799. From Clegg, Steward, C. Hardy, T. Lawrence & W. Nord. The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies, Second Edition. 2006. Sage Publications. P. 778.


“The underlying thrust of this work [research on organizational effects of globalization challenges] indicates that hybridized control strategies and regimes, in which elements of bureaucratic control are selectively combined with elements of concertive control, are becoming the dominant governance form in high value-added, service sector organizations. Within the latter, the re-engineering of corporate culture and the fabrication of new organizational subjectivities/identities – better aligned with the incessant demands and endemic uncertainties of globalized competition – emerges as the primary focus for managerial action.

“Considered in these terms, hybridization is a multi-level, systemic process that simultaneously responds to and generates increased complexity in organizational forms, relations and practices. Hybrids combine and contain cultures and roles based on contradictory norms and principles by providing mechanisms for loosely coupling competing ‘logics of collective action’ that are required in more unstable, uncertain and competitive environments. They tend to facilitate horizontal, rather than vertical, decision-making processes because they have to absorb and cope with much higher levels of contradictions, tension and conflict than would normally be the case in simpler forms of organizing and managing.” Reed, Michael. “Organizational Theorizing: a Historically Contested Terrain.” Pp. 19-54. From Clegg, Steward, C. Hardy, T. Lawrence & W. Nord. The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies, Second Edition. 2006. Sage Publications. P. 38.


“More recently, a third meta-theoretical paradigm or framework has emerged in organization studies to challenge the ontological assumptions and epistemological principles on which both positivism and constructionism traded to legitimate their respective philosophical and methodological positions. Realism – or more precisely ‘critical realism’ – has emerged as a radical meta-theoretical alternative to both positivism and constructionism. It maintains that ‘organization’ is necessarily embedded in pre-existing material and social reality that fundamentally shapes the structures and processes through which it is generated, reproduced and transformed. This means that the epistemological principles and theoretical practices through which we attempt to understand and explain ‘organization’ must focus on the underlying ‘real or generative’ structures and mechanisms through which the interrelated entities and processes that constitute it are generated, sustained and changed. By rejecting the material determinism inherent in positivism and the cultural relativism endemic to constructionism, critical realism provides a meta-theoretical framework in which explanatory theories and models of historical and structural change in organizational forms and processes can be developed.” Reed, Michael. “Organizational Theorizing: a Historically Contested Terrain.” Pp. 19-54. From Clegg, Steward, C. Hardy, T. Lawrence & W. Nord. The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies, Second Edition. 2006. Sage Publications. Pp. 40-1.


“For example, looking internally, Daft views organizational complexity as proportional to the number of organizational subsystems and recommends measuring it using three dimensions: vertical, capturing the number of hierarchical levels; horizontal, capturing the number of units; and geographic, capturing the number of distinct sites.” Maguire, Steve, B. McKelvey, L. Mirabeau & N. Oztas. “Complexity Science and Organization Studies.” Pp. 165-214. From Clegg, Steward, C. Hardy, T. Lawrence & W. Nord. The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies, Second Edition. 2006. Sage Publications. P. 171.


“If political change was now [after the French Revolution] to be considered normal and sovereignty was to reside in the people, it suddenly became imperative for everyone to understand what it was that explained the nature and pace of change, and how the ‘people’ arrived at, could arrive at, the decisions they were said to be making. This is the social origin of what we later came to call the social sciences.” Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 4.


“New disciplines therefore grew up for this purpose [studying the present rather than history]. There were mainly three: economics, political science, and sociology. Why, however, would there be three disciplines to study the present but only one to study the past? Because the dominant liberal ideology of the nineteenth century insisted that modernity was defined by the differentiation of three social spheres: the market, the state, and the civil society.” Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 6.


“The anthopologists-ethnographers studying primitive peoples and the Orientalists studying high civilizations had one epistemological commonality. They were both emphasizing the particularity of the group they were studying as opposed to analyzing generic human characteristics. Therefore they tended to feel more comfortable on the idiographic rather than the nomothetic side of the controversy. For the most part, they thought of themselves as being in the humanistic, hermeneutic camp of the two-culture split rather than the science camp.” Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 9.


“Of course, the triple set of critiques[of world-systems theory]–world-systems rather than states as units of analysis, insistence on the longue duree, and a unidisciplinary approach–represented an attack on many sacred cows. It was quite expectable that there would be a counterattack. It came, immediately and vigorously, from four camps: nomothetic positivists, orthodox Marxists, state autonomists, and cultural particularists.” Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 19.


“The complex relationships of the world-economy, the firms, the states, the households, and the trans-household institutions that link members of classes and status-groups are beset by two opposite–but symbiotic–ideological themes: universalism on the one hand and racism and sexism on the other.” Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 38.


“Is this contradictory antinomy [universalism vs. sexism and racism] a necessary part of the modern world-system? Universalism and anti-universalism are in fact both operative day to day, but they operate in different arenas. Universalism tends to be the operative principle most strongly for what we could call the cadres of the world-system–neither those who are at the very top in terms of power and wealth, not those who provide the large majority of the world’s workers and ordinary people in all fields of work and all across the world, but rather an in-between group of people who have leadership or supervisory roles in various institutions. It is a norm that spells out the optimal recruitment mode for such technical, professional, and scientific personnel. This in-between group may be larger or smaller according to a country’s location in the world-system and the local political situation. The stronger the country’s economic position, the larger the group. Whenever universalism loses its hold even among the cadres in particular parts of the world-system, however, observers tend to see dysfunction, and quite immediately there emerge political pressures (both from within the country and from the rest of the world) to restore some degree of universalistic criteria.” Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 40.


“On the other hand, racism, sexism, and other anti-universalistic norms perform equally important tasks in allocating work, power, and privilege within the world-system. They seem to imply exclusions from the social arena. Actually they are really modes of inclusion, but of inclusion at inferior ranks. These norms exist to justify the lower ranking, to enforce the lower ranking, and perversely even to make it somewhat palatable to those who have the lower ranking.” Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. 2004. Duke University Press. P. 41.


“To survive in the short term, firms and larger economic systems must efficiently exploit existing resources, including knowledge, which requires a certain clarity and stability of goals, standards, meaning, roles, tasks and skills. To survive in the long term they must also engage in exploration, which entails ambiguity of meanings, and break-up of existing standards, roles, tasks and skills. The combination of exploitation and exploration is a paradoxical and arguably the most important challenge for both firms and economies. In those terms, roughly speaking the market generates exploration, firms generate exploitation and inter-organizational alliances and networks connect the two.

“However, exploration and exploitation may be combined, to a greater or lesser extent, within organizations.” Nooteboom, Bart. 2009. A Cognitive Theory of the Firm: Learning, Governance and Dynamic Capabilities. Edward Elgar Publishing. P. 3.


“As indicated, a key challenge, for organizations as well as larger economic systems, is to combine or connect exploration and exploitation. This entails a trade-off between problems and opportunities of cognitive distance, seeking an optimal distance that is large enough to yield novelty but not so large as to preclude understanding and collaboration.” Nooteboom, Bart. 2009. A Cognitive Theory of the Firm: Learning, Governance and Dynamic Capabilities. Edward Elgar Publishing. P. 4.


“The problems and opportunities of cognitive distance lead to the notion of an organization as a ‘focusing device’.” Nooteboom, Bart. 2009. A Cognitive Theory of the Firm: Learning, Governance and Dynamic Capabilities. Edward Elgar Publishing. P. 4.


“On the basis of Hodgson I define institutions as pre-established, prevalent, explicit rules or more implicit norms, socially transmitted, and supported by habits, that structure, enable and constrain behaviour. Being rules or norms, institutions have normative content or import, and entail sanctions that may be material or immaterial, such as loss of legitimacy, or both at the same time. Institutions are pre-established, that is while they are constructed and re-constructed by actions, they also precede actions and form a basis for them. They are prevalent, that is they apply universally to members of some groups.... In the incorporation of institutions into habit, idiosyncratic elements come in.” Nooteboom, Bart. 2009. A Cognitive Theory of the Firm: Learning, Governance and Dynamic Capabilities. Edward Elgar Publishing. Pp. 30-1. Reference is to Hodgson, G. 2006. “What are institutions?” Journal of Economic Issues. 60(1), 1-25.


“With the emergence of the first mammals some 200 million years ago, babies were born dependent on nurture from one other individual–their mother, who kept them safe, warm, and milk-fed. Bonds between mother and infant were fundamental to the evolution of the ways creatures like ourselves smell, hear, remember, sense the nearness of, and feel comforted by those close to us. Absent mammals and minus mothers, we would not be groping for terms to express affiliative emotions or need a word like ‘love’ to describe the ties that bind one intimate to another.” Hrdy, Sarah. 2009. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Harvard University Press. P. 68.


“With the cortical brain expansion seen in monkeys and apes, there has been an increase in the complexity of social relationships and a decreased dependency on olfactory communication.” Broad, K.D., J. Curley & E. Keverne. 2006. “Mother-infant bonding and the evolution of mammalian social relationships.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. B 2006 361, 2199-2214. P. 2200.


“The word bonding is a loosely used descriptive term to signify an especially meaningful relationship between two or more individuals. In all mammalian species this relationship primarily involves mother and infant. The evolution of viviparity and the birth of live offspring as opposed to egg production have required consolidation of the mother’s in utero investment, resulting in extended post-natal care. This is turn has required offspring recognition. Common to all bonding relationships are hormonal mechanisms, brain reward mechanisms and sensory recognition. However, the way in which these mechanisms are deployed and their relative importance are dependent on the species and in particular on the evolution of the brain.” Broad, K.D., J. Curley & E. Keverne. 2006. “Mother-infant bonding and the evolution of mammalian social relationships.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. B 2006 361, 2199-2214. P. 2209.


“Eibl-Eibesfeldt sees parental care as the basis not only of group bonding, but of individual friendship: ‘There is also, with few exceptions, no friendship without parental care.’ He points out that friendships are initiated by behavior that draws on the repertory of parental care, as does, even more clearly, courtship behavior. Nuzzling, real or pretend feeding, kissing, are all borrowed from the repertory of parental care.” Bellah, Robert. 2011 Religion in Human Evolution. Harvard University Press. P. 71. Subquote is from Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenaeus. 1996 [1971] Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns. Aldine. P. 127.


“Burghardt sums up by indicating five things that must in some way always be present before we can call something animal play:

“1. Limited immediate function
2. Endogenous component
3. Structural or temporal difference
4. Repeated performance
5. Relaxed field

“The first criterion indicates that play is ‘not fully functional in the context in which it is expressed,’ that it ‘does not contribute to current survival.’...”

“... The second criterion is that play is something ‘done for its own sake,’ pleasurable in itself, spontaneous and voluntary; it is not a means to an end....”

“... The third criterion, ‘structural or temporal difference,’ indicates that play may use behaviors from ordinary life, like fighting, chasing, wrestling, but without the aim that such behavior would ordinarily have....”

“...The fourth criterion is that play behavior is ‘performed repeatedly in a similar, but not rigidly stereotyped form.’ It is, then, ‘something that is repeatedly performed, often in bouts, during a predictable period in the animal’s life (which in some cases can be virtually lifelong).”

“The fifth and final criterion is related to the first one: play behavior ‘is initiated when an animal is adequately fed, healthy, and free from stress, or intense competing systems.” Bellah, Robert. 2011 Religion in Human Evolution. Harvard University Press. P. 77. Reference is to Burghardt, Gordon. 2005. The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits. MIT Press. Pp. 71-81.


“Students of animal play have discerned three major forms of play: locomotor, object, and social play. Burghardt speaks of locomotor-rotational play as it can involve not only movement from place to place but movement in one spot, involving various kinds of turn. This is usually the earliest form of play in the life of the animal and is often solitary. Burghardt gives the example of ‘the gambols of foals released from barn stalls into a field.’ Object play is also often solitary and involves an animal interacting with an object with no purpose other than to play. Anyone who has ever had a cat knows what object play is, but human infants interacting with toys is another obvious example. Social play involves at least two animals, but sometimes more. As Burghardt says, ‘social play can take many forms, but the most common are quasi-aggressive behavior patterns such as chasing, wrestling, pawing, and nipping.’” Bellah, Robert. 2011 Religion in Human Evolution. Harvard University Press. P. 78. Subquote is from Burghardt, Gordon. 2005. The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits. MIT Press. Pp. 83-89.


“De Waal argues that play inhibitions are probably produced by conditioning, are ‘learned adjustments’: ‘From an early age, monkeys learn that the fun will not last if they are too rough with a younger playmate.’ On this account play would be an expression of the plasticity and openness to learning that arises when parental care limits the need for early instinctive self-preserving behavior.” Bellah, Robert. 2011 Religion in Human Evolution. Harvard University Press. P. 81. Reference is to De Waal, Frans. 1997. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Harvard University Press. P. 48.


“But in hominid groups that were too large for kinship alone to provide solidarity, and that were also, perhaps, already moving away from dominance hierarchies toward more egalitarian solidarities among both sexes, ritual might have been just the innovation to provide the solidarity that was necessary but not otherwise provided.

“The play features of such ritual would be evidenced in the fact that they would be discrete events, with beginnings and ends, that they would take place at particular times, perhaps when food was plentiful, and particular places, perhaps some place that had significant meaning to the group.” Bellah, Robert. 2011 Religion in Human Evolution. Harvard University Press. P. 94.


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Bellah, Robert. Religion in Human Evolution
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