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PROLOGUE: PREVIEW OF THEMES F ROM STUDIES of sociocultural process of interest this book distills and integrates analytic themes. “Of interest”? To whom? Use “observer” as placeholder for the great variety of perceivers (personal or not) who may, singly or jointly, figure in and/or influence and/or unobtrusively observe: What is going on here? What matters, to whom? For each ongoing sociocultural situation some implied searchlights from the different chapters of this book give us cues. We work outward from situations rather than impose boundaries. The data-mining of Quentin Van Doosselaere (2006) will suggest how, over two centuries, a capitalist trade economy spun out in networks around medieval Genoa. And closer to home, on a smaller scale, we’ll watch Andrew Abbott (1999) tease out (as analyst, as observer, and also as participant) how a department and discipline emerged, in decades of orientings and dealings and commitments, as a robust cloud of common sensibility—the “style” discussed in chapter 4— around a scholarly journal nested in the University of Chicago. Other studies and observation suggest that similar portrayals and themes can also apply for much smaller scopes in sociocultural time and space.1 Altogether, chapters 1–6 offer six distinct viewpoints (or takes or humors or framings) on sociocultural process. Metaphorically, these are “takes” on us as schools of fish in a vast river, with tributaries and shoals and yet also some great depths. The principal question for this book is How? My colleague Charles Tilly recently published an enticing book simply entitled Why? It seems to me that Why? is becoming the easy question for social analysis . An analyst can drown in thousands of answers, sought and unsought , since all studies are geared, trained, socialized to say why, to give reasons. These can just cancel out, leaving the play with How? which is to insist on setting, context. Now Tilly builds on earlier foundational labors, not least by Lazarsfeld and colleagues at mid-century Columbia, to tease out, then probe further, how folk approach causality . And four years earlier Tilly gives equal billing to how and why in a book on stories to which I return in chapter 2. 1 This is a principle of self-similarity, as brilliantly laid out by that same Abbott in a chapter on “fractal analysis” in Chaos of Disciplines (2001). xviii P R O L O G U E Geographical factors count in social process, of course, along with equipment and weather and myriad other factors including skills and know-how. Their impacts as settings appear only indirectly, as refracted by the dynamics and topology of social process, viewed anew in each chapter. This book gives them little direct attention in order to instead develop deeper accounting of social process in its own terms. Horizons You may already know something of social network analysis (chapter 2 here), a major advance in sociology and anthropology over the past half century, and this is indeed bedrock for my spinning out social space through this book. Identities, which are the nodes, trigger out of struggles for control as they seek footing with each other (chapter 1), and so co-evolve along with networks in one and another tangible domain of activity. What is seen in searchlight focus depends on context, embracing for example some degree of reflections from other networks , along with their at least partly distinct identities. Our metaphoric river consists in stochastic flows of events. Ties and identities alike are bathed in uncertainty among crosscurrents from situations , on up through births and deaths. Switchings thus are endemic , across combinations of network and domain. Situations may be imbricated across multiple network-domains of identities. Signalings lead to utterances and thence stories that cluster for each network-domain as a set, able to account for happenings within those ties. Participants, too, probe cohesion and connectivity among ties and may come to perceive boundaries. Subsequently, identities and ties may string and profile under some circumstances (see chapter 4) into what you and I think of as persons.2 Or the process of interest may go on to bloom into a style, or instead mature as the institutions dissected in chapter 5. Levels Actions may, instead of lolling around among network ties, directly build up a disciplinary unit (chapter 3)—for example, a production team. Such a team may be so robust that it figures as an identity itself, on a new level, nonpersonal, enabling a whole new level in continuing 2 The...

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