Social Change in a Material World 0367144530, 9780367144531

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 On changes, events, and processes
2 The practice plenum
3 The material dimension of social life
4 Social dynamics I: chains of activity
5 Social dynamics II: material events and processes
6 Explaining social changes
7 Dealing with complexity: overviews
8 Challenging social theoretical stalwarts
References
Index

Citation preview

Social Change in a Material World

Social Change in a Material World offers a new, practice theoretical account of social change and its explanation. Extending the author’s earlier account of social life, and drawing on general ideas about events, processes, and change, the book conceptualizes social changes as configurations of significant differences in bundles of practices and material arrangements. Illustrated with examples from the history of bourbon distillation and the formation and evolution of digitallymediated associations in contemporary life, the book argues that chains of activity combine with material events and processes to cause social changes. The book thereby stresses the significance of the material dimension of society for the constitution, determination, and explanation of social phenomena, as well as the types of space needed to understand them. The book also challenges the explanatory significance of such key phenomena as power, dependence, relations, mechanisms, and individual behavior. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, geographers, organization studies scholars, and others interested in social life and social change. Theodore R. Schatzki is Professor of Geography, and of Philosophy and Sociology, at the University of Kentucky, USA. He is the author of Social Practices, The Site of the Social, Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space, and The Timespace of Human Activity. He is also co-editor of, among other works, The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, The Nexus of Practices, and Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory.

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

138 The Intellectual Origins of Modernity David Ohana 139 Political Fraternity Democracy beyond Freedom and Equality Angel Puyol 140 Nationalism, Inequality and England’s Political Predicament Charles Leddy-Owen 141 Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey Hobbes writes Homer Andrea Catanzaro 142 Social Change in a Material World Theodore R. Schatzki 143 Hubris and Progress A Future Born of Presumption Carlo Bordoni 144 Work: Marxist and Systems-Theoretical Approaches Stefan Kühl 145 The Social Life of Nothing Silence, Invisibility and Emptiness in Tales of Lost Experience Susie Scott

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Social Change in a Material World Theodore R. Schatzki

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Theodore R. Schatzki The right of Theodore R. Schatzki to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schatzki, Theodore R., author. Title: Social change in a material world / Theodore R. Schatzki. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 142 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018058230| ISBN 9780367144524 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367144531 (pbk) | ISBN 9780429032127 (ebk) | ISBN 9780429628467 (web pdf ) | ISBN 9780429626821 (epub) | ISBN 9780429625183 (mobi/kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Social change. Classification: LCC HM831 .S3563 2019 | DDC 303.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058230 ISBN: 978-0-367-14452-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-14453-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-03212-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

For my family

Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 1 On changes, events, and processes 1 2 The practice plenum 26 3 The material dimension of social life 51 4 Social dynamics I: chains of activity 78 5 Social dynamics II: material events and processes 105 6 Explaining social changes 117 7 Dealing with complexity: overviews 135 8 Challenging social theoretical stalwarts 164 References 193 Index 209

Preface

This book about social change is an exercise in philosophical social theory. It is sensitive to philosophical issues and seeks to maintain the conceptual precision of philosophy. Examples of pertinent issues are: What is an explanation? and Which categories of entity are fundamental in analyzing the world? The book, however, is not philosophy. It is, instead, a piece of social theory: its proximal and ultimate concerns are to illuminate society and to further the enterprise of understanding it by developing concepts useful in studying it. Although, consequently, the book uses philosophical concepts and takes stands on philosophical issues, it does not dwell on these but instead focuses directly on the composition and dynamics of social phenomena. The work is also resolutely multidisciplinary, drawing on ideas from sociology, philosophy, geography, organization studies, anthropology, political science, and education. The concept of social practices is central to the conceptual armature of the book. The book, as a result, falls into the currently vigorous stream of practice theories. It also, however, extends the process of turning theories of practice inside-out that I began in my previous book, The Timespace of Human Activity. In that book, I wrote that “[the analysis] moves inside practice-arrangement nexuses to theorize the indeterminate temporalspatial activity events, as simultaneously effect-features and determining contexts of which practices, social phenomena, and the course of history at large occur” (2010: xii). The present book takes even more seriously the idea that practices, or rather, bundles of practices and material arrangements, are effects of activity: such bundles, it argues, largely come about through chains of activity. At the same time, like in the 2010 book, bundles form contexts to which chains are beholden. What’s more, the book explains, the material world, like activity chains, causes bundles at the same time that it, like bundles, forms a context in which activity chains unfold. In particular, I argue, chains of activity and material (and other) events and processes interconnectedly

x Preface

circulate in and propagate through bundles, leaving behind changed bundles in their wake. Because “social changes,” that is, changes in social phenomena, are configurations of changes in bundles, the explanatory enterprise of social investigation is at bottom a matter of tracking the nexuses of activity chains and material events and processes that, in dynamizing bundles, generate change. The book is organized into eight chapters. The opening chapter works out the notions of change, event, and process that undergird the analyses of social change and its explanation in subsequent chapters. Change, I claim, arises from events and processes. Because, moreover, events and processes automatically introduce myriads of differences in the world, change needs to be understood, not as difference simpliciter, but as significant difference. The chapter also, among other things, canvasses prominent notions of process in contemporary social thought and introduces the empirical phenomena through which the book’s conceptual apparatus is substantialized: the history of bourbon distillation in the State of Kentucky, where I reside, and the formation and evolution of associations of old and new kinds via contemporary digital media. Aspects of this history and of these contemporary developments are marshaled in chapters two through five to substantialize the ideas about social phenomena, materiality, and social change developed there. A variety of simpler or more complex changes in these matters are subsequently the subject of explanation in chapters six and seven. Chapter two presents the account of social life and social phenomena employed in the book. It starts from the thesis (see Schatzki 2002) that social phenomena consist in slices and aspects of practice-arrangement bundles. The entirety of bundled practices and arrangements—what I call the “practice plenum”—­ provides the materials in which all social phenomena consist. Accordingly, the chapter explores the constitution of this plenum. My discussion considers, among other matters, the persistence and structure of practices, the nature of the material arrangements with which practices are bundled, the roles of humans and other animals in arrangements, and the variety of relations that link either practices and arrangements or the bundles that practices and arrangements form. The chapter concludes by showing how its account of the practice plenum analyzes relations of the sort most widely recognized in social thought: relations among individuals. Chapter three highlights a second key feature of the plenum: its material dimension. I define materiality as the physical-chemical composition of entities and the material world as the sum of such entities and of the properties, events, and processes that hold of or befall such entities on the basis of this composition. I situate this conception of materiality among contemporary approaches to the topic and explore crucial material aspects of bundles, including material events and process that pass through, bear on, and suffuse bundles and, thus, social phenomena. The chapter also suggests that the ecology of social life—which embraces everything that can bear on social phenomena and the changes they undergo—includes more than the plenum alone. It also includes things of nature and forsaken and decaying artifacts that lie beyond the plenum as well as things of

Preface  xi

nature that help compose the entities that make up material arrangements. This ecology, I claim, also includes the life trajectories of individuals. A final section (1) shows that the material character of social life informs the sense of horizontality that imbues my ontologically flat social ontology, (2) ventures the idea that combinations of such “morphological” properties as size, shape, and density can replace the micro-macro distinction, and (3) emphasizes just how critical material space is to social life and change. Chapters four and five analyze social change: its nature, temporal features, and causes. These chapters begin from the thesis that social changes consist in configurations of changes in bundles of practices and arrangements. They also claim that chains of activity and material (and other) events and processes form the two principal sorts of occurrence befalling bundles that are responsible for changes in bundles. It follows that nexuses of chains and material events/­processes cause social changes. Chapter four provides a detailed analysis of chains of activity. Among other things, it discusses different types of activity chain (e.g., interaction, exchange, dialogue, governance, and haphazardness), contrasts its account with those of Tarde and Latour, and explores how individual activity inflects chains and under particular conditions qualifies ex post facto as originary activity. Chapter five focuses on material events and processes and explores the multifaceted causal relationship between social life and the material world. The material world, I claim, does not simply support, but also permeates, forms, suffuses, and is encountered, coped with, and constructed in social life. Chapters six and seven analyze explanations of social change through the concepts of change, event, and process and the accounts of social phenomena, materiality, social change, and causal nexuses presented in previous chapters. Chapter six, drawing on a broad notion of causality, equates explanation with causal explanation: the cause of something is what is responsible for it (cf. Aristotle and Heidegger), and an explanation of something is a description of what is responsible for it (i.e., its causes). It follows that explanations of social changes are descriptions of the nexuses of activity chains and material events/processes that give rise to them. All such explanations are historical. Explanations are richer, moreover, if the bundles in and through which nexuses circulate and propagate are included in the descriptions of them. The chapter continues by providing explanations of a range of simpler social changes taken from the empirical material with which the book works: the formation and evolution of associations of new and old sorts through digital media and the history of bourbon distillation. Along the way, the discussion addresses the explanation of action, which, the book avers, plays a circumscribed role in the explanation of social change. Chapter seven turns to the issue of how social research copes with complexity, in particular, with explaining complex social changes. I first consider and reject two common responses to this issue: marshaling laws and generalizations and constructing simulations. Explaining social changes, I instead argue, requires providing overviews (Übersichten, cf. Wittgenstein) of the nexuses of activity and materiality that generate them. An overview conveys the gist and significant,

xii Preface

salient, and essential features of a field of entities, for example, a multitude of causal nexuses. The idea of an overview is then illustrated through the provision of explanatory overviews of complex changes in contemporary digitally mediated associations and two large-scale episodes from the history of bourbon distillation. The concluding chapter in the book is confrontational. It challenges the causal and explanatory significance of prominent phenomena that social theories have claimed cause or explain social changes. Section one demonstrates that the causal roles that many contemporary analyses assign to dependence, power, and coevolution can be elucidated through nexuses of activity chains and material events/ processes. In section two, a critical discussion of the responsibility that relations bear for social changes seques to a general criticism of the various “relational” turns and calls for “relational” thinking that sound through contemporary social theory. Section three develops a detailed critique of the use of mechanisms—a popular type of generalization—to provide explanatory understanding of changes in social affairs. It also argues that the explanatory power of descriptions of causal nexuses rests, not on generalities at all, but on researchers’ familiarity with social life and its diversity. The chapter concludes by disputing the idea that explaining certain changes in the contemporary world requires postulating the existence of digital/virtual or topological spaces that are new or much more prevalent today than in earlier eras.

Acknowledgments

It has been nearly a decade since I last published a book. This hiatus coincides with a decade-long stint as a dean without a sabbatical. I stepped down from the dean position in the summer of 2017, and the ensuing year on leave enabled the composition of the present book. It is not as forward-looking as I would have liked, but it does re-establish the path left hanging by the hiatus. My scholarly trajectory while a dean was facilitated by the numerous invitations I received to speak and teach. These invitations directed attention to a succession of topics and prevented thinking from drowning in administrative tasks and concerns. I particularly benefited from those invitations that asked me to speak or teach on a specific topic. Such invitations did eighty percent of the work of writing an essay by coming up with the topic; all that was left for me to do was to provide ideas and thoughts. Indeed, for a number of years while dean I described myself as a “thinker for hire.” I was also often struck by the timeliness— vis-à-vis both practice theory and my own thought—of the requested topics. In this context, I am thankful for invitations to speak or teach in ­Chicago, ­Lancaster, Eichstätt, Tübingen, Copenhagen, Kos, Vienna, Dublin, Tampere, Hagen, ­ indemere, ­Wageningen, Flensburg, Oldenburg, Warwick, Brisbane, Sydney, W Venice, Melbourne, Essex, Nijmegen, Wagga Wagga, Providence, ­Manchester, Sheffield, and Basel, in some of these places multiple times and occasionally at more than one institution. For their generosity, comments, or ideas, I am ­indebted—in roughly the same backwards geographical-chronological sequence, though not equally—to Paul Spee, Paula Jarzabkowski, Allison Hui, Stanley Blue, Gordon Walker, Lenneke Kuijer, Hilmar Schäfer, the late John Urry, Mika Pantzar, Robert Schmidt, Basil Wiesse, Joost van Loon, Susann Schäfer, Anders Buch, Hari Tsoukas, Ann Langley, Michael Jonas, Beate Littig, Tasos Zembylas, Andreas Reckwitz, Alan Warde, Anna Wanka, Orla Byrne, Juho Luukkonen, Thomas Bedorf, Sophie Prinz, Jürgen Budde, Thomas Alkemeyer, Davide

xiv Acknowledgments

Nicolini, Jörgen Sandberg, Peter Grootenboer, Stephen Billet, Gloria Dall’Alba, Frank Trentmann, Don Weenink, Gert Spaargaren, the late Alison Lee, Nick Hopwood, Cecily Maller, Yolande Strengers, Steve Griggs, David Howarth, Richard Freeman, Ernst Huib, Stephen Kemmis, Christine Edwards-Groves, Jane Wilkinson, Stanley Stowers, Dale Southerton, Daniel Welch, Peter Jackson, Jonathan Everts, Megan Blake, and last, but hardly least, Matt Watson. I am especially indebted to Elizabeth Shove, who made many astute observations and suggestions about the exposition and its organization. I am also grateful to my office neighbor, Karl Raitz, for showing me the manuscript of his forthcoming book—the most comprehensive and myth-busting available—on the Kentucky bourbon business. I would also like to thank Steiner Verlag and Oxford University Press for permission to include in this book revised versions of material that originally appeared as part of “Tracking Large Phenomena,” Geographische Zeitschrift 104 (1) 2016 and “Processes, Life, and the Practice Plenum,” in Institutions and Organization: A Process View, edited by Trish Reay, Tammar B. Zilber, Ann Langley, and Hardimos Tsoukas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Thanks are likewise due to the Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History in Bardstown, KY, for permission to use their photograph of the Cliff Springs Distillery on the cover. Calmness and good sense during the past decade were abetted in innumerable ways by those closest to me. Accordingly, this book is dedicated to my family.

1 On changes, events, and processes

Chapter one is mostly an analysis of changes, events, and processes broadly. It specifies basic features of the account of social change and explanation developed in subsequent chapters. Chapter one also considers ideas about theory and empirical work that clarify the overall shape taken by the present book. Although both sets of matters are unevenly addressed in social theory, they inform and shape theories of social change. Considering them hews initial components of my account while articulating key meta-features of it. The discussion of theory and research also introduces the empirical material engaged in the book.

Why a book on social change? This is a book about social change: what it is, how it comes about, and how it is to be explained. Many books, parts of books, and articles have been written on this topic. Why, consequently, write another—hasn’t social change been sufficiently explored? Two principle considerations justify yet another entry into the genre. The first is that social change is of perennial interest to human beings, not just academics but people generally. Numerous social phenomena that compose or bear on people’s lives are subject to change: interpersonal relations, personal networks, employment, governmental policy, taxation, health care, the provision of food and water, personal safety, communication and infrastructure, workplace politics, sports teams, affairs of neighborhood, community, and country, even family matters, assuming families qualify as social phenomena. Many people fear social change, many others welcome it; any given person is likely to welcome it in some areas and to fear it in others. It is true that personal health, the state of one’s soul, and the fate of one’s children weigh on most people as heavily as, if not

2  On changes, events, and processes

more heavily than, do changes in social affairs. But personal health and the state of people’s soul, notwithstanding their physiological and spiritual dimensions, are also social affairs. Indeed, sociality bears, in one way or another, on most aspects and dimensions of human life, and certainly on more aspects and features of human life than simply those that can be noncontentiously defined as social. The fate of one’s children, and one’s relationship to them, are good examples. In short, interest in social change is pervasive and never ending. Room always exists for another general book on the subject. Widespread interest in social change likewise pervades the social disciplines. Whether it is because researchers want to comprehend particular features of or facts about social life or because they want, ultimately, to change particular such features or facts, social change has remained among the most persistent and insistent topics of social investigation since the beginning of the enterprise. Even if a researcher is not focused on social changes per se, but instead, say, on explaining incarceration rates among minority juveniles or comparing daily energy use profiles across countries, actual and possible social changes carry implications for her topic of study. In recent decades, theorists have pointed out that comprehending stasis and persistence is just as critical as understanding change. Various theorists, moreover, have bucked traditional divisions between accounts of persistence and accounts of change (e.g., Stinchcombe 1968: 103) and developed unified accounts of social dynamics that cover both persistence and change. Explaining change, however, reaches further than does explaining stasis, stability, and persistence. Both cognitive achievements contribute to the end of self-knowledge, which is one of the overall raisons d’être of social science. Human beings, however, are interested not just in comprehending themselves, but also in making their worlds better places. Achieving the latter goal often requires careful, considered intervention into social affairs, success in which depends partly on a sure tutored grasp of how things change and what is responsible for this. Understanding why things persist also contributes to this effort. Social change is also intimately connected to what is perhaps the other most enduring topic of social investigation: human activity and what is responsible for it. Every social ontology or theoretical approach to social life treats human activity as a necessary and also prominent component of social phenomena. It is, if you will, the common ontological and explanatory touchstone of all such ontologies and approaches. Activity and social change are intimately connected because social changes invariably encompass changes in human activity and also because all human activities—however much their determinants might be ­organic—are part of or sensitive to both social phenomena and changes in them. It follows that (1) grasping why people act as they do can be critical to explaining, anticipating, predicting, and bringing about social change and (2) changes in social phenomena bear on what people do. So, again, interest in social change is everywhere— it is part and parcel of an interest in human life. Accordingly, room always exists for another general book about change. The second reason that justifies, in this case not just any but instead the present effort, is that theories of practices have not to date exhausted the topic of

On changes, events, and processes  3

social change. This book seeks to provide another piece of the contribution that such theories can make on this topic. The expression “theories of practices” denotes a family of theoretical approaches, all of which make the concept of practices central to their account of social life and social phenomena. Examples of thinkers who have advanced such theories are Anthony Giddens, Jean Lave, Charles Taylor, Andreas Reckwitz, Elizabeth Shove, Stephen Kemmis, Joseph Rouse, Robert Schmidt, and Silvia Gherardi. I include Pierre Bourdieu in this group because, even though the concept of practices is not central to his work, his theory of social life can be interpreted as an account of practices. His theory, moreover, closely aligns with four theses that link the just mentioned theorists’ accounts of social affairs. The first thesis is the idea that social life is composed, at least centrally, of practices (in Bourdieu, of practices-in-social spaces). These theories agree neither about what a practice is nor about what it is for social life to be composed of them. But they concur that practices are central to social affairs. Their theories, moreover, exhibit significant general commonalities. Examples are the proposition that practices are organized actions, the idea that practices are carried on by multiple individuals (a practice is not something carried on by a single individual), and a theorized intimate relationship between practices and objects of various sorts (biological, physical-chemical, informational, artifactual etc.). The second common idea arises from the fact that, on any account of practices, the world contains many practices, not just one. These practices, moreover, are not isolated from one another; they, instead, connect. And in connecting they form larger nexuses, complexes, and constellations. This vision of practices forming larger constellations is the second common feature of theories of practices. The third common idea is that social phenomena—from rites of spring to international disputes, from scientific labs to sports complexes, from street brawls to loving family relations, and including power, governments, forced migration, racial prejudice, rising stock markets, and the dissemination of photos on social media—are either aspects of, complexes of, or rooted in constellations of practices. This idea suggests that social research secures a more clairvoyant purchase on its subject matters if it explicitly conceptualizes them as aspects of, complexes of, or rooted in such constellations. This idea also implies that any social formation should be explained by reference to (1) aspects or complexes of such constellations or (2) phenomena whose existence is compatible with the fact that the social world is composed of such. An example of the latter possibility is explaining racial prejudice by citing so-called “mental” phenomena such as mistrust of otherness, fear of displacement, or beliefs about superiority/ inferiority or about differences between humans and animals: the existence of these mental phenomena is compatible with the social world being composed of practices. An example of the former possibility is a researcher who studies competition among Kentucky bourbon distilleries (1) analyzing the companies involved as, and the competition among them in terms of, nexuses of practices

4  On changes, events, and processes

such as distilling, marketing, strategic planning, price-determination, lobbying, and transportation and (2) explaining how such competition works, as well as the fates of particular firms and market segments, through the dynamics of the larger constellations that embrace the practices that constitute distillery companies, government agencies, consumer behavior and tastes, industry groups, and wholesalers as well as rectifiers (rectifiers blend different whiskeys and other ingredients and sell the resulting product). Generally speaking, the third idea common to theories of practices amounts to the conviction that a researcher’s account of practices and of relations among them provides the basic materials with which the composition, workings, emergence, persistence, evolution, and demise of social phenomena are to be explicated. A fourth common feature of theories of practices is their emergence on the background of certain philosophical ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1957) and Martin Heidegger (1978). Perhaps the central philosophical inheritance is the idea that human activity rests on something that cannot be put into words. Diverse conceptions of this something exist among theorists of practices, including habitus (Bourdieu), practical consciousness (Giddens), inarticulate embodied understanding (Taylor), knowing how to go on (Kemmis), and know-how (Ryle) or skills (Dreyfus). All these expressions designate abilities, grasps, or dispositions that in some sense shape, govern, or underlie human activity, but whose specific bearing on what people do on specific occasions cannot be captured by the significance or implications for activity of any finite collection of symbolic formulations. Not surprising given this list of diverse names for the unformulable basis of action, theorists of practices have divergent understandings of what else is responsible for human activity. They likewise have divergent understandings of what a practice is, how practices connect or are bounded, and how social phenomena of different types should be conceptualized and comprehended by reference to constellations of practices. As suggested, one might also question whether Bourdieu is rightly classified as a theorist of practices at all (as opposed to a theorist of practice in the singular or to neither of these; contrast Ortner 2006 and Wacquant 2018). Still, it is clear that the above theories form a family in Wittgenstein’s sense. They resemble one another in varying combinations of registers, and these resemblances knit them into a constellation that is distinct from the constellations of theories that gather around alternative core concepts such as structure, system, action, becoming/flow, and network/assemblage. Note that because the present book is not about theories of practices as such, differences among such theories will surface only when discussions of them advance my argument. As indicated, theorists of practices have not exhausted the topic of social change. The two theorists who have focused the most on change are Bourdieu (cf. Gorski 2014) and Shove and her colleagues; because of this, I will touch on their ideas at multiple junctures in this book. The conceptualizations and accounts of change found in their work closely reflect their ontologies of social life. Since, consequently, my ontology differs in important ways from theirs, so, too

On changes, events, and processes  5

does my account of change. This, then, is the second justification for the present treatment.

Dynamics and change In the discipline of physics, “dynamics” pertains to motion. Though there is no uniformity in how physics defines dynamics, for present purposes it can be understood as the study of why physical objects move as they do. Dynamics is thus distinguished from kinematics, which studies the properties of motion—e.g., position and velocity—as such, without asking why these properties assume certain values in particular situations. Dynamics can be defined in further detail in alternative ways that reflect different understandings of what it is to specify why things move as they do. An advocate of causality, for example, will describe dynamics as studying the causes of motion, for instance, force, mass, energy. A Humean, by contrast, might say that dynamics studies the rules, that is, the regularities of motion. Because these two philosophical interpretations countenance variables for the same quantities (force, mass, energy etc.), they come operationally to the same. This concept of dynamics then carries over to fluid dynamics, which studies the flow, that is, the motion or movement of fluids (liquids and gases). Motion is a kind of change. It is a kind of change involving movement from-to: movement from some starting point to some end point, however temporary, arbitrary, or abstract-unreal these two points might be. Motion is a conspicuous, physical version of such movement. But movement can take other forms as well. For example, a large number of prominent philosophers in the past 140 years, including Dilthey, James, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Mead, Schutz, and Deleuze, have held that a kind of movement is inherent in human life, namely, movement from the past toward or into the future (or vice versa). Although these thinkers’ conceptions of this movement vary, this common idea offers great insight into human life. Narratives, furthermore, contain movements, too, from the earliest to the final events narrated, all narratival complications of linear time and all narratival references to the contexts of these events notwithstanding. One can even find movement in social affairs, namely, in the sequences of events that bear on or help compose such affairs: these sequences begin with particular events and conclude with others. The facts that such sequences usually extend farther backwards and also often extend farther forwards do not contravene, but instead simply contextualize by elongation, the movements involved. What is common to all these forms of movement is directionality: from the past toward the future, from the beginning to the end, from early events to later ones. Physical motion from point A to point B is another example. Accordingly, just as dynamics studies the movement of physical objects, and fluid dynamics studies the movement of fluids, it is possible to imagine forms of dynamics that study movements of these other types: the dynamics of life or experience, the dynamics of narrative, and the dynamics of sociohistorical affairs. However, not just

6  On changes, events, and processes

movement, but change generally is directional. For change necessarily involves (at least) two different states of the world that form a succession. This succession can occur at an instant or take the form of a transition over time, in which case a minimum of three states of affair are involved. An entity’s acquisition of a property, for instance, is a change, one that involves lack of the property followed by its possession. Even a reversal involves direction since a reversal is movement from whatever point had been reached back to an earlier point. Accordingly, dynamics can be specified most generally as the study of change. Social dynamics, accordingly, studies social change: its forms, properties, determinants, and the like. An important feature of movement is time. Some forms of movement are by definition temporal in nature. Examples are movement from the past to the future and movement from early events or states of the world to later ones. Other forms of movement are necessarily temporal even if not temporal by definition. Physical motion, for example, is not temporal by definition; if anything, because physical motion is movement from point A to point B, it is spatial by definition. Physical motion, however, is necessarily temporal. This is because motion from point A to point B always takes time; no movement is instantaneous in the sense of taking place at an instant and taking up zero time. The only possible exceptions involve quantum effects tied to the probabilistic nature of the location of subatomic particles. It is probably best, however, to interpret such effects—e.g., quantum tunneling—as taking infinitesimal amounts of time. Twentieth-­century physics recognized the necessary temporal character of motion by expanding the three dimensional space pertaining to physical objects and events into a four dimensional space-time. In any event, movement from beginning to end (of a narrative, of a sequence of events) likewise requires time. Not only are depicted events as depicted necessarily spread out over time, but it takes time to read the narrative. Sequences of events are likewise spread out. In short, some movements are temporal entities by definition, and all movements necessarily take place in or over time. The kinds of change at stake in the expression “social change” likewise take place in or over time. At the same time, most, even all, social changes are also spatial in character. Someone might claim that there are changes, including social changes, that are spatial alone and not also temporal in character. What is depicted by isotherms, topographical lines, and charts that break down statistics by jurisdiction might be described as purely spatial changes. For anyone like myself, however, who intuitively thinks of changes as inherently or necessarily temporal, these so-called changes are better described as differences or variation over space. In any event, the following chapters focus exclusively on temporal changes that are also spatial. As noted, a change involves (at least) two different states of the world that form a temporal succession; if the succession takes time, then at least three different states are involved. First one state exists and then a second occurs, with a transition possibly between them. Differences between the two states, or among the two states and the transition, come into being along with the occurrences

On changes, events, and processes  7

of the second state and any transition. More broadly, the occurrences of the second state and any transition institute differences with all previous states of the world. Changes, consequently, come to be through occurrences. Note, however, that changes themselves are not occurrences. They do not, for example, happen. Rather, they exist. And they remain in existence even once the occurrences that institute them have ended. For example, after the revolution that leads to a new political regime concludes, the change in regime remains. The two most basic categories of occurrent phenomena are events and processes. Changes, consequently, emerge through, or result from, events and processes. A world lacking in events and processes would be change-less. Some philosophers call events and processes “occurrents.” An interesting feature of occurrents is that their parts are temporal phenomena, too. A sunset is an occurrent since all its parts—the slow setting of the orb, the metamorphosing color-cloud configurations in the sky etc.—occur. The transition to a new political regime is also an occurrent since its parts—occupying the residences of power, appointing new ministers and ambassadors, forming transition committees, meeting with politicians and officials etc.—all occur. The same holds of distillation, whose parts—mashing, heating, evaporating, mixing etc.—are likewise processes. Philosophers discourse at length about what they call categories (of entities), where the expression “entities” covers anything that is, regardless of what beyond the mere fact of being characterizes it. I do not want here to enter too far into philosophical discourse. But some discussion of events and processes is needed to set the stage for following chapters.

Events, processes, and other categories An event is, to put things as simply as possible, something happening. Anything that happens is an event—a game-winning shot, an itch, the rising of the sun, a master distiller taking a sip of a ten-year-old bourbon from a barrel, cooking dinner, a Pokémon battle, giving a talk, visiting an indie band’s website, a rise in unemployment, a solar eclipse, and on and on. The category of event is intuitively familiar to anyone who speaks a modern western language (or any of many other languages, too). An important feature of events is that the length of time they claim can vary, from vanishingly small slices to the entire period since the big bang (the universe can be conceptualized as an unfinished event that has been occurring since that singularity). Some events, moreover, can be instantaneous. To take a stock example, when a minister pronounces two people married, they become married at the instant the pronouncement concludes. Scholars are intuitively conversant with the notion of event (even if they cannot define or analyze it). This is not the situation regarding the notion of process. Considerable variety reigns in the social theory literature about what a process is (see, e.g., Hernes 2008 and Sandberg, Loaker, and Alvesson 2015). It will be useful, accordingly, to discuss three overall conceptions of process that, in my

8  On changes, events, and processes

opinion, are prominent in social thought today. I will describe these conceptions in order from the least demanding to the most radical. The least demanding conception construes processes as sequences of events. In a recent book, Andrew Abbott writes, “[t]he world of the processual approach is a world of events. Individuals and social entities are not the elements of social life, but are patterns and regularities defined on lineages of successive events” (2016: ix; cf. 202). On this view, the processual character of society is its composition out of tangled event series (cf. Van de Ven 1992 and Pettigrew 1997), and processual movement lies in the continual occurrence of new events that extend, conjoin, or conclude such series. These series form the “substrate” of the social process. A typical conception of explanation that dovetails with this conception of process is that explanations of social phenomena, even if they cite individuals and social entities, refer to “patterns in events, activities, and choices over time” (Langley 2009: 409). What, finally, makes this conception of process the least radical is its unabashed use of the concept of event, which is a prominent ontological category in its own right that is to be distinguished from the category of process (see below). At the same time, its lack of radicalness explains the pervasiveness of this concept of process in social research (and in ordinary life). A more demanding version of this first conception of process is that a “[p] rocess is an … occurrence that consists of an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in programmatic coordination” (Rescher 2000: 22). According to Nicholas Rescher, processes instantiate or realize programs, which are rules, patterns, or regularities. Two examples of programs that apply to human life construed as a process of this sort are life narratives and stage sequences (e.g., birth, childhood, adolescence etc.). Rescher holds, further, that the developments whose programmatic coordinated unfolding make up a process are not just causally or functionally connected (Rescher 1996: 38), but also “integrated,” or “unified” (2000: 24). This integration or unification has multiple aspects. One is that the unity of a process is the unity of its program (1996: 41). Another is that processes are wholes (2000: 31). The developments that constitute a given process cannot exist independently of the process (1996: 38): they are temporal parts of a temporal entity. Adolescence, for example, cannot exist independently of the life process, nor can experiential episodes undergone by adolescents. A third, very important aspect of the integration/unification of a process is spatial-temporal continuity (2000: 23). The developments that compose a process are continuous. No breaks, for example, intervene between the stages of the life-process. As long as life unfolds, moreover, developments go on that are not separated by gaps. Rescher offers a richer account of the unification or integration of a process than does Abbott. A reader of the latter’s 2016 book can easily get the impression that Abbott conceives of processes simply as linear series of events. This is unfortunate because the idea of an event series is widespread in social thought, and such a conception of process would assimilate his processual approach to a wide variety of nonprocessual event-based alternatives. In earlier writings

On changes, events, and processes  9

(e.g., 1983, 1992), however, Abbott claims that event sequences are stories, or narratives (“the full social process … makes up a network of stories flowing into the present and future” (1992: 438)), and that the unity of such a sequence, and thus of a process, is the unity of its story’s subject matter. Even so, Rescher has at once a more capacious and a richer sense of the unification of a process: narratives are not the only form programs can take, and developments (temporally extended events) compose a process only if they are temporal moments of a temporal whole and continuous in character. These differences, especially the requirement of spatial-temporal continuity, make Rescher’s conception of processes more distant from nonprocessual event-based alternatives than is A ­ bbott’s conception. A second overall conception of process is the idea of movement or passage through, in, or by reference to the present. The intuition behind this idea, which was broadly promulgated in pragmatism, is that “reality exists in a present” (Mead 1980: 1). Usually, the present through, in, or by reference to which movement or passage occurs is the present of experience. A strong version of this idea construes human experience as the place, akin to a stage, where things take place (come on stage), only to recede (exit the stage) as other things replace them. A weaker version treats current experience as the omnipresent reference point for determining which events qualify as present ones. In addition, there are at least three views of what comes and goes in the present and thereby constitutes passage. The first view holds that events are what come and go. This view fosters the idea that processes are continuous series of events that pass through or coincide with the ongoing present of human experience. Many pragmatists advocate this position. A second view avers that it is human experiences themselves, not events as such, that come and go in the present, new experiences continually replacing extant ones. On this, admittedly knotty view, the present is the occurrence of experience, and passage—which is not passage through or in a present—is the coming and going of experiences, each of which is necessarily present. This view of passage spawns the idea of a series of presents, that is, a series of present experiences, as well as a picture of time, or better, of history, as such series (cf. Mead 1929). History is composed, not of event series passing in or through human experience, but of series of (present) experiences. A third view of what passes through experience claims that time itself flows. It is not the passage of events or experiences that makes up the movement of process. Rather, process is the incessant flow of time from the future through the present into the past. On this view, which is found for example in a book by Tor Hernes (2014), everything that is, including events and human experiences, is borne on the river of time. Reality, as a result, is composed of endless subsidiary processes. For as time flows, experiences, actions, and events, as well as goods, communication, and bodies etc., are carried from the future through the present into the past and thereby form historical subprocesses. Humans, meanwhile, always operate in an ongoing present. This means that they always experience the flow of time in the present tense.

10  On changes, events, and processes

The third overall conception of a process is that of an unfolding advancing. This—Bergson’s conception—is the most radical conception. According to Bergson, process is best known to humans as the dureé of consciousness. Process, however, is omnipresent: all more particular flows such as those of ­consciousness-action are subsumed into the flow of the universe, and everything that exists is deposited by some unfolding advancing or other. Curiously, the central feature of process as Bergson conceived of it is ignored in many accounts that claim to appropriate his conception (see Schatzki 2010: chapt. 4). This feature is the ongoingness of process, the fact that process qua process ceaselessly unfolds. The image of an advancing wave captures some of Bergson’s idea here: process is the ongoing advancing curling of the wave. In Bergson’s words (1911: 4), dureé is “the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and swells as it advances.” In contrast, most appropriations of his conception (two exceptions are Chia (1999) and Langley (2009)) treat process in effect as the result of what Bergson calls process: as unceasing change (the result of the relentless unfolding) rather than as unceasing changing, that is, the relentless unfolding in its unfolding. Note that the movement that process so conceived embodies is directionally opposed to the movement embodied in process qua passage in or through the present: it runs, not out of the future through the present into the past (or just from the present into the past), but from the past into the future. This third conception of process is the most radical because it is free of alternative ontological categories. According to Bergson, moreover, there is no accounting or theorizing about process: it can only be intuited. The three dominant conceptions of process in social thought are (1) sequences of events, including integrated whole nexuses of continuous events, (2) movement or passage through, in, or by reference to the present, usually the present of experience, and (3) ongoing unfolding advancing. Notice that several conceptions or subconceptions of process appropriate the notion of an event. This raises the question of whether event and process are distinct ontological categories, where a category is a highest kind or genus of entity. In considering the relationship between categories, moreover, an important issue is generality: which categories subsume which others. Ludger Jansen (2015), for example, identifies occurrents and continuants as the two broadest categories of entity: whereas occurrents are temporal entities with temporal parts, continuants are spatial entities with spatial parts. Jansen claims that processes and events are two kinds of occurrent. The differences between them are that processes necessarily have a duration, inherently involve change, and can be individuated by reference to their results, whereas events can occur instantaneously and need not involve change. If, for example, the value of my home stays stable this year, this is something that happens, and thus is an event, but it is not a process. According to Jansen, therefore, processes must be cleanly differentiated from events as two types of temporal entity. Contrast this position with Johanna Seibt’s claim (2012; see 2003 for a more detailed discussion) that the category of process encompasses both developments (comings-about) and occurrences (goings-on, i.e., events).

On changes, events, and processes  11

What contrasts with processes are substances, not events. Whereas talk of substance, Seibt holds, implicates an eternal, static universe, talk of process invokes a world in movement. Whereas the being of substances, furthermore, is defined by what they are, the being of processes is defined by becoming, what they do. Meanwhile, the difference between developments and occurrences is that the former, but not the latter, are directional. Seibt does not distinguish events from processes as two types of occurrence but treats events as a type of process. The standard, philosophical way of tackling disagreement is to try to resolve it argumentatively. I am skeptical, however, that scholastic differences such as those between Jansen and Seibt can be resolved through force of argument. Luckily, loggerheads of this sort do not exclude other ways, at least in social theory, of nonarbitrarily moving forward on the issue of whether process and event are distinct categories. The starting point of an alternative approach is the existence of a great diversity of ontologies in social theory. Many of these ontologies are good ones. For the purpose of social research, accordingly, it is not necessary to resolve through argument whether event and process are disparate categories: good social research can likely be done on the basis of either an affirmative or negative answer. A researcher, consequently, can proceed on the basis of her intuitions on the matter. To my ears, the word “process” intuitively connotes something flow-like in character, something smoothly unfolding over time, whereas “event” connotes happening, or coming into existence. Flow or temporal unfolding, on the one hand, and happening and coming into existence on the other are not mutually exclusive matters. A flow of electrons, for example, can happen, just as the happening of a debate can flow. But process and event are still distinct notions. Their connotations pull in different directions: smoothly spread over time versus coming to be. This divergence is captured in the parallel between Jansen’s distinction between process and event and Seibt’s distinction between development and occurrence: in contrast to events and occurrences, processes and developments alike possess duration, encompass change and thus directionality, and can be differentiated by reference to results. A related issue is which conception(s) of process—if any—to embrace. In the face of the ineradicable plurality of ontological frameworks in social research, my position is that answering this question requires a researcher to become familiar with different conceptions of process and to determine which rationally sensible ones are most useful for her research projects. A conception is “rationally sensible” when reasonable arguments can be given for it, it does not prove deficient when elaborated, and it jibes with experience and empirical knowledge. Theories or theoretical concepts that are both rationally sensible and useful are good (see Schatzki 2017a and below). The distinctiveness of event and process as categories can serve as one criterion for determining which conceptions of process to appropriate. I will not, as a result, appropriate the pervasive conception of processes as sequences of events because it does not sufficiently distinguish between events and processes. At best it funds a distinction between individual events and sequences of events. Nor

12  On changes, events, and processes

will I work with pragmatist notions of processes as passages of events in present experience or as processions of present experiences. These notions uphold the flow-like connotation of process, but their concentration on experience diminishes their usefulness for social analysis. Many processes that compose or bear on social life—for instance, electrical transmission and infection—do not transpire in or as experience, and those that do—for example, a coffee maker brewing a cup of coffee—can be conceptualized without reference to experience. Even Abbott (2016), who accepts Mead’s dictum that reality exists in a present, does not make the present an experiential one. Nor, finally, will I draw on Hernes’ conception of process as the flow of time due to conceptual problems that it harbors (see Schatzki forthcoming). I will work, instead, with two conceptions of process. The first is of integrated whole series or nexuses of continuous events (Rescher). As noted, one key feature that differentiates processes of this sort from Abbott’s narrative event sequences is the continuity of the events involved. I also affirm Jansen’s and Seibt’s observation that processes of this sort can be identified by their results: results, it seems to me, provide unity to processes. The process of distillation, for example, is identified by its result, distilled spirits, just as the process of closing a sale is identified by its result, the closing of a sale. The second sort of process is Bergson’s unfolding advancings. Human activities are examples of unfolding advancings. Like Rescherian processes, advancings of this type can be differentiated by their results. Bergson also joins Rescher in attributing unity and continuity to processes; in fact, these properties distinguish processes from events under both their conceptions. I see no reason, however, to follow Bergson in averring that (1) all objects, things, or substances are deposits of such advancings or (2) all more particular unfolding advancings are subsumed into one overall advancing that is the process of the universe. That is too totalitarian a picture (see below). In the following, consequently, I will treat events as things happening. Processes will be construed either as whole continuous series of things happening or as ongoing unfolding advancings. As explained, moreover, changes emerge from events and processes, the basic generic types of occurrence. Social changes, consequently, emerge from the events and processes that befall or bear on social entities. A social world sans events and processes would be a changeless, static one. Having broached the topic of ontological categories, I want to add that one general message promulgated in the present work is that analyzing social life requires drawing on a plurality of ontological categories. The array of categories with which a scheme of thought operates is the repertoire of broadest, and in this sense most basic, sorts of entity recognized by the scheme. This array tells us what the scheme thinks reality, or the portion thereof with which it is occupied, ultimately consists of generically. Not just philosophers, but some social theorists, too, hold that one particular ontological category is primary and others secondary. Traditionally, the prime candidate for the status of primary ontological category has been substance, a situation deriving from Aristotle’s (1941a) claim—the

On changes, events, and processes  13

notion of categories derives from him—that the modes of being picked out by categories other than substance are either attributes or components of substances. Philosophers have debated the cogency of an event ontology, that is, an account that holds that events are the sole primary category. The idea has few proponents (though see, e.g., Bowden 2011). Process ontology, by contrast, has received greater support, philosophers such as Plotinus, Leibniz, Hegel, Bergson, and Whitehead numbering among its adherents. Today, in organization theory, for instance, scholars routinely distinguish strong process ontologies from weak process views (e.g., Chia and Langley 2004; Langley 2009: 410). Strong process ontologies hold that reality is composed of processes and that everything else that exists somehow results from or is subordinate to processes. Weak process views admit that there are substances and defend the existence of processes against those who deny them. Weak process views also sometimes contend that processes befall things and objects, i.e., substances. Whereas strong process ontologies are a form of ontological totalitarianism, weak process views are pluralistic. There was a moment in the previous section where I could have argued for a “strong” event or process ontology. I wrote that events and processes usher in changes. I could have easily concluded from this fact that changes, too, occur, that is, that they themselves are events. For the word “occurrence” can be taken to denote the mode of being of entities that are in or over time. And changes clearly qualify. But, then, such objects and things as tables, rocks, and human bodies would also qualify: they, too, are in time. Indeed, this is precisely what an advocate of a strong process or event ontology might claim about such substances. I want, however, to extend the ecumenical spirit animating weak process views and to develop over the course of this book a multi-category ontology. Social theory, I believe, is most flexible and most adequate to the oft-invoked messiness of social life when it embraces the—to paraphrase Heidegger (1978)— equiprimacy of categories. I just urged that events be distinguished from processes and hinted that both categories should be employed in social analysis. Over the next two chapters, I will argue en passant that substances, structures, and relations are equally essential. The social world is generically composed at least of substances, structures, relations, events, and processes, and none of these categories has priority over the others in the sense that what the others designate are attributes, properties, products, or modes of existence of the alleged primary entities (or otherwise gain their being by reference to the latter). Maybe categories beyond these five need to be put to work, too. I will remain agnostic about that while periodically challenging the ideas of those who promote, most prominently, substances, processes, or relations as the primary type of entity in social life.

Difference and change I intimated that movements of all sorts are changes and stated that social changes are necessarily temporal in character. I have not, however, said anything about

14  On changes, events, and processes

change per se. It is important to say something about this topic since it helps define the subject matter of chapters four through eight. Changes result from events and processes. Exactly how, however, does this work? A relevant feature of events and processes—mentioned above in ­passing— is that differences emerge through them. In a way, events and processes are founts or incubators of difference. For example, an event, the happening or coming to be of something, ipso facto marks a difference with the state of the world prior to the event when that something had not yet happened and thus was not yet the case. This event also institutes all the differences that obtain between the consequences of the something that has happened and the prior state of the world. Thus, if an earthquake strikes, both the earthquake itself and its devastating effects produce differences with the state of the world before its onslaught. Differences, furthermore, are likely to be more numerous when processes, as opposed to events, occur. This is because processes either embrace multiple events (à la Rescher) or exhibit an unfolding quality (à la Bergson). Either way, processes add that many more occurrences to the world, thereby expanding the sum of differences that much more and, in addition, multiplying the range of consequences and hence additional differences in the world. Indeed, in associating Bergsonian processes with becoming, some theorists have conceptualized processes as continuously engendering differences while they unfold (Tsoukas and Chia 2002; cf. Deleuze’s 1988 remark that to become is to become different). The process of distillation, for example, involves, among other things, inserting mash into the still (mash is the fermented mix of grain, yeast, barley malt, and water that is heated to produce evaporated alcohol), burning fuel, controlling the heating, cooking the mash and releasing its alcohol through evaporation, and condensing the evaporated alcohol in the spiral copper tube called the “worm” that is immersed in a pool of circulating cold water. Distilling is a Rescherian sort of process, whereas some of its components—heating, evaporation, and condensation—are ­Bergsonian in character. Any given instance of the distillation process is unique and thus temporally different from all other instances; each such instance also continuously produces differences, both with its own earlier phases and with states of the world prior to the commencement of the process. Some thinkers hold that change is difference. This claim entails that events and processes automatically yield change(s). Whether, however, differences amount to change depends on what is juxtaposed with what. As noted, each instance of distilling by a particular distiller differs from all previous ones. The exact timing of what the distiller does on the different occasions might slightly deviate, the proportion of different ingredients in the mash might subtly vary, different amounts of mash and cooking temperatures might be achieved, the distillations occur on different days, begin at different moments, and last for slightly different periods, and so on. In relation to one another, these microdifferences amount to changes. At the same time, it might be that nothing really changes from one instance to another of distillation: the same distillation process might occur, the distiller might use the same ingredients and follow the same steps, the

On changes, events, and processes  15

results might be the same, and the same distiller might be at work. What’s more, the events and processes that are responsible for all the microdifferences involved are the very events and processes that effect this lack of change, that is, that are responsible for the persistence of the same over time. Indeed, the fact that the microdifferences and the persistence of the same have a common origin is grounds for saying that the former amount, not to changes, but to fluctuation. In order for change to have occurred, significant differences need to have taken place. Possible examples include following a different formula for the mash, using a different wood for fuel that burns at a different temperature, a new master distiller starting work etc. When any of these things take place, a change might have occurred to the process. It might no longer be the same. Of course, even if the distillation process changes, the distillery where it occurs might stay the same. Other differences are needed for the distillery to change, for example, being bought out by a larger outfit, moving to an entirely new production facility, abandoning the production of bourbon for the production of rye whiskey, and so on. Hence, change is not difference simpliciter; it is significant difference. And what qualifies as significant difference—including in all the above e­ xamples— depends on what is juxtaposed with what. It also rests on the volume and nature of further differences that arise consequent on the difference under consideration, as well as on judgments of significance. If the distiller alters the mash formula, or the placement or rotation of barrels in the storage house, and later rejects the resulting whiskey as inferior in quality, nothing has changed. If that formula, or the different placement or rotation, instead produces a great new taste and other distillers notice it and themselves experiment commensurately after the new product hits the market, change has occurred. Significance, in short, is a contextual matter, dependent both on human judgment and on states of as well as occurrences in the world. The difference between events and processes lies partly in disparate relations to difference and change. An event need not encompass differences that amount to change. An event is simply the occurrence of something. This occurrence institutes a set of differences, which always includes temporal differences and usually worldly ones as well. Which worldly differences arise depends on what the event and its consequences are. A particular distiller staying with a particular firm for the year is an event, but it is an event that involves stasis: the difference between what happens and the prior state of the world (the distiller working at the firm) is nil, and temporal differences between this event and what preceded it do not amount to change. Processes, by contrast, seem regularly bound up with changes, which result from them. This connection is likely due to the stretchedout continuous ongoingness of processes, which increases the likelihood of change occurring. Even if a process simply maintains stasis, it inevitably encompasses changes that are needed to accomplish this. For example, the process of the distillery owner maintaining his grip on power is likely to involve him doing various things that amount to changes in the firm, in his management style, in his relations to employees, other distilleries, or the government, and so on.

16  On changes, events, and processes

Change is the existence of significant difference. Social change, consequently, is the existence of significant differences in social life and social phenomena. It is these differences that social researchers are typically interested in ascertaining, describing, understanding, and explaining, as well as impeding, instigating, or inflecting. Since, on a practice theoretical view such as my own, social life consists of practices, more precisely, of practice-arrangement bundles (see chapter two), it follows that social change is the emergence of significant differences in such bundles. Given the discussion in the previous section, this formula can be expanded to read that social change is the emergence of significant differences in practice-arrangement bundles through the events and processes that befall such bundles and their components. The present book is about these events, processes, and significant differences. A perennial issue in social thought concerns the origins and causes of change. Scholars have sought to pinpoint where change comes from and what is responsible for it. In this vein, theorists have identified such factors as changes in culture (including ideas), demographical changes (e.g., in births), technological innovations, environmental events, conflict, and social movements as prominent causes of change. Others have sought to segregate the causes of change into such categories as economic, cultural, environmental, and demographic and to show that one or the other of these is the chief or ultimate source of change. These are important efforts that help people understand what is responsible for their lives and worlds. The approach in this book, however, is going to be a little different. As process theorists have long argued, differences emerge continuously with every event and every phase of a process. I would add that changes, therewith and consequently, frequently result. Happening social life is replete with difference and change. I do not, however, follow process theorists in drawing the inference from this situation that it is persistence and stability—and not change—that require explanation (e.g., Abbott 2007: 8, Bryant 2014: 143). As various theorists have recognized (e.g., Feldman and Orlikowski 2011), both changes in and the persistence of social phenomena are brought about through events and processes. Neither occurs in the absence of certain events and processes. In the case of social phenomena, moreover, events and processes of the same sorts are responsible for persistence and change alike (see chapter seven). Events and processes of these sorts perpetually occur, and whether persistence or change results can be determined only by looking. The only nearly automatic or default matter in this regard is the persistence of some material components of social phenomena. And even they are subject to weathering and decay and need occasional repair or restoration. What process theorists are right about, meanwhile, is that change is inevitable. The forms it takes, however, are variable. Why changes assume one shape or are of one sort rather than another, and why they occur at one moment or time period rather than another, are matters requiring explanation. In chapters six and seven I will argue that such matters are explained by locating particular change-constituting differences in the wider sweep of events and processes of

On changes, events, and processes  17

which they are part. Explanation is thus concerned, inter alia, with how change (or persistence) comes about. It follows that clarifying the nature of social change and the sorts of events and processes that are responsible for it are part of the enterprise of comprehending social life. The present book tackles these tasks at an abstract level. Its analyses aim less to lay out different forms of change or different types of responsible events and processes and seek more to uncover what unifies or links these forms and types. It is concerned with what change and the events and processes responsible for it ultimately amount to or involve. It will develop, therefore, a set of theoretical concepts that are useful for conceptualizing, describing, and explaining changes generally. Since changes arise from events and processes, the temporal features of changes will loom large. Familiar examples of relevant temporal features are moments or periods of change, timing relative to other phenomena, rhythms and rates, and the diverse and multiple temporal matters of these sorts that characterize complex social phenomena such as economic systems, wars, and sports leagues. A different sort of temporal feature of change arises from the fact that social phenomena have temporal courses, that is, histories through time. In a world of ceaseless difference and inevitable change, social phenomena come and go: they emerge, persist, and decline. Emergence, persistence, and decline are phases of something’s temporal course. This trio need not be wielded, as was historically the case (e.g., Spencer 1882, Spengler 1991), on the basis of a today suspicious analogy between societies and living organisms. It can be construed instead as a periodization that arises from the fact that anything that exists in a difference- and change-filled world comes into and goes out of being at particular moments (or over particular periods), persisting, and possibly evolving as it persists, between the two times (or periods). The temporal courses and phases of social phenomena are effected through events and processes and embrace multitudinous differences and changes. Effecting and characterizing the emergence, persistence-evolution, and demise of social phenomena are important temporal features, respectively, of events and processes on the one hand and changes on the other. As noted, chapters four and five analyze the complex of events, processes, differences, and changes that happen to or bear on social phenomena. In doing so, they will spell out a unified set of concepts—a unified ontology of occurrence and change—that underlies the understanding, description, and explanation of specific instances of social persistence and change. These and subsequent chapters will not differentiate or discuss the relative roles of different origins and causes of change. As noted, they will instead discuss what unifies these origins and causes, that is, their basic character. Doing this will require attending to how differences and changes characterize the temporal courses and phases of social phenomena. The uniqueness of this approach is a third reason for the present book. This work, however, does not contain just theory. It also substantializes this theory through sustained analyses of several current or past social phenomena.

18  On changes, events, and processes

The proof is in the pudding The ultimate criterion for the adequacy of theory and theoretical concepts is their usefulness in empirical analysis, the use that is and can be made of them to conceptualize, describe, explain, and understand social life and social phenomena (or to order these cognitive achievements). Success at conceptualizing, describing, explaining, and understanding might make theories and theoretical ideas useful for intervening in, that is, impeding, instigating, or inflecting social affairs. Although it is intellectually defensible for any work of theory that upholds theses such as these to be a work of pure theoretical development and elaboration, pure theory contravenes the spirit of the thesis; it is also tactically inadvisable. Accordingly, I examine two empirical subject matters in the following. The first empirical subject matter comprises two large-scale episodes from the history of bourbon distillation in Kentucky, the state in the US where I reside. This history is not of local interest alone. The history of bourbon is closely integrated with many other episodes and developments in US history. It is also sufficiently rich to allow the entire theory developed in the following chapters to be deployed in analyzing it. The first episode from this history that I will examine is the transition from an agrarian to an industrial mode of production that took place roughly between the 1830s and the 1880s. From its origin in the 1770s and 1780s (Kentucky was settled by Europeans in the 1760s and 1770s) until the 1830s, whiskey distillation in the state was the business of farmers and millers. Individuals in these lines of work distilled whiskey in order to use up surplus grain that they could not get to or sell at market and as a means of supplying alcohol to rural communities. Note that I write “whiskey” instead of “bourbon.” Nothing existed from the 1780s until roughly the 1820s that resembled what today is called “­bourbon.” ­Kentucky whiskey became bourbon between the 1820s and 1860s: the key change in this development was the aging of distilled spirits in charred barrels made from white oak. Distillery operations before 1830 were small in scale and mostly located along rural streams or springs (power was supplied through water wheels or horses). These operations had a close, even symbiotic relation with the farms that supplied both the corn used in distillation and the livestock that were fed spent mash and the small communities that consumed the whiskey. Labor, often slaves (see Raitz forthcoming: chapt. 11), was supplied locally. Such operations proliferated: by 1812 the number of registered distilleries in Kentucky had risen to around 2,000 (Mitenbuler 2015: 66); it continued to rise for the next two decades. By the 1880s, by contrast, most bourbon, measured by volume, was produced by large industrial distilleries, many located in the Ohio River cities of Louisville, Covington (the Kentucky side of Cincinnati), and Owensboro (to the west of Louisville). A few large industrial distilleries were also found away from river urban areas in towns situated in historic distilling regions, along railroad spurs that fed into the elaborate national rail system that developed after the War.

On changes, events, and processes  19

These industrialized distilleries were large-scale operations employing scores of workers and requiring numerous buildings to house their practices (e.g., fermentation, distillation, aging, storage, administration, shipping, livestock feeding). Small-scale distillers also continued to exist during this time, especially in the rural “inner Bluegrass” region near the city of Lexington and the rural Eastern Pennyroyal (or Pennyrile) region that lies forty-five to seventy-five miles to the southwest of that city. As we will see, large and smaller distilleries came into conflict during this time. How did this change come about? A similar large-small contrast characterizes the second episode I will consider: the resurgence of the bourbon industry in the 1990s and 2000s. In 1964, the US Congress declared bourbon to be America’s “distinctive” spirit. At this very moment, however, bourbon was beginning to face a severe challenge from vodka (beer had already overtaken bourbon as America’s favorite alcoholic beverage in 1913). In the mid 1960s, vodka succeeded in positioning itself as an up and coming trendsetter in tune with the broad social changes occurring in that decade. Bourbon became associated with the establishment and had the image of being a little out of step with the times. This association was due in no small part to the industry’s long-standing practice (dating to the mid 1800s) of invoking heritage and the past in brand names, labels, and advertising. Vodka’s rise was also fueled by increased interest in mixed drinks featuring juices. Bourbon, by contrast, had always positioned itself as a beverage to be enjoyed by itself, supplemented only by water or ice. Vodka sales surpassed bourbon sales in 1976, ushering in the industry’s 20th-century nadir (worse than during Prohibition). The industry was in serious danger of running aground. By the early 2000s, however, bourbon was back An industry that in 2000 had thirteen principal distilleries (Mitenbuler 2015: 46) in 2015 boasted as many as 500 (though in 2015 roughly 95% of bourbon was still produced by thirteen large distilleries). What happened to explain this remarkable turn-around? The second empirical subject matter to be examined in this book would be conventionally described as group formation (and transformation) through contemporary digital information and communications technologies (ICTs) such as computers and cell phones. I call this the conventional description to suggest that one of the issues that arises in analyzing metamorphoses of sociality consequent on digital technology is whether traditional social theoretical concepts such as groups or communities apply to digitally mediated associations. Veritable cascades of new and improved hardware and software over the past fifty years, in conjunction with evolving and repeatedly upgraded electronic infrastructures, have made significant contributions to the emergence, development, persistence, and dissolution of social phenomena. What happens to extant social phenomena such as families and workgroups when their members start using new ICTs or take up online relations to one another? Does the advent of social networks, MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games), and, later, LBMGs (location-based multiplayer games) usher in new groups or communities or new kinds of social formation? What happens to the character

20  On changes, events, and processes

of human membership in associations when people can access multiple digitally mediated groupings? And, How should the changes, or lack of changes, implicated in answers to questions such as these be explained? What’s more, different combinations of software and hardware might occasion different answers to these questions. My discussion will hardly seek to address the full range of new formations that exist in digital environments. I will, instead, concentrate on what I consider to be three very different thought-provoking associations, highlighting the second of the above questions, namely, the one about novel forms of human association. These three associations have emerged over the past thirty years in digital environments. The expression “digital environments” signals that I treat digital devices, most prominently, computers, tablets, and mobile phones (as well as, today, watches and glasses), as elements of the world through which people proceed, that is, as parts of the material arrangements with which peoples’ practices are entangled (see chapters two and three). The expression “digital environments” holds no implications for spaces that actually or allegedly exist through, are affected by, or otherwise pertain to these devices—other than that these devices help define, or are found in, the physical spaces people live through. In particular, use of the term does not imply the existence (see chapter eight) of what others have variously called “cyber space” (e.g., Gibson 1984), “virtual space,” (e.g., Flusser 2006), or “digital space” (e.g., Chayko 2017). The first of the associations I will analyze is the WELL, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. This association began in 1985 and still exists today. In 1986 it had a few hundred members, reaching a high water mark in the early 1990s with over 5000 participants. The WELL was one of the first online discussion boards. As a discussion forum, it was preceded in 1980 by Usenet, which enabled otherwise unrelated individuals to form newsgroups focused on particular topics. As a digital communication network it was preceded by such computer systems as ARAPNET, set up by the US military in 1965, and PLATO, set up at the University of Illinois in the early 1970s. Unlike its predecessors, however, the WELL became the first “virtual community,” to use Harold Rheingold’s (1993) expression: it was the first digital forum for communication and social interaction to qualify as a community. The term “community” is often applied to digital associations regardless of whether the associations in question meet any careful or serious definition of the term. The WELL, however, really was a community (see chapter seven). So it is of interest to ask how it emerged and why it became one. Unlike the WELL, the other two digitally mediated associations to be examined came after what Rainie and Wellman (2012) call the triple revolution: the joining of mobile communication (ushered in by the introduction of small computers called smart phones), the World Wide Web (enabled by the development of hypertext in the early 1990s, which soon led to social media such as Wikis and blogs), and true social networks, which allow people to choose their connections and networks and enable personal and mass communication alike (the first true such network was Six Degrees in 1997; see boyd and Ellison 2007).

On changes, events, and processes  21

The first of the two post-Triple Revolution digitally mediated associations to be examined does not have a proper name. It is the digital association formed by fans of Swedish indie music as of 2007. The coalescence of this digital fandom through and across a variety of digital sites is well described in Nancy Baym’s intriguing article, “The new shape of online community” (2007). I examine Swedish indie music fandom because it formed neither a community nor a group. As the title of Baym’s article wants to indicate, it diverges from social associations of standard social theoretical types. As will be argued in chapter seven, this digitally mediated association formed a kind of teleological organization. Of it, too, the questions can be asked: How did it coalesce? and Why did it take the form it did? Around the turn of the millennium, the development of more powerful graphics interfaces fostered dramatic immersive multiplayer online games (MMORPGs). Toward the end of the 2000s, moreover, the combination of mobile communication and social networks spawned software such as Foursquare that added user location to the information processed through such networks. This made location in physical space an explicit and vital element in the composition, formation, and evolution of digitally mediated associations. Combined, these two developments gave rise to a new type of association, namely, participants in massive locative multiplayer games. The first fully localized such game was (is) Pokémon Go, which was launched on July 22, 2016. I presume that every reader recalls this episode and either personally knows people who played this game or saw pictures of hordes of people moving about in the streets doing so (for example, www.youtube. com/watch?v=MLdWbwQ JWI0). Pokémon Go is intriguing because of its combination of the virtual, the social, the spatial, and the physical (Clark and Clark 2016). It is, to begin with, a form of augmented reality (though purists dispute this): participants capture and battle Pokémon creatures on cell phone screens that show the animated creatures moving about in a simplified geometric representation of the real physical environment surrounding the players. The game is highly social, moreover, because participants must join one of three teams in order to play. They thereby acquire teammates, most of whom are strangers, and do battle with and on the behalf of their teams against members of other teams who control so-called PokéGyms, a kind of digital den. The game is also spatial, both because real circumjacent material spaces are represented on game screens and because the game has induced hundreds of millions of human beings to search nearby locales to capture Pokémon. The project of going about to capture these creatures introduces a further dimension of sociality to the game since people, again often total strangers, have inevitably interacted as they came together to search particular places (see Majgaard and Larsen 2017). The game is physical, finally, since people must physically move about in the physical environment to play; this fact sparked the attention of public health researchers interested in whether the game holds lessons for the challenge of inducing greater physical activity in overly sedentary

22  On changes, events, and processes

populations. Incidentally, Pokémon Go remains the most downloaded app in history in the first week of release. I will explain in chapter seven that, as in the case of Swedish indie fandom, it is hard to characterize the associations playing Pokémon Go as either communities or groups. They also do not form the sort of teleological organization that the fandom did. Rheingold (2002) coins an expression that comes close to capturing both the game’s disorganization and the physical-spatial dynamism of game play: “smart mobs.” Mobs, however, have relatively little form. Perhaps “smart swarms” is better. The question I pose about these smart swarms is why they formed, that is, why Pokémon Go was initially so popular. I will also ask why game play plateaued and declined soon after the game’s explosive debut. Concerning digitalized worlds, I should add that analyses of social phenomena that are bound up with digital devices and digital environments often distinguish between online and offline, for example, online and offline groups and communities. Despite its seeming intuitiveness, this distinction is hard to pin down. One version is that it differentiates phenomena that emerge and subside only through digitally mediated connections from phenomena that originate and completely or mostly persist independent of such connections. Facebook groups, gaming guilds, and interest-based websites are examples of the former, whereas families, corporations, governments, and neighborhood associations are examples of the latter. The distinction so interpreted is unsatisfactory because when members of online formations begin to interact offline, or when members of offline formations increasingly relate to one another online, the resulting phenomena are neither online nor offline. The temptation to call them “hybrid” phenomena suggests that it is probably best to shift the distinction between online and offline and to apply it, not to social phenomena at large, but to specific ties between people: people can relate online, that is, as mediated by a digital device, or offline, that is, as not so mediated. A social formation, consequently, can combine relations of the two sorts; the possible combinations are immense. A virtue of this approach is that it indicates that every social formation, regardless of how it comes about or is maintained, embraces real living people who carry on practices as they proceed through particular material settings and worlds that might or might not contain digital devices. This emphasis counters the widespread tendency to segregate online existence from offline existence and to treat the former as a world unto itself (see chapter eight and Chayko 2017: 65–8). A social phenomena is online only to the extent that the materiality it embraces (see chapters two and three) includes devices that run and are run by software programs. Whereas the analyses of bourbon are more “historical” and, as we will see, “economic” in nature, my discussion of contemporary digitally mediated associations is more “sociological.” What I mean is that in analyzing the two subject matters I will be led to touch on concerns typically addressed in history and economics, on the one hand, and in sociology (and geography and media studies) on the other. The comments I have been making about different types of social

On changes, events, and processes  23

association give some sense of the latter. The two clusters of substantialization thus facilitate engagement with topics across the social sciences, while also treating both of historical and contemporary material. In an earlier work, I claimed that one advantage of working with two, or even one, empirical substantialization is that they can be developed in greater depth. Assuming one has chosen subject matters wisely, greater depth at once (1) enables most if not all the components of a theory to be mobilized inter-relatedly and (2) reveals details of reality more thoroughly, thereby submitting a theory’s cogency and propitiousness to a fuller test. As I wrote then (Schatzki 2002: xix), this method “provides at once greater substantiality, sharpened perspicuity, and above all enhanced clarity of understanding.” As just indicated, the two subject matters that I have chosen pull, respectively, in more historical-temporal or more ordering (structural, if you prefer) directions. Of course, any social subject matter encompasses both dimensions: the dynamics of social life articulates order in and over time at the same time that it lays down ordered times (in the form of sequences of events and processes). This formulation neglects space, activity, and materiality, which are fully integrated into the dynamic order-time complex as equal partners to structure and history-time. All these phenomena will be treated of in subsequent chapters. Usefulness is not the only criterion of good theory in social investigation (see Schatzki 2017a). As mentioned, a second criterion is rational sensibleness. A theory is rationally sensible when reasonable arguments can be mounted in its defense, elaboration does not reveal deficiencies, and the theory jibes with experience and empirical knowledge. It is important to acknowledge that these two criteria do not and cannot whittle the range of ontologies and theories on offer to social investigators—either in general or on particular issues—to one or a very few good ones. Students of social life are, in effect, placed before and required to find their way through an ineradicable multiplicity of good theoretical approaches, that is, approaches that are both useful and rationally sensible. Luckily for all, only so many good theoretical approaches are available in any period of intellectual history (though which these are is subject to considerable disagreement). Accordingly, social investigators do not confront what could be a cognitively debilitating situation. The existence of the second criterion for a good theory indicates that the development of theory must pursue intellectual virtues such as insight, consistency, comprehensiveness, defensibility, and even novelty and excitement. In turn, the pursuit of intellectual virtues suggests that theory development can enjoy a kind of semi-independence from empirical work, more specifically, that it can legitimately proceed—at least temporarily, if not more sustainably—in autonomy from both the theorist’s own pursuit of empirical work and his or her consideration of the results of specific empirical investigations. Theoretical discussions may and sometimes do proceed by reference to theoretical issues, which are distinct from though they bear implications for and sometimes reflect and are rooted in empirical questions and results. As a result, theory can legitimately be

24  On changes, events, and processes

developed through reflection, the construction of conceptual edifices, and the interpretation and appropriation of existing ideas. Social theory also has philosophical dimensions, which are traditionally addressed in thought. At the same time, however, because empirical usefulness is the ultimate criterion of good social theory, theory development should never lose track, let alone proceed independently, of the results of empirical work generally. And it is impossible, in any event, to theorize about social life uninformed by social experience and by what one has learned about social life, either through academic investigation, practical experience, or news and social media. But these facts do not imply that theory is legitimately developed only from empirical phenomena, say, through the introduction of theoretical concepts to solve issues in comprehending specific empirical phenomena or on the basis of methodic encounters with empirical phenomena and a controlled process of abstraction and inference from them. Pierre Bourdieu developed theory in these latter ways (see Heilbron 2014, Wacquant 2016). The concept of habitus, for example, was originally introduced to explain problems that certain sorts of adult were having in Béarn, France (where Bourdieu grew up) coping with social worlds in which they lived (see Wacquant 2016). Bourdieu claimed (1985: 18), moreover, that his theory of fields was developed by (1) using the concept of fields to account for things in a given social universe, (2) supposing—via analogical reasoning—that the concept illuminates proceedings in a different social universe, (3) investigating and uncovering features of the specific form fields take in that other universe, thereby deepening understanding of general features of fields, and (4) repeating this procedure, eventually achieving a more general and formal grasp of the “invariable laws of structure and history” of fields. Bourdieu stressed the importance of analogical thought in this context: Sociology is the art of thinking phenomenally different things as similar in their structure and functioning and transferring that which has been established about a constructed object, say the religious field, to a whole series of new objects, the artistic or political field and so on (quoted in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 5). Bourdieu was also bitterly critical of what he called the “scholastic disposition” (2000), or “theory theory” (1985), which he (1998a) sometimes equated with theory outright. But Bourdieu’s procedure is just one way of developing theory. The part of the cognitive structure of social investigation that is formulated in words is capacious. It includes, among other things, theoretical concepts, theoretical issues, and theoretical discussions, as well as descriptions of empirical phenomena, specifications of methods, many things that qualify as “data,” and explanations and interpretations of particular phenomena. These items all connect, some more strongly and directly with certain others. One can imagine, therefore, a division of labor, in which some scholars specialize more on the theory components, others on investigating and comprehending specific social

On changes, events, and processes  25

phenomena, and a few are capable of doing both. Considerable, even complete specialization on one or another component of this structure is legitimate so long as the specialist understands that the purpose of the entire enterprise, and thus the ultimate purpose of his or her part of it, is to better comprehend both particular empirical phenomena and the social world at large. The contribution of theory is to produce rationally sensible concepts and schemes that are useful to empirical research. There are many ways of going about this. The following chapters seek both to develop theory and theoretical concepts through argumentation and theoretical elaboration and to show that the concepts developed can contribute to better comprehension of past and present-day social phenomena. My exposition leans much more toward the elaboration of theory than toward the description and explanation of specific social phenomena. This balance reflects both the temperament and career trajectory of the author and the fact that theory development deserves careful and considerable attention in its own right. Nonetheless, as stated, the proof of theoretical concepts is actual empirical puddings. This chapter has developed a cluster of concepts that is essential to the account of social change and explanation presented in this book, namely, change, event, and process. The latter two concepts identify the sorts of phenomena that give rise to change. Chapter two develops a second essential component of the book’s account of change and explanation, namely, the conception of social life and social phenomena that specifies what is meant by social change.

2 The practice plenum

This book approaches the topics of conceptualizing and explaining social change through a practice theoretical account of social life and the constitution of social phenomena. The present chapter lays out basic features of this account. In elucidating the constitution of social phenomena, it prepares the way for the analysis in chapter four of what social changes—that is, changes in social phenomena— are. It thereby provides an essential piece of the conceptual structure elaborated in this book. Note that, although this chapter explores topics addressed in earlier works of mine, it offers new ideas on these topics and takes earlier discussions in new directions. In Schatzki (2002), I argued that bundles of practices and material arrangements form “sites” of the social. Sites are where certain entities exist or occur, in a rarified sense of “where.” Two familiar senses of where an entity is or occurs are, first, its location in space or in some broader (spatial, actional, or historical) phenomenon and, second, this space or broader phenomenon (context) where it is located. Video sharing, for example, takes place (1) at specific locations such as park benches and living room couches as well as at specific moments over the past two decades and (2) in parks, in houses, in physical space, and during the past two decades. Sites are a special type of broader phenomenon, or context, where something can exist or take place. For an entity to exist or occur in a site is for it to inherently exist or occur as part of some broader phenomenon. When this situation obtains, the broader phenomenon involved is the site of the entity in question. In this sense, absolute space—if it exists—is the site of spatial locations, and history can be conceptualized as the site of human actions. In the aforecited book, moreover, I interpreted the adjective “social” to mean pertaining to human coexistence. This interpretation opposes ones that construe “social” as pertaining to joint commitment (Gilbert 1989) or pertaining to fellowship/ companionship (the meaning of socius). I suggested, further, that coexistence be

The practice plenum  27

understood as the hanging-together (Zusammenhang) of people’s lives. These conceptual moves set up the argument that social life, the hanging-together of lives, inherently transpires as part of bundles of practices and arrangements. Such bundles form sites of the social: all social life transpires as part of them. According to this picture, bundles of practices and arrangements are the central unit of conceptuality in analyses of social life and social phenomena. I write “unit of conceptuality” instead of “unit of analysis” because, although the concept of bundle is central to such analyses, bundles as such are not necessarily their central focus. Bundles, moreover, connect, and the broader constellations they form link to form one overall complex. I call this complex the “practice plenum.” The choice of the term “plenum” is deliberate. A plenum is a sum of particular things, which might or might not relate, that, as a sum of particular things, amounts, not to a bigger thing, but simply to a multiplicity. The practice plenum is a plentitude in this sense: an entirety of practices and arrangements, which happen to relate and, as related, form bundles and constellations. Social life inherently transpires as part of bundles of practices and arrangements. Together, moreover, these bundles form a plenum. It follows that social phenomena are aspects or slices of this plenum. The components of the practice plenum, consequently, are the materials of which social phenomena are composed. What’s more, this plenum, like its constituent bundles and constellations, is nothing more than the practices, arrangements, and relations that compose it. As a result, the key components of the plenum, the basic materials of which social phenomena are composed, are practices, arrangements, the relations that link practices and arrangements into bundles, and the relations among bundles that link them into broader constellations.

Practices All theories of practice construe practices as organized actions. They disagree about how actions and their organization are analyzed. Bourdieu, for instance, made habitus—which he interpreted as batteries of dispositions—central to his account of practices, that is, actions. He also emphasized that social spaces, understood as position-defining multidimensional distributions of capital (fields are a prominent type of social space; see Wacquant and Akçaoğlu 2017), organize practices in given domains. More specifically, relations among, that is, the relative locations of, positions in social spaces define actual relations between people who occupy these positions, thereby structuring what these people do and how they interact in those spaces (e.g., Bourdieu 1968, 1998b, 2005). Bourdieu, in addition, held that such matters as stakes, strategies, and the layouts of material settings both depend on social spaces and contribute to the organization and evolution of practices in particular domains. Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012), meanwhile, write relatively little about actions per se. They focus, instead, on practices. Following Reckwitz 2002, they analyze a practice as a block of elements that is brought together in the

28  The practice plenum

performance of action. The elements involved are of three types: competences, meanings, and materials. The practice of car driving, for example, brings together such competences as knowing how to start the car, how to steer it, and how to anticipate other drivers’ actions; such meanings as Stop!, need gas, and driving as an expression of freedom; and such materials as cars, keys, roads, signs, gasoline, and human bodies. Driving practices vary geographically as different blocks of such elements. Such practices also evolve (i.e., the mix of elements changes) as well as develop from earlier transportation practices, for example, those of carriage driving: the latter’s blocks of elements, though different from the blocks that compose driving practices, partly overlap with them, especially during the transition, for example, roads, carriage-car design, travelling on a particular side of the road, hand signals, changing wheels, and other repair skills. For Shove, Pantzar, and Watson, actions, that is, practices as performances, draw together meanings, competences, and materials and, in so doing, reproduce practices qua entities composed of blocks of such elements. On my account, practices are open-ended, spatial-temporal sets of organized doings and sayings. A doing is always a doing of something. In more conventional terms: a doing is the performing of an action. Performings, moreover, are events, things that happen. Note that I will sometimes use the word “activity” as equivalent to performings, thus to denote the event of doing. This usage entails that activity and action are distinguished as event and achievement (see Schatzki 2010: xiv–xv). Sayings, meanwhile, are a type of doing, namely, doings in which something is said. The idea of saying something, however, is ambiguous. What a person says in saying something is, first, the words, sentences, and strings of words, phrases, and sentences she utters (or writes or types). These words and sentences, as vocables, are texts. They are texts, of course, that usually perish in the event. What a person says in saying something is, second, what she says. If someone says (or write or types), “The evening is cool” or “Hand me my cell phone,” what she says in this second sense is that the evening is cool or to bring her the phone. Incidentally, the point of distinguishing the wider set of doings from the subset of doings composed of sayings (see the criticism at Hirschauer 2016: 54–5) is to highlight sayings as a component of practices and social life and thereby facilitate examination of the different contributions of and issues that attend nondiscursive and discursive doings (see Schatzki 2017d; “nondiscursive doings and discursive doings” is an alternative formulation of “doings and sayings”). Practices are open sets of activities. Openness means that any practice can in principle be extended through the occurrence of additional performances that compose it. Cooking practices, for example, are open since additional cooking actions can always in principle be performed. The openness of practices has implications for what it is for a practice to persist. A practice persists whenever an additional practice-composing action is performed. Whenever such an action is performed, it turns out that the practice had persisted from the time of the previous practice-composing action to the time of this one. In the future,

The practice plenum  29

consequently, a current practice will persist only if further practice-composing actions occur; and with each such occurrence the practice will turn out to have persisted from the time of the previous such activity. Note that persistence does not require constituent activities continuously to occur. The doings and sayings that compose a practice can be and usually are spread out in time and space, i.e., are separated by temporal and spatial gaps (a practice, consequently, is not a ­Rescherian or Bergsonian process). Accordingly, it is enough in order for a practice, in the future, to have persisted that at some time in the future a constituent activity occurs. There is no rule, however, concerning how short this time must be or how long it cannot be. For example, the ancient practice of communicating by smoke signal has largely died away, at least in the North Atlantic region. But it will persist so long as people communicate this way every so often. There is no rule, however, how quickly these occurrences must follow one another (nor how frequent they must be) for the practice to persist; correlatively, there is no rule about how long a time period must pass before the practice qualifies as having died. Practices are open, and it is possible that people will communicate this way in the future (think Mad Max). Another implication of the open nature of practices is that, unless an action that constitutes a practice is performed at a given moment, it is indeterminate at that moment whether the practice persists. This is easy to see vis-à-vis smoke signals: during recent periods when no inhabitant of the North Atlantic region communicated in this way, it was perpetually indeterminate whether another occasion of such communication would occur. Indeed, it is still presently indeterminate. This same indeterminacy, however, affixes all practices, even those such as cooking practices that are today widely carried on; or, to speak from the vantage of the present moment (when you are reading this sentence), even those that people have been widely carrying on in the very recent past. For until a new constituent activity actually occurs, it remains indeterminate whether one will occur, however likely this might seem. The lack of a rule about how long the absence of new constituent activities must continue before it is sensible to proclaim the practice dead is grounded in this indeterminacy: for the persistence of the practice remains indeterminate regardless of the length of time that has elapsed since the last persistence-authenticating activity. It is possible that someone in the North Atlantic region could resurrect the practice of communicating by smoke signal. But at what point will it be true to say that this is no longer possible? It no longer seems possible that people will take up the use of cuneiform languages again. But might people begin speaking Latin again? Can one think of circumstances under which this would be imaginable? So, what about writing in cuneiform languages? There are no definitive answers to such questions: the persistence of open-ended sets of doings and sayings is inherently indeterminate. Practices, moreover, are intrinsically spatial-temporal. This is because their constituent activities take place in or over time and at particular locations or along particular lines in space. Activities take time, that is, occur over a duration of it. The myriad of activities that compose the practice of texting, for instance,

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occupy varying short amounts of time as they occur over the course of the ­t wenty-four hour day. I am not sure whether any action performances occur at an instant. The reason, moreover, that activities take place at particular locations or along particular lines in space is that activities involve the performance of bodily actions, which are necessarily localized where bodies are located: at particular locations in or along particular paths through space (bodies themselves define such paths). Texting, for instance, takes place at all the locations where a person types or reads text messages on her phone: these are the locations occupied by her body and its moving hands, fingers, and head as she performs the bodily actions that compose the typing or reading of texts. I will return to the topic of the spatial location of activities when exploring materiality in chapter three. As noted, practices are not just sets of activities. They are sets of organized activities. According to Bourdieu, practices, that is, practices in a particular social space, are organized by the distributions of capital that define positions and objective relations between positions in that space; by the common ends (stakes) people pursue there; and by group habituses, which are what the habituses of people who occupy a particular position in that space owe to the same or similar conditions they have experienced (Bourdieu 1990b: 60). Shove, Pantzar, and Watson, meanwhile, hold that practices are organized by blocks of meanings, competences, and materials. On my account, finally, practices are organized by pools of understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities. The relevant sorts of understandings are two. The first comprises practical understandings, which are understandings how to carry out particular intentional actions in particular circumstances through performances of bodily actions. Examples are understanding waving as a way to greet a friend across the street or understanding tapping on a screen in certain places in a certain sequence as a way of sending greetings to someone on another continent. Such understandings also inform people’s perceptions of what other people are doing. The second sort of understanding embraces general understandings, which are ethoses or general senses of things, for instance, of Shaker work as sanctification of the earthly sphere of existence (Schatzki 2002), of the authenticity of places and products (Welch and Warde 2017), of the venerableness of Kentucky bourbon, and of a particular virtual community as an electronic realization of transformative community. General understandings such as these imbue particular practices in the sense of being expressed in many of their constituent activities. Such understandings can also suffuse the different practices and bundles that compose given constellations. Rules are formulated directives, instructions, or remonstrations. They are uttered by people—not just those in positions of authority—and formulated in texts, including children’s books, government documents, rulebooks, and signs. Unformulated rules will not be treated as rules in the following despite the diverse philosophical and social theoretical analyses that construe them as such (for reasons why, see Schatzki 1997). Rules qua formulations are an important determinant of action in Bourdieu’s theory of practice (see Bourdieu 1990b: chapt. 4). They, together with habitus, determine the spontaneous behaviors through

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which people cope with most contingencies in life. According to Bourdieu, rational thought comes into play only when rules and the automatic operations of habitus are inadequate to situations and thinking must intervene (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 131) Human action, furthermore, is almost always teleological, that is, performed for the sake of some way of being or state of affairs. This is true of actions that are ritualistic or ceremonial in character as well as most actions that are determined by emotion (see Schatzki 2010: chapt. 3). Often, moreover, an action that a person performs for the sake of something is part of some complex of actions—a task or project—that she pursues for the sake of that end. Someone, for instance, might text or call a friend as part of the task of calming him down, which she pursues for the sake of maintaining the cohesiveness of their circle of friends. In texting or calling, she is also seeking to calm him and to maintain the circle—and if she succeeds, then in texting she was also calming him down and maintaining the circle. A salesperson, furthermore, might sweet-talk a liquor wholesaler as part of the task of winning a contract, which she pursues toward the end of beating her yearly sales minimum. In sweet-talking him, she is also seeking to win the contract and to beat her minimum. The teleoaffective structure of a practice embraces all those end-project-action combinations that are either prescribed or acceptable in the practice. Only certain ends, for instance, can be acceptably pursued in the communication practices that texting is part of; embarrassing friends, for instance, does not number among them. Ditto for the sales practices that the salesperson’s sweet-talking is part of. What people can do acceptably or as prescribed for the sake of particular prescribed or acceptable ends is also delimited. In all practices, moreover, the lines between acceptable and unacceptable and between prescribed and not prescribed are to some extent indefinite and also subject to disputation among participants in the practice. Emotions, too, can be normativized. The expression of certain emotions can be prescribed or acceptable in practices. An example is expressing delight over the successful audition of an Instagram buddy. The emotional dimension of the teleoaffective structure of most practices is considerably thinner than its teleological counterpart. An activity, that is, the performing of an action, is an event: in it, an action takes place. A practice, consequently, embraces an array of such events. Because these activity-events can overlap or be successive, a practice transpires at an array of possibly overlapping moments and periods of time. The actions that compose a practice are also performed by multiple individuals. Philosophers once debated whether it is possible for a single person to carry on a practice, but the practices conceptualized in theories of social practice are invariably carried on by many people. In fact, an indefinite number of people can in principle carry out a given practice even when being a participant is strictly regulated, e.g., as in monastic, military, legal, or educational practices. Finally, for different activities to be part of a given practice is for them to express elements of that practice’s organization: these activities realize common practical and general understandings, uphold certain rules, or instantiate the practice’s normativized teleoaffective structure.

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Understandings, rules, and teleoaffective structure also hang together and can refer to one another, thereby forming arrays other than by being expressed in people’s behavior. Particular general understandings, for instance, might hang together with particular ends, and rules might refer to the contents of general understandings and ends. These connections come out when people reflect on, formulate, and argue about the understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities that do or should govern their lives. The doings and sayings that compose practices are events. This is not true of what organizes practices. The realization or observance of organizing elements are features of activities and, thus, of particular events. But organizations as such, and their elements qua organizing elements, are not events. For instance, the rule, Quiet Please, in a talk-free compartment of a train is not an event, though observing the rule is a feature of the activity-event of leaving off talking whenever a passenger does not talk there because of the rule. Nor is the organization of distillation practices a feature of any one, any subset of, or even all the actions whose performances compose these practices. The complex of understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities that organizes these practices does not happen. Rather, it exists. Practice organizations, consequently, are not processes: their components are not events, developments, or advances, let alone continuously happening ones. What organizes practices instead form structures. These are not, however, structures of the sort conceptualized in traditional French structuralist anthropology and social theory, namely, abstract systems of elements and relations that lie outside time and space and govern action and social phenomena without working through people’s minds and cognitive capacities. This conception of structure dates to Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1959) idea of la langue as an abstract, closed, and autonomous system of elements (defined internally through differences) that governs spatial-temporal events of speaking and writing (la parole). The idea of abstract structures that govern spatial-temporal events subsequently spread in the social disciplines via Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (1966) conception of the underlying synchronic structure of communication systems, Louis Althusser’s (1969) notion of the mode of production, Jean Piaget’s (1970) theory of the genetic stages of knowledge, and Michel Foucault’s (1970) account of epistemes. One of the great weaknesses of this general conception of structure has been the difficulty of explaining how abstract structures actually govern activity. Of the just mentioned theorists, Lévi-Strauss offered perhaps the most ingenious solution, postulating that the underlying structures of communication systems are homologous with one another and rooted in the logical properties of brain operations. Since his lifetime, however, the rapid development of neuroscientific understandings of brain organization and operations have undermined this stunning conjecture. Nor are practice organizations structures of the sort invoked in certain forms of neo-structuralist thought, namely, abstract structures that govern activity and practices by working through people’s mental and cognitive conditions. Anthony

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Giddens (1979), for example, holds that the structures of practices, which he analyses as sets of rules and resources, lie outside space-time. These structures, however, are also contained in practical consciousness: in memory traces and in the recursive mobilization of memory. This claim exemplifies the idea that what organizes practices is embedded in mental/cognitive conditions. According to his account, moreover, the practical consciousness in which the organization of practices is embedded is responsible for all activities of a routine nature. Other theorists of practice have likewise promulgated conceptions of a practical understanding that is responsible for most human activity, for example, habitus in Bourdieu and skills in Hubert Dreyfus. Bourdieu also toyed with the ­Giddens-like idea that structures of social life are embedded in practical understanding qua habitus. In his earlier theoretical work, he claimed that the structure of habitus is homologous with the structures of social spaces and the layouts of settings. This earlier work also argued that habitus is governed by elements and principles that can be articulated in a practical logic (1976, 1990b). At some point, however, Bourdieu seems to have abandoned, or at least de-emphasized, the idea of practical logic (it mostly disappears from his work), and the thesis that habitus is structured homologously with objective conditions vanishes along, or at least coincident, with the de-emphasis of this logic. Indeed, in Bourdieu’s later work habitus evolves into batteries of dispositions that are merely correlated with position in social space instead of structured homologously with such spaces. My account does not follow Giddens (or early Bourdieu) in embedding what organizes practices in practical understanding. Practical understanding is simply knowing how to bodily carry out intentional actions in particular circumstances (i.e., through particular bodily actions). The remainder of what organizes ­practices—rules, general understandings, teleoaffective structure—is not contained there. These items are, instead, matters that people grasp, are aware of, or are familiar with. People know of and are familiar with the rules cited in their practices, the general understandings that imbue proceedings, and the ends, projects, actions, and emotions that are acceptable or prescribed there. If, moreover, they are unsure of these matters, they can ask and discuss as well as dispute with others about what does or should organize their practices. As I conceive of the matter, what organizes practices does not form abstract structures of the traditional French structuralist or more recent neo-structuralist sorts. I just noted, moreover, that practice organizations make a difference to human activity by virtue of participants grasping or knowing them. In this way, the organizations of practices bear some resemblance to the sorts of structures postulated in cognitive linguistics, which embraces rules and principles that govern action by being embedded in cognition. But there are two significant differences. First, the claim that practice organization is embedded in cognition utilizes a very thin conception of cognition as familiarity and knowledge. Second, no participant in a given practice grasps the entirety of that practice’s organization. One reason for this is that what organizes practices evolves. Another reason lies in the indefiniteness of some of what qualifies and the susceptibility of this

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to determination and alteration through disputation. A third reason is that any given participant grasps only certain components of a practice’s organization, and different participants grasp different subsets of it. In these ways, practice organizations are not like the structures postulated in cognitive linguistics. At the same time, the fact that practice organizations are temporal phenomena in the sense that they change over time does not entail that they are structures of a familiar empiricist sort diametrically opposite to structuralist conceptions. According to this empiricist conception, structures are patterns in actual actions and practices, in the present case, patterns formed by actions expressing or upholding particular understandings, rules, or elements of teleology or emotion. This conception of structure is popular in research circles that reduce what is to what is actual, that is, to what is encounterable or measurable. Practice organizations cannot form patterns because it is possible for rules and teleological elements such as prescribed or acceptable ends and tasks never to be upheld or expressed (this is less likely to be true of emotions). An organizing element that is never expressed is not part of any actual pattern. Another reason practice organizations cannot be patterns is that any component of practice organization, including understandings and emotions, can be expressed or upheld irregularly. Irregular occurrences cannot be part of patterns since patterns are regularities or generalizable configurations: singularities, erraticness, and shifting frequencies or rhythms do not fit. It is important to realize that the organization of a practice does not govern activity in the sense of determining it. Practical understanding, for instance, does not determine activity; rather, it informs it. Suppose, for example, that someone out walking sees a friend on the other side of the street. He unreflectively raises his hand and moves it back and forth. This spontaneous act of greeting is informed by his knowing how to greet his friend in this situation through performances of bodily actions. He could also have nodded his head, smiled, or called out, “Hello” (etc.). Rules and teleoaffective structures, meanwhile, govern activity by virtue of their normative character, the fact that they specify how one ought to act or how it is acceptable to do so. Normativized items do not govern activity by determining it, that is, by causing people to do what is normatively enjoined or permitted. Indeed, nothing forces or guarantees that people will do what is acceptable or prescribed. Normativized items instead govern activity by circumscribing it (see Schatzki 2010: chapt. 4), and they accomplish this by laying down what is or is not enjoined or acceptable. Another reason practice organizations circumscribe activity instead of determining it is that they almost always embrace multiple acceptable or enjoined ends, tasks, emotions, leaving open which are pursued by participants. And, of course, it is always possible that someone will act contrary to what is normatively acceptable and prescribed. In short, rules and teleoaffective structure are dimensions of the context of activity that bear normatively on what people do. Of course, normativized items can bear on human activity, and practice organizations can thereby circumscribe activity, only because people are disposed to act normatively, that is, only because they tend to uphold normativity. Laying

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down what is prescribed or acceptable circumscribes activity, and in this way governs it, only if people are disposed to act normatively. People are so disposed, moreover, because they are brought up to uphold normativity. And it is plausible to conjecture that people bring up their children to uphold normatively, and that this complex formed of people being disposed to act normatively and bringing up their children to follow suit, arose through biological evolution. However that might be, it is the normative character of practice organization, together with people’s disposition to uphold normativity, that largely explains why people tend to observe what organizes practices. Note that in upholding the organizations of practices people thereby perpetuate practices. Normativity is central to the persistence of practices (and bundles). Finally, it is important to recognize that participants in a practice do not carry it out in the same way. Warde (2005), for instance, describes what he calls the “internal differentiation” of a practice: the different levels of commitment to and involvement that different practitioners exhibit, as well as gender differences in how it is enacted. What’s more, Gloria Dall’Alba (Dall’Alba 2009, Dall’Alba and Sandberg 2010) observes that there are different ways of carrying on those professional practices that involve multiple roles and positions (such as doctor and nurse in medical practices or lawyer and paralegal in legal ones). These different ways of carrying on professional practices are bound up with different ways of occupying the roles and positions concerned (i.e., being a doctor, nurse, lawyer, or paralegal). Similarly, the understandings, rules, and teleoaffective structures that organize a practice can be apportioned among the roles or positions found in it. The rules, for instance, that govern the actions of physicians might differ from those that govern the activities of nurses. In short, practices accommodate variation among their participants and in how these individuals carry them on (for discussion of what is responsible for participants taking up particular possibilities, see Schatzki 2017b). In sum, practice organizations are mutable temporal structures. They largely govern human activity by forming sanctioned public normative contexts in which people proceed. A social practice is thus an open spatial-temporal array of doings and sayings that is governed by a largely normative array of understandings, rules, teleologies, and emotions. It is also a complex that accommodates significant differences among its practitioners.

Arrangements I wrote above that the practice plenum is the total nexus of practices and material arrangements. Material arrangements are just that—arrangements of material entities. Chapter three explores materiality and thus the nature of material arrangements. For now, the material entities that form arrangements can be understood to be of four types: humans, artifacts, organisms, and phenomena of nature. Several notes about this typology. First, the categories are not mutually exclusive; in particular, humans are organisms, and most organisms are things of

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nature. Second, I do not claim that it is always unambiguous to which category a given entity belongs. Two familiar examples are viruses and polluted estuaries. Finally, this typology is not meant to be an immutable or the only sensible, or even best possible, typology of the entities that make up the arrangements through which social life, that is, human coexistence, transpires. For instance, the typology as formulated does not easily accommodate certain noteworthy entities that in the future might confront human beings, namely, robots or aliens that are as if not more intelligent than us. It is a good question, of course, whether these entities—if they appeared—could be treated by my theory simply as components of material arrangements or instead would have to be granted statuses that humans enjoy, for example, practice participants. Maybe humans would simply have to accept whatever statuses, more “elevated” than our own, such entities claimed. What I do aver about this typology is simply that it is a useful, adequately comprehensive, experientially based sorting of the entities that compose arrangements. The word “arrangements” must be properly understood. To speak of the arrangements amid which practices proceed is to point to the multiplicity of material entities that are involved with human practices and also to the fact that these entities are connected to one another. Entities form arrangements—of connected entities. Arrangements as I think of them bear some resemblance to what Bruno Latour and Michel Callon call réseaux (networks), what Deleuze and Félix Guattari called agencements (assemblages or arrangements), and what Foucault called dispositifs (apparatuses). Each of the latter three concepts denotes a configuration of social things, whereby they “hang together, determine one another via their connections, and as combined both exert effects on other configurations and are transformed through the actions of these other configurations” (Schatzki 2002: xiii). The above thinkers, however, seek to build up social life from and around these configurations. By contrast, I, as an advocate of theories of practice, complement arrangements with practices and treat bundles of practices and arrangements as the centerpiece of a theory of society. Arrangements moor the material dimension of society. Although theorists of practice concur on the centrality of practices to society, they disagree on whether material entities are components of practices or connected to them. My account joins those of Bourdieu and Giddens (and others) in treating practices as conceptually distinct from the material arrangements—the congeries of material entities—amid, with, and through which practices transpire. This position contrasts with those of, for instance, Reckwitz and Shove, Pantzar, and Watson that treat material entities as one type of element that is brought together by performances to form practices. This difference is of no real significance in some contexts. Indeed, my account converges with Shove et al.’s in claiming that because intertwinings of practices and materiality are fundamental to social life, the notion of a bundle is the central unit of conceptuality in social analysis. Still, an advantage of differentiating arrangements from practices while acknowledging their intimacy is that it introduces more degrees

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of freedom into a practice theoretical account of social life and thereby affords the account greater flexibility in capturing the contributions of different entities to social affairs. For instance, differentiating practices and arrangements subtends recognition that different practices can be carried on amid, with, and through one and the same arrangements and that particular practices can be entangled with multiple arrangements. The word “arrangements” does not imply that the material configurations it denotes have been arranged, say, through human action. As a matter of fact, of course, humans, from the beginning of their social existence, have arranged, that is, set up and altered elements of the circumjacent environment through which they proceed. As time proceeded, moreover, they came to arrange ever more of this environment, to the point that today these environments are often entirely arranged by humans, and humans are ineradicably dependent on a myriad of material things (Hodder 2014). At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that some material entities, and not just organisms, are self-moving and can thereby alter arrangements on their own. This is not to mention the many physical-chemical, biological, and informational etc. processes that can befall arrangements and alter them. It is important to emphasize, moreover, that although my use of the concept of arrangements highlights the involvement of material entities in social life, such entities bear relations to one another that do not enter social life and might be independent of it. Indeed, the material entities that compose the arrangements with which practices bundle can be and often are linked independent of social life and human practices. (As explained in chapter three, arrangements also connect with wider complexes of material entities that are not part of social life.) The importance of recognizing the existence of such independent ties has been emphasized lately by so-called “speculative realism.” I am not going to argue for the point here, but in my opinion, contra speculative realism, such ties should be comprehended through the findings and theories of contemporary science. The ties between earthquakes and tectonic movements, the processes through which one galaxy captures another, and the processes through which insects exploit plant hosts, must be understood through contemporary geoscience, astronomy, and biology. Links (between material entities) that depend on human practices likewise should be understood with the help of these sciences, for example, electronic connections between mobile communications devices or the processes through which barreled distilled spirits absorb flavors and colors from barrels. This claim about science holds regardless of whether the entities involved are humans, artifacts, things of nature, or organisms. There presumably also exist material and biological relations among entities (both those that do and those that do not compose arrangements), as well as material and biological processes that befall them, of which we presently have no inkling. The entities that make up the complexes denoted by the word “arrangements” bear a variety of relations to human activity and practices. People use or see or touch and cope with some entities as they proceed amid them. Other

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entities are generally unknown to people but nonetheless directly contribute to what they do, for instance, stomach and intestinal microbes or the internal components of electronic devices. Still further entities and complexes thereof underwrite activity even though they are not close by, for example, satellite communications networks and the material infrastructures that provide electricity and water in support of activities people pursue in their practices (see Shove, Watson, and Spurling 2015). Such networks and infrastructures are arrangements, complexes of interconnected material entities. Certain components of such arrangements (e.g., the pipes and electrical lines that enter buildings) connect to the immediate arrangements amid which people ply many if not most of their practices (at home, at work, at service, and while shopping, recreating, or moving among these). Other elements of such arrangements (e.g., sewer lines and transmission lines in the countryside) are linked to practices—for example, repair practices—primarily when something goes wrong. Once they are constructed, moreover, networks and infrastructures persist independent of people’s actions; they are objective. Their objectivity, however, does not entail that no further human activities or other material processes can destroy, damage, or wear them down. Events and processes also occur through or to infrastructures and other material arrangements. Given this complexity, it is important to categorize the different ways that material entities and the arrangements they form connect to and make a difference to practices (for examples, see Morley 2017 and Shove 2017). The idea of an arrangement implies that arranged entities are related to one another. Relations between arranged entities can take several general forms, including physical contiguity, connective physical structures (natural or human built), movements of material entities (e.g., of electrons or bodies), interactions among organisms or between organisms and artifacts, and being subject to the same material, biological, informational, and other processes. Another way that material entities link and form arrangements is by being set up in or incorporated into the same human practices. Meanwhile, which arrangements exist is not independent of human practices. As noted, for example, humans are responsible for ever increasing numbers of arrangements. More generally, which arrangements exist depends, not just on how people build their environments, but also, in conjunction with features of complexes of material entities, on the practices people carry on and their viewpoints, interests, and ends. For example, where one arrangement in a building ends and another, contiguous one begins depends on the practices that are carried in the building in conjunction with physical features of the arrangement that are salient to or designed by humans, for instance, walls, passageways, and the layouts of meeting rooms. Entities of nature, moreover, form very large complexes of material entities on their own. Where one natural landscape begins and another, contiguous one ends depends on such matters as the visual viewpoints people assume, points and paths of access to the complexes involved, and features of the complexes that are salient to humans, for example edges (cf. Casey 2017). It is typically in relation to particular practices,

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among other things, that large complexes of material entities contain this and that particular arrangement. An additional word should be said about material entities of two particular types: animals and human bodies. Animals—at home, in zoos, on farms, in stockyards, on patrol, on grocery store shelves, and in hunting grounds (etc.)—are components of the material arrangements amid, with, and through which practices are carried on. As such components, they differ from, say, artifacts. They move about on their own and do things, and they lead lives that exhibit some, sometimes little and sometimes more than expected, of the complexity, diversity, and psychology of human lives. As a result, the differences they make to bundles vary across animals and differ from the contributions of artifacts and things of nature; any clairvoyant account of social life is sensitive to these differences, including to the possibility of labeling animals “subalterns” (Arcari 2018) if this is appropriate. Animals also exist and interact a lot with one another independent of bundles. Pets and working, including companion animals are particularly interesting in this context since people welcome them into their personal and social lives in ways that are not extended to other animals. More generally, relations between people and other animals, and among animals themselves (like relations more generally between people and material entities and among material entities), and not relations among people alone, can help make up social phenomena (cf. Latour 1992, Callon 1986, Law 1992, Deleuze and Guattari 1987; cf. Clark 2015). Animals are also obvious candidates to be participants in social relations (e.g., Koski and Bäcklund 2015, Strengers, Nicholls, and Maller 2016; forests, too, e.g., Kohn 2013). But from the point of view of the present account of social life, they are still components of the arrangements amid, with, and through which practices are enacted. I make no apologies for the human-centeredness of this assertion. The present book aims to analyze human social life. According to its analysis, animals, like human bodies, number among the material entities amid, with, and through which human coexistence transpires. I have made clear, moreover, that saying this does not entail that animals are merely material entities. Challenging questions, meanwhile, are posed by the most intelligent nonhuman animals, for example, dolphins and bonobos. Do such creatures carry on practices? If so, are their practices similar to ours? Since the present work is concerned with human society, it will not address such questions. Human bodies are another sort of material entity making up material arrangements. They differ, of course, from other sorts in various ways, not the least of which is the fact that people perform actions and carry on practices through performings of bodily actions. This remains true however much human bodies are prosthetically improved or equipment extends or amplifies what humans can do. A person’s body also occupies a unique position in his or her perceptual field. And the human brain is larger and more complicated than those of other species. In other ways, however, human bodies are like material entities of other sorts: they resemble other organisms in endless ways, they share physical-­chemical properties with many organic and inorganic entities, and they bear many of the sorts

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of relations to other material entities that material entities, generally, maintain among themselves (e.g., spatial location, gravitational attraction). There is no denying that the unique role human bodies play in human life gives theory reason to differentiate them categorically from other material entities. But this uniqueness simply counsels, once again, attending to differences: the uniqueness and singular importance of bodies must be acknowledged while the fact that they are components of material arrangements is accommodated. Again, things get conceptually interesting vis-à-vis dolphins and bonobos. What are we to say about bonobo and dolphin bodies, lives, and societies and about the roles that their lives and bodies may and should play in our bundles? Indeed, what are we to say, ethically speaking, about animal species more broadly in this context? The speculative cases of aliens and super intelligent robots serve up yet further dilemmas. Finally, a word should be added about the idea that arrangements contain material entities. The word “entities” might be heard as roughly equivalent to “objects” or “things,” which designate relatively discrete, tangible beings. This is a mistake. An entity is simply something that is. More important, some of the material beings that help make up social life are not discrete or tangible. Prominent examples are liquids, including water, and gases, including air. The atmosphere, moreover, is material in character but likewise nondiscrete and largely intangible. And what about land? Liquids, gases, land, and atmosphere are all material entities (see chapter three). At least the first three, moreover, can be components of material arrangements. What, however, usually qualifies as such a component is a delimited chunk of water, air, or land. A stream, for instance, can be part of an arrangement amid, with, and through which distilling practices are carried on. It is not the stream as a whole, however, but the section of it alongside the distillery (where, for instance, the intake pipe for the condensation system enters it) that is part of this arrangement. In this way, ponds, bays, disputed waters, beachside currents, and fishing grounds can be parts of bundles even though they are tied—without break—to larger bodies of water that extend beyond the bundles involved. The same considerations also hold, say, of the stale air in a meeting room, a city’s dirty air, or a parcel of land. The fact that a given expanse of water, volume of gas, or parcel of land is not cleanly and definitively demarcated from others does not diminish its eligibility to be part of arrangements. It entails only that the limits of the arrangements involved are indefinite; some of the relations among the components of the arrangements are probably indefinite, too. Similarly, the fact that particular expanses, volumes, and parcels connect with others entails only that what happens in one arrangement (e.g., the distillery arrangement that includes the section of the stream alongside the distillery) can depend on (1) other arrangements or bundles (e.g., ones further upstream), (2) connections between them (e.g., the rushing stream), and (3) the wider expanses of liquid, gas, or land that, at a given moment or period of time, might not be part of any bundle. Atmosphere, meanwhile, has to be treated differently than liquids, gases, and land. This is also true of earth. I touch on these in the next chapter.

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Relations and bundles The plenum of practices does not contain a single practice and a single arrangement. It contains many practices and many arrangements. These practices and arrangements link in diverse, changing combinations, yielding a panoply of bundles that evolves with time. A variety of relations link practices and arrangements into bundles. Practices, generally speaking, use, set up, give meaning to, and are directed toward and inseparable from arrangements and their components, whereas arrangements and their components induce, prefigure, channel, and are essential to practices. Each of these verbs or verb phrases denotes a type of relation between practices and arrangements. Practices and arrangements form bundles by virtue of these relations. Note that multiple practices can bundle with the same arrangements at the same or over time and that a given practice can bundle with multiple arrangements at the same or different times. Most of the just named relations are self-explanatory. Using and setting up are just that: using material entities and constructing as well as altering arrangements of them. The existence of relations of these sorts does not depend on whether, or to what extent, people have intentions or plans in using entities and setting them up: what counts is that their actions utilize entities or effect changes in arrangements of them. By “are directed toward”, moreover, I mean that people are directed toward entities in their activities and, thus, in their enactment of practices. A person who looks at something, for instance, is directed toward it, just as she is when looking it over, playing with it, turning away from it, listening to it, feeling it, fleeing it, talking to it, thinking about it, or imagining it. People are likewise directed toward entities and states of affairs through their mental conditions and cognitive states, for instance, when hearing, fearing, hoping for, desiring, longing after, or yearning for something or believing, hoping, expecting, or knowing that something is the case. Each instance of directedness toward obtains between a person and an entity, event, or state of affairs and is effected through an activity, a cognitive state, or an ongoing emotion, state of consciousness, or conative condition. The entity, event, or state of affairs can be real or imaginary and differ from what someone is directed toward it as. In the present context, the objects of such relations are bodies, organisms, artifacts, things of nature, arrangements of such entities, or states of such entities or arrangements. The giving meaning relation is more diffuse. Lying behind it is the idea, widely propagated during the 20th century, that meaning derives from human existence. One version of this idea is that the meanings of things in the world, like the meaning of the world in toto, derives from human practices and people’s aims, thoughts, hopes, fears, and the like. This idea applies to the meanings that particular entities bear. This here object, for instance, is a cell phone—as opposed, say, to a paperweight or a shiny dense rectangular object—only in relation to, or in the context of, such human practices as those of industrial production, communication, mobility, and the internet. Similarly, whales are magnificent

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sea creatures—as opposed, say, to marine mammals—only in the context of such human practices and products as whale watching, PR, literature, and poetry. Of course, unlike the cell phone, which as an artifact exists only because of practices, whales do not owe their existence to particular human practices. Still, their meaning as magnificent creatures does so. It is a property whales come to enjoy in relation to human practices. Of course, being marine mammals is likewise something these here entities are in relation to human practices, namely, those of biology. The difference is that the practices of biology, unlike those of industrial production vis-à-vis cell phones, do not bring these mammals into existence. Note that the relationality of meaning does not imply that these here entities are not in fact magnificent creatures and marine mammals. Finally, some practices cannot exist independent of particular material entities. Up at least to the present point in history, for instance, this relation holds between practices generally and human bodies. Some practices, moreover, cannot exist without certain of the material entities used in them. Practices of bourbon production, for example, cannot exist independent of stills, corn, and barrels, just as mobile communication practices cannot exist independent of computers, tablets, and cell phones. “Cannot” does not mean logically impossible. Rather, it means infeasible in present circumstances or presently inconceivable. Whether given practices cannot exist independent of particular entities—including human ­bodies—is a geohistorical matter tied to the bundles that exist in particular regions and eras; it is not an absolute state of affairs. I might add that there is a danger of overemphasizing relations of inseparability. It often seems that a given activity can be carried out, or a given result achieved through activity, only with the assistance of particular entities. In most cases, however, the activity (e.g., transporting bourbon) can in fact be carried out with the assistance of objects and setups other than the ones standardly used in the geohistorical region in which it is performed. Similarly, in most cases the same results (e.g., selling bourbon at a distant market, a satisfied customer) can be achieved through activities other than those through which it is standardly achieved then and there. Standardization, dependability, and regularity often obscure alternatives but never obliterate them. Correlatively, material entities and the arrangements they form induce, channel, prefigure, and are essential to practices. The last of these relations is the reverse of the inseparability-from relation just discussed. Human bodies, for instance, are essential to practices because practices are carried out through bodily actions. The very important relation of inducing is the same relation as leading to. Objects, arrangements, and the events as well as processes that befall them can lead people to perform certain actions and to carry on certain practices. An approaching tsunami, for instance, might lead people to text friends and relatives, to collect their children from school, to seek higher ground, and the like. The approaching tsunami induces them to take these actions: it is that in response to which they perform them. Similarly, the arrival of a shared image (an event that happens to a server and then to electronic devices) can induce someone

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to groan, cheer, respond, turn to tell a friend etc., just as a pet’s antics can lead someone to smile, get upset, take a quick picture, call out to family members, and the like. Note that a material phenomenon can induce activity only if the actor(s) involved encounters it and, thus, in some sense is aware of it or knows or believes something about it. The fact that something can induce a person to act only if the person is directed toward it does not preclude material entities from causing actions outside people’s ken. When this happens, however, the entities do not induce actions but instead cause them in some other way. If, for example, an ingested substance (e.g., a Twinkie) brings about physiological changes that result in someone performing particular actions (e.g., murdering the mayor), the ingested substance does not induce the actions. Material entities and arrangements also channel activities and practices. What I mean is that such phenomena, being physical, obstruct movement and, thus, the performance of certain actions. People generally try to avoid collisions with physical things and take paths through physical space that go around them. Arrangements, finally, prefigure activities and practices. “Prefiguration” denotes the bearing of the present on the future. The usual conception of this bearing is that the present makes certain future actions or courses of action possible and others impossible, where possible and impossible are not logically possible and impossible but either physically possible and impossible or feasible and infeasible. This way of thinking engenders the conceptual duo of enablement and constraint, which has been familiar fare in accounts of social life over the past forty years and longer. It seems to me (see Schatzki 2002: chapt. 4) that this duo provides an overly thin analysis of the bearing of the present on the future. A richer analysis complements enablement and constraint with the idea that the present qualifies future possible actions and courses of action on a wide variety of registers such as easier and harder, longer and shorter, more and less expensive, more or less time consuming, of greater or lesser nobility, normatively acceptable or unacceptable, flashier or more reserved, and so on. No theoretical limit exists to how many registers might be involved in prefiguration, either in general or on specific occasions. On any specific occasion, moreover, which registers are involved depends on features of the actors concerned such as their ends, emotions, skills, and situations. The development of a new form of bourbon (such as smallbatch bourbons, which are brands assembled from smaller numbers of barrels than normal) prefigures actions for a distiller who prioritizes tradition differently than it does for a distiller who is determined to save his operation from bankruptcy. The present never bears on the future simply through the delimitation of possibility but always more richly and specifically by qualifying possible paths of action on certain registers made pertinent by people’s skills, situations, ends, and emotions. Like other aspects of the world, material entities and arrangements thereof prefigure activity. In obvious ways, such entities or arrangements as a wall, the presence or absence of a still, floods, excess stocks of particular grains, the layout of company headquarters, extreme heat or cold, veins in a block of marble,

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transportation, communication, and computer networks, new electronic devices and software programs, the chemical properties of particular materials, squadrons of whales passing down the coast, the eating habits of pets, the activities of viruses and of stomach microbes, acid ingestion, and a broken leg—these phenomena qualify multiply ranges of (possible) actions for people who encounter, proceed amid, take account of, and suffer them, in ways that reflect these people’s ends, situations, and emotions etc. Material entities and arrangements endlessly qualify possible actions and, thus, the possible enactment of particular practices. They thereby bear on which practices people execute. I do not claim that the nine relations just outlined exhaust those between practices and arrangements (more will be discussed in chapter three). They are simply types of relation that bear significance for the character and course of social life, above all, for the composition and evolution of simpler practice-arrangement bundles. These nine types, moreover, can be collected under four broader headings: causality (setting up, inducing, and channeling), constitution (inseparability from and essentiality to), action and mind (use, bestowing meaning, directedness toward), and prefiguration. Note that the category of causality umbrellas disparate phenomena: activity intervening into the world, the world inducing particular actions, and solid objects blocking certain paths and movements. Practices are bundled with arrangements through these relations: human activity is intimately entwined with material entities. The richness of this entwinement underlies the claim that bundles, not practices, are the central unit of conceptuality in the analysis of social life, thus the central concept in social ontology. It is also why, as mentioned, theorists such as Reckwitz and Shove build materials into practices.

Relations and constellations The practice plenum contains a myriad of bundles. These bundles are not independent of one another. Rather, they connect. In connecting, they form larger constellations, which are simply more complex bundles of practices and arrangements. It is due to these connections that bundles, and the constellations they form, link into a single overall nexus of practices and arrangements—the practice plenum. Any social phenomenon of any complexity consists in, or consists in features of, some constellation of practices and arrangements. This is true of governments, sports leagues, universities, academic departments, social movements, social conflicts, scientific, technological, or political revolutions, racial prejudice, economic enterprises, economic competition, internet scams, and digitally mediated associations. The number of practices and arrangements that compose a bundle or constellation can range from few (e.g., working at the office) to many (e.g., an economic system). Constellations that embrace more constituent practices and arrangement are usually, though not always, larger—that is, more spatially far-flung—than constellations that embrace fewer (see chapter seven).

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Conversations among employees around a still, for example, are smaller than the distillery where they occur, which itself is smaller than the distilling industry. By contrast, although the industry is larger than the local community where the distillery is located, the community likely embraces a greater range and even number of practices and arrangements. In this sense, it is more complex than the industry. How do bundles connect into constellations? One prominent way of thinking holds that bundles form constellations through relations of dependence and codependence (e.g., Shove et al, 2012, Kemmis et al. 2014). Dependence and codependence certainly are relations that join bundles (or practices). As I see things, however, they result from certain facts about other relations between bundles, for example, chains of action (see below). These other relations are what actually link bundles into constellations. To speak of dependence and codependence, as a result, is to point toward certain facts about relations of these other kinds. One bundle depends on a second when the world is such that the first can obtain something it needs only from the second (a weaker sense of dependence requires only that, as a matter of fact, the first bundle acquires the needed item from the second). Gaming practices, for instance, require gaming software and appropriate hardware. These are obtained from stores, online distributors, and friends. Gaming practices, consequently, depend on the practices of stores, online distributors, and friends (more precisely, they depend on these practices or others, for example, those of stealing or piracy). But it is by virtue of chains of action that link the practices of stores, distributors, and friends to gamers and to gaming practices that the requisite software and hardware can and actually do make their way to the latter. Hence, the dependence of gaming practices on these other practices lies in the fact that the sole possible, or better, feasible chains of action through which these items can be obtained link gaming practices to these others. The dependence of gaming practices on these other practices amounts to this situation. So the contribution that dependence makes to bundles forming constellations lies in the existence of this situation. Bundles relate, and thereby form constellations, principally through relations of five basic sorts: (1) common and orchestrated teleologies (ends, projects, actions), emotions, rules, and general understandings, (2) intentional relations, (3) chains of action, (4) material connections among arrangements, and (5) prefiguration. Bundles overlap through common teleologies, rules, emotions, and general understandings. The different bundles that compose a sports franchise, for instance, might share the end of a successful season, the ethos that winning is everything, and an emotional high after a big victory. Teleologies, rules, emotions, and understandings are orchestrated, moreover, when different bundles nonindependently pursue different ends, exhibit different emotions, uphold different rules, or are imbued by different understandings. An example is the sense that corporations are crooks imbuing the bundles of a municipal committee hearing on high cable rates nonindependently of the ethos of profits at any cost

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imbuing the bundles of the local telecommunications company. By “intentional relations,” furthermore, I mean participants in one bundle being directed toward other bundles and constellations (or their components) in doings, sayings, and mental, emotional, and cognitive conditions, for example, in discussing, planning, exchanging, threatening, thinking, desiring, and believing. As indicated above, furthermore, chains of action form a conduit through which goings-on in one bundle link with those in others. A chain of actions is a sequence of actions, each member of which responds to the previous member or to a change brought about by the previous member in the world. Such chains form the subject matter of chapter four. An important effect of such chains and of nexuses of them is the threading of such items as people, goods, ends, beliefs, emotions, microbes, and information through bundles and constellations. Circulations of such entities can be crucial to the workings of social affairs. For instance, when beliefs, desires, and emotions flow among people (cf. Tarde 2007, Collins 1981), people’s ends alter, what they react to—and thus which chains they extend—shifts, they observe different rules, and teleoaffective structures evolve. Most crucial, such flows help effect, not just changed bundles, but shifts in which bundles people carry on (what Shove and Pantzar (2007) call “recruitment”). It might be thought, consequently, that circulation, or threading through, should be identified as a sixth sort of relation between bundles. In actuality, however, circulations form a hybrid sort of relation built from chains of action and material connections. The communications, exchanges, postings, and other interactions and events through which desires, beliefs, and emotions flow among people and practices are types of or components of materially mediated chains of action. Material connections, the fourth type of relation among bundles, take many forms, including infrastructures, continuous physical structures (natural or artifactual, including built spans), telecommunication and transportation systems, passageways and points of access and egress, and physical processes such as the movement of electrons and bodies. The category of material relations also includes spatial relations such as inside and outside, above and below, overlapping and separate, larger and smaller, and so on. As just suggested, material connections are important ingredients in chains of action. A different sort of material relation is the sharing of material entities. Digital devices such as computers and mobile phones are familiar entities that link multiple bundles by being present in each of them. Less flashy entities such as rocks, automated switches, and landline phones can achieve this as well, as when a rock used as an altar in a pagan ceremony is later the focus of attention in a criminal investigation. So, too, can animals, especially pets. The fifth basic relation between bundles is prefiguration. Bundles do not prefigure other bundles by qualifying the latter’s possible courses of action. For the idea that bundles and constellations perform actions or follow courses of action is problematic. Bundles can, however, prefigure other bundles by way of prefiguring possible courses of action in the latter. For instance, legislative deliberations about new government laws regulating bourbon prefigure people’s courses

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of action in the distillation and public relations practices of distilleries. In this way, the legislative bundle prefigures the temporal development of the distillery bundle. Note, however, that because bundles embrace the activities of multiple people, the prefiguration effects of bundles quickly become complex, and it can be difficult to state them concisely in words. The relation of essentialness seems to hold among bundles. Surveillance bundles, for instance, cannot exist without bundles to keep track of; East German border guards sensed this in 1989 when people streamed across the border and they abandoned their posts. The essentialness of one bundle to another, however, amounts to the dependence of the second bundle on the first. Bourbon production bundles, like software development ones, are essential to, respectively, bourbon distribution bundles and mobile chat room ones in the sense the latter cannot exist without them. This is just another way of saying, however, that the latter depend on them. As discussed, moreover, bundles and constellations come to depend and codepend on each other according to the feasibility between them of relations of more concrete sorts. Bundles, accordingly, can be essential to other bundles, but essentialness is not an additional sort of basic relation among bundles. A moment’s thought reveals that the number of relations between practices and arrangements or among bundles is immense. Particular material arrangements, for example, prefigure practices connected with them in countless ways, while chains of action and material connections zigzag in all directions and link all manner of bundles. Bundles are regions of particularly dense relations among particular practices and arrangements. For instance, the bundle as part of which a scientist conducts an experiment is a particular concentration of relations between research practices and particular settings, namely, her lab and office. These practices and settings link with other practices (e.g., of child care, government regulation, and suppliers) and other settings (e.g., kitchens, government buildings, and warehouses). But these connections are less dense. Similarly, the constellation that is an academic department or a company is marked by a particularly dense relatedness among the bundles that compose it. Again, these bundles link up with the bundles composing, respectively, other departments, dean’s offices, and university research offices or other companies and government inspection or regulation agencies. But the relations composing these latter states of relatedness are thinner—fewer and less frequent—that those composing the department or company. At the same time, they are denser than those between the department or company and, say, local sports stores and leagues, and this greater density marks the existence of a college/university or industry. All social phenomena consist in constellations, or aspects of constellations, of practices and arrangements. They differ in the practices, arrangements, and components thereof involved and in the density, continuity, and spatial-temporal spread of relations among these. It follows that all social phenomena—large or small, complex or simple, local or global, micro or macro, ancient or contemporary, economic or political, cultural or social (sic)—are composed of the same basic ingredients.

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Relations between individuals I just discussed various relations that exist in the practice plenum and help constitute social phenomena. These relations are not of sorts generally recognized in social analysis. They are, instead, relations that reflect an ontology whose central concept is that of bundles. Now, an account of social life will seem more plausible to those who do not advocate it if it can give insightful analyses of entities whose existence is acknowledged by theories of social life generally. Consequently, to conclude the present analysis of the practice plenum, I want to discuss how this analysis conceptualizes relations of one more or less universally acknowledged sort. The most widely recognized sort of relation in social thought is of a connection between or among individual people (the second most common conception is probably that of relations between positions that individuals can occupy, e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1966, Foucault 1976, Bhaskar 1979, Laclau and Mouffe 1985, Sayer 1992, Bourdieu 1968, 1998b). The wide recognition that relations of this general sort enjoy reflects the prominence of individuals in theories of social life. Essentially all individualists discuss such relations in their analyses of sociality, though disagreement reigns about whether connections between individual people are anything more than compounded nonrelational properties of the individuals involved. Almost all nonindividualists, too, acknowledge individuals and analyze relations between them. Indeed, it is arguably incumbent on any account of social life to do so. Often, theories of relations between and among individuals highlight interactions and hold that relations between individuals are instituted or brought about through face-to-face and other interactions. Interactionally secured relations exist between lovers, among family members, among colleagues, between salespersons in one part of the world and customers in another, between people who run into each other walking their dogs, between the designer of a computer interface and the people who build the interface, among the members of an online chat group, between a populist politician and the citizens loyal to him, and so on. The idea that relations between people are largely instituted or mediated by interactions fuels the idea that these relations are processes, which unfold through interactions between people over time (see Crossley 2013). Relations processually understood thus are series of interactions, thus series of event series. They are processes in the sense advocated by Abbott (see chapter one). Norbert Elias defended a good example of such a conception of relations between individuals. Elias (e.g., 1978) conceptualized states of society as figurations, which are arrays of interdependent people. The relations of interdependence that link members of a figuration are manifested in and effected through interactions among them. Elias described these figurations as processes (ibid.: 131), meaning that dependences among people evolve over time according to how they act and act toward one another. The idea that relations between individuals are or embrace processes is a good one (see also Powell 2013), though the role that interaction series play in such processes cannot be addressed here. An especially provocative interpretation

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of relations between individuals as processes construes them as transactions. A transaction is a relation between two entities that precedes them and is responsible for their emergence (see Bentley and Dewey 1949). The idea descends from John Dewey’s (1896) Hegelian insight that analyses of human behavior cannot atomistically focus on stimuli and reactions alone but must also attend to the preceding, enveloping context (the behavioral reflex-arc) in which stimuli and reactions are identifiable as specific entities. Some social theorists sensitive to the pragmatist legacy have explicitly treated relations among people as transactions; these theorists also tend to understand transactions processually. They take as their epigram Erving Goffman’s (1967: 3) quip, “Not, then, men and their moments. Rather, moments and their men.” In their hands, this motto becomes “Not, then, people and their interactions. Rather, transactions and their people.” One prominent such theorist is Mustafa Emirbayer (1997). Emirbayer claims that relations between individuals are transactions understood as ongoing processes that precede individuals, through which individuals emerge as who they are. The relation, for instance, between a child and a parent is a process that unfolds over time, out of which the child and the parent jointly become the people they are. Emirbayer analyzes the contrast between transactional and nontransactional relations as that between relations conceived of as dynamic, i.e., as unfolding processes, and relations conceived of as “static ties between inert substances,” that is, as static ties between “preconstituted, self-subsistent actors” (1997: 286, 295). He is wrong, however, to suggest that nontransactional relations are static and their relata inert and preconstituted. For many conceptions of relations that deny that relations precede their relata and are responsible for what the relata are nonetheless affirm that relations and what they relate evolve, thereby acknowledging the fundamentalness of dynamism or process. What is more, even alleged transactional relations between individuals are not, strictly, transactions. Rather, they have transactional and nontransactional aspects, which repeatedly combine, re-emerge, and recombine as the process unfolds over time: what a person becomes in and through a given phase of the process depends on what she was as that phase begins, where what she was at that moment was the complex resultant of earlier phases of both this and other relations cum processes. It is true that the relation between, say, a child and a parent is a process that unfolds over time, and that what each eventually becomes through the process depends on the unfolding of the process as a whole (what each becomes also depends on relations with others). Yet, what each is at various moments of the process always precedes what each subsequently becomes. People, in other words, contribute to their relations to others as much as these relations determine them. As Lave and Wenger (1991:  53) write, “The person is defined by as well as defines … ­relations.” The same argument, incidentally, applies to the opposition Abbott (2007: 12) constructs between the proposition that “a personality exists and has as properties certain proclivities” and the proposition that “the available environment … governs the way the personality is constituted.” Both propositions are

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true. Thus, although some relations between specific people are processes, they are misleadingly described as transactions. I affirm the processual nature of most relations between specific people. Such relations consist in confluences and ties between the life trajectories (see chapter three) of people within particular bundles and constellations. The relationship between a mother and her daughter, for instance, consists of continual interactions, chains of action, and intentional directednesses and orientations (e.g., desires, thoughts, and emotions) between them, many of which likely involve other people as well. The existence of the relationship consists in the occurrence of these phenomena. These phenomena, moreover, occur as part of particular practices and bundles—at home, in the car, at school, in stores etc.—whose composition, organization, and history bear on what takes place. Many of these mother–daughter relationship-constituting interactions, chains, and intentional directednesses also help constitute other social matters such as power relations and gendering processes that are therewith bound up with the relation between the mother and the daughter. The relation, in short, transpires within and across particular practices and bundles. The positions of mother and child are also named or notionally embedded in the sayings, rules, and teleoaffective structures that compose the practices and bundles involved. Essentially all relations among individuals can, I believe, be analyzed in some manner such as this. Such relations embrace events and (Rescherian or Bergsonian) processes that transpire within practices and bundles, where who and what the individuals are develop. Of course, theories of practice depart from theories that contend that social life is primarily constructed out of relations between and among individuals: the practices or bundles where such relations transpire can’t be reduced to the latter. The present chapter has explored the constitution of the practice plenum. This plenum is the entirety of interconnected bundles. It provides the sites where social life transpires and the materials of which social phenomena are composed. Analyzing it, as a result, sets the stage for coming analyses of social changes: because social changes are by definition changes in social phenomena, they consist in changes in aspects and slices of practice-arrangement bundles. Social changes and their generation will be examined in chapters four and five. First, however, I want to highlight a particular aspect of the practice plenum, and thus of social life, namely, its material dimension. I dedicate a chapter to this topic because social phenomena are surprisingly full of material entities, events, and processes, and social changes are to a surprising extent materially determined.

3 The material dimension of social life

Social thought has had an unsteady relationship to the material world. A ­ lthough, as disciplines, anthropology has long pondered the material grittiness of life, geography underwent a long phase of environmental determinism, and economics and political economy have long taken material resources and the corresponding material basis of society into account, too much social thought turned its attention away from the material world for stretches of the 20th century. This neglect has somewhat reversed itself over the past thirty or so years. But ­a lthough some recent social theory has attended to materiality, it still regularly underestimates the contributions made to social affairs by material entities, the material properties of things, and the processes that happen to entities by virtue of these properties (for parallel laments, see LeCain 2017). It also often ignores the fact that processes of further sorts that contribute to social life (e.g., ­biological, technological, informational, intelligent, mental, and social processes) befall material entities. The fact that these other processes befall material entities makes material processes potentially relevant to them. It also opens these other processes to disruption through malfunction, misfiring, breakdown, and alterations in material ones. Theories of practice are among those that have highlighted material aspects of social life. Bourdieu, for instance, was one of the first contemporary social theorists to emphasize materiality in a nonMarxist sense. He was particularly attentive to the material character of the human body and to the material layouts through which practices-in-particular-social spaces (e.g., fields) proceed. ­Habitus, he repeatedly indicated, is embodied, and the knowledge that it contains corporeal. Although he did not say much about what embodiment and corporeality are, it appears that they have to do with functioning physical structures of a biological body: The world is comprehensible, immediately endowed with meaning, because the body, which, thanks to its senses and brain, has the capacity to

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be present to what is outside itself, in the world … has been protractedly (from the beginning) exposed to its regularities. (Bourdieu 2000: 135; see, e.g., 156–7) Bourdieu also conceptualized a kind of bodily pedagogy, whereby principles and other aspects of social life and social organization are directly inscribed on the body without the mediation of mind and consciousness. And in an early version of his account of the practical logic that describes the operations of habitus, the pairs of oppositions that make up the systems of difference—through which ­action-governing definitions of the situation and of the functions of action in that situation are constructed—go back, Merleau-Ponty-like, to opposed motions of the human body (Bourdieu 1976: 119). Indeed, in that work the body is the “analogical operator of practice.” This same work (ibid.: appendix) analyzes the material layouts of built environments as structured homologously to the habitus. Because of this, Bourdieu interpreted the mere fact of living amid these layouts as an important form of pedagogy, through which habitus is acquired. As mentioned in the previous chapter, moreover, Shove, Pantzar, and W ­ atson (2012) highlight materiality in analyzing practices as blocks of competences, meanings, and materials that are brought together in performances of action. Materiality therewith runs through practices, bundles of copresent practices, and complexes of interdependent ones, helping to establish co-location, dependence, and codependence. The present chapter is organized as follows. Section one explains what I mean by “materiality” and “the material world.” Section two then spells out the material character of the practice plenum and, as a result, of social life and social phenomena. To demonstrate the scope of the material dimension of society, I retrace the path taken in chapter two and say something about the material character of each type of component of the practice plenum. Following this, section three explores an important facet of the occurrence of social life in a material world, namely, that this world is a central component of the ecology in which social phenomena subside and social changes occur. This section also introduces the phenomenon of life trajectories, which form a further component of this ecology. The final section executes multiple tasks. It shows how the materiality of social life informs the sense of horizontality associated with my version of a flat social ontology, promotes such properties as size, shape, and density as candidates to replace the micro-macro distinction in social analysis, and makes patent the profound significance of material space for social life and change.

The material world By “materiality” I mean—rather traditionally (Harman 2016: 3)—the stuff of entities, what fills them out. The kinds of entity I have in mind are diverse, including human bodies, bacteria, rocks, pencils, software programs, computer processors, buildings, air, pools of water, water currents, electrical currents, wind, sunlight,

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and the atmosphere. This list should make clear that the term “material” as I use it is not restricted to tangible objects, though such objects are obviously important ingredients in social life. It is tempting to call the stuff of something its substance, more precisely, what makes it substantial, i.e., a substance, but ­m illennia-old intuitions about substance, together with a rack of diverse contemporary cultural theoretical critiques of the notion, make this inadvisable. Plus, there is a rough workable synonym, namely, composition. The stuff of something is what composes it. The term “composition” encompasses everything that makes up something, including atoms, molecular structure, and the tangible ingredients, or materials (cf. Ingold 2007), that humans incorporate into the entities they make. The composition of a water molecule includes hydrogen, oxygen, and forces of attraction, whereas the composition of a book embraces such materials as ink, glue, and paper in addition to the molecules that make these up. In the modern west, the stuff of things has been generically characterized as matter: everything that composes material entities, like the entities themselves, is ultimately matter. Matter, however, is not a clearly defined concept. The pervasive interpretation—which I accept—is physicalist in character and treats matter as matter-energy. On this interpretation, “materiality” denotes the physical, or better, physical-chemical composition of things and of whatever materials make them up. Physical-chemical composition is what gives things and their materials substance or substantiality. In accordance with this interpretation, a material entity can be defined as any entity with a physical-chemical composition, and the adjective “material” can be used to qualify all properties, events, and processes that pertain to such entities, and whatever materials compose them, on the basis of their physical-chemical composition. This includes structures that underlie so-called “causal powers” as well as processes that are sometimes dubbed “mechanisms,” e.g., RNA replication, digestion, chemical reactions, and cloud formation. The sum of these entities, materials, properties, events, and processes can then be called “the material world.” This naturalistic interpretation of materiality opposes such contentions as that “materiality … can never be separated from either the experience of [material phenomena] or the meaning that we attach to experiences [of these]” (Steinberg and Peters 2015: 256). The facts that matter is matter-energy and that events and processes occur to material entities and what composes them reveal that the material world is dynamic: the entities, materials, properties, events, and processes composing it are susceptible to change and transformation as well as themselves capable of and effective at bringing about change and transformation. The dynamism of matter, materials, and material entities (as material) can be elucidated naturalistically through the findings and theories of the natural sciences. At the same time, explaining changes in human life wrought by the material world often requires attending to considerations studied in the social and human disciplines (including journalism), and comprehending the effectuation of changes in the material world through human activity and practices—like explicating human activity and practices themselves—strongly rests on such considerations. Although

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physics and chemistry uncover the physical-chemical composition of things and illuminate the events and processes that befall such things on the basis of this composition, they cannot explain the fuller range of events and processes that befall material entities. In the past thirty years, the dynamism of matter has also been scrutinized in cultural theory. An example serendipitously encountered the day I wrote the first version of this paragraph is an announcement for a workshop on “New Materialisms and Politics” that took place on September 21–22, 2017 at the University of Aberdeen. This announcement attributes to “new conceptualisations of materiality” a “distinctive understanding of matter as dynamic and self-generative force” (www.abdn.ac.uk/sahp/events/11908/; accessed 8/21/2017). Stereotypical accounts of what science has to say about the dynamism of matter often stress the regularity, lawfulness, and predictability of changes in and transformations of material (physical-chemical) systems. This portrayal of what is sometimes skewered as “dead matter” has spawned opposing accounts of the dynamism of matter that take on animistic tinges, as when Jane Bennett (2005: 445; but compare Bennett 2010: viii) describes materiality as “vital and animated;” cf. “materiality is not a passive collection of stuff that is distinct from active organic life” (Kinsley 2014: 365). Other ways of thinking about the dynamism of matter grounded in cultural theory instead of in science attribute to matter and to assemblages or networks of material things such properties as excess, spontaneity, a virtual dimension, inherent openness, inexhaustible intra-active becoming, a dose of not-yetness, and even anticipation (e.g., Kirby 1997, Grosz 2005, Barad 2007; for discussion, see Anderson and Wylie 2009). Scientific accounts of matter can, however, highlight the irregularity, nonlinearity, and precipitous transformation of material systems, drawing on theories of dynamic systems (chaos, catastrophe, and complexity). The matter science theorizes need not be “dead.” More recently, speculative realism (e.g., Mackay 2007, Harman 2010, 2016) has argued that objects exist, have properties, and interact independent of and in part fundamentally beyond the ken of human action and thought. In the following, however, I hew to a naturalistic understanding based in the sciences. The reason for this is simple: I do not know from where else one can expect to obtain systematic and reliable knowledge of the material dimension of the world. This claim is not challenged by discussions in anthropology, sociology, and philosophy regarding the cogency and legitimacy of “native”—as opposed to scientific—classifications and “theories” about such matters as witchcraft (e.g., Evans-Prichard 1937) and the medicinal use of herbs (e.g., Oloyede 2010). Poststructuralist and performative accounts of science (e.g., Rouse 2002, Barad 2007) likewise do not challenge it; these accounts instead challenge pervasive understandings of science and the world. An important feature of the material world is that some entities and materials composing it are alive, that is, are organisms. It does not matter for present purposes how the term “organism” is defined. Organisms have biological properties and undergo biological events and processes. Organisms are also material entities.

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Some biological properties and processes are not material since they do not arise solely from, though they depend on, the physical-chemical properties of organisms and their environments. The extent to which this claim is true, however, is not clear: biology is a fast developing multidiscipline that is actively sounding the material dimensions of organisms at various “levels,” from cellular processes to entire organisms to populations. Regardless of the extent to which biological properties and processes prove to be material, treating them as characteristics of or as befalling certain material entities qua material spawns notions of living or organic matter (e.g., Vernadsky 1998). Notions of living matter oppose the idea that matter is dead and emphasize that certain material entities, even if not definitely alive (e.g., viruses), are inherently dynamic. Such notions thereby give meaning to the idea of dynamic matter that differs from the physical-chemical interpretation. Yet more demanding versions of dynamic matter are embodied in programmed automated devices, future super intelligent robots, and human beings, who are capable of action, including mental action. Incidentally, theories of organisms, automation, and artificial intelligence sometimes draw on theories of autonomous or self-organizing autopoetic systems. Because these systems are kin to dynamic systems, this practice, in some people’s eyes, opens the prospect of a unified account of the physical-chemical, biological, and intelligent aspects of entities. Many properties and processes beyond material and biological ones can pertain to material entities. I just indicated that processes of automation, intelligence, and action/mind befall certain such entities. The range of processes that pertain to material entities is virtually endless. Indeed, what philosophers dub “materialism” and distinguish from physicalism holds that all processes whatsoever befall material entities (physicalism holds, in addition, that these processes can be explained physical-chemically). The present book concurs that the kinds of interpersonal, technological, industrial, informational, and cultural (etc.) processes that are relevant to social analysis befall arrangements of material entities, even though they themselves are not material. Material phenomena also bear a range of qualities that are tied to features of organisms and to the encounters organisms have with them. Many of these qualities correlate with the behavioral or perceptual (more broadly, detectional) capacities of living entities. Perceiving entities can feel, smell, see, hear, and taste material phenomena. Many, moreover, can use, eat, or construct such phenomena. Humans, in addition, can interpret, judge, and appreciate them. Correlatively, material phenomena can be felt, smelled, seen, heard, tasted, used, manipulated, eaten, constructed, judged, and appreciated. Less passively stated: such phenomena afford the just mentioned actions (cf.  Gibson 1979), though only of course to organisms with the corresponding capacities. Material entities thereby come to bear a broad range of organism- or human-related features and to undergo a broad range of similarly related processes. Indeed, by falling within the perceptual-actional-cognitive ken of humans, material entities acquire exceptionally sophisticated properties: they can signify, bear meanings, be

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poeticized, matter, be emotion-laden, and the like. Sometimes, moreover, it is useful (for humans) to categorize material entities by reference to properties such entities have in relation to human life. A good example is the category of artifact, which inherently refers to human activity. To summarize: in the following I will treat the material world as the realm of physical-chemically composed entities together with the properties, events, and processes that pertain to these entities due to this composition. Just what qualifies as a material property, event, or process depends on the state of scientific knowledge. Material entities can be dead, living, or intelligent; processes of many sorts beyond material ones can befall them; and such entities bear further sorts of property in relation to organisms, in relation to humans, by virtue of being elements of social life, and so on. (These are not mutually exclusive types of processes or sets of features.) Humans might also find these types of properties useful for categorizing material entities, as, for example, enshrined in such categories as organism, artifact, and technology.

The material character of the practice plenum I stated in chapter one that theorists of practice claim that all social phenomena are aspects of, constellations of, or rooted in practices. As indicated in chapter two, this claim, on my account, becomes the thesis that all social phenomena are aspects of, constellations of, or rooted in the overall nexus of practices and material arrangements. A bourbon distillery, for example, embraces a set of such practices as distilling, public relations, strategic planning, shipping, and facility maintenance carried out amid, with, and through the arrangements composing the distillery, the home office, and the visitor’s center. Digital communication, moreover, embraces a set of communication practices that are carried on amid, with, and through multiple fixed or mobile arrangements with the help of electronic devices. And competition in the bourbon market embraces publicity campaigns, misleading advertising, deals with wholesalers, relations with suppliers, price-setting, and strategic planning, each of which involves a complex of practices, arrangements, and relations or aspects thereof. The material world pervades and plays diverse roles in these constellations of bundles. It thereby makes endless differences to social life.

Arrangements One reason that the material world pervades the practice plenum, and therewith social phenomena, is that arrangements are by definition material phenomena. Material arrangements often simply support practices, as when the human body underwrites human activity, floors, walls, and ceilings enable practices to be carried out indoors, and an elaborate technological structure enables digital communication, file sharing, and gaming. As discussed in chapter two, however, practices and the material world are bound together in many ways.

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Material entities that compose arrangements are often used in practices linked to them; examples are sending texts on a cell phone while on the move, operating setups of equipment such as stills, employing dogs to guard property, using robots to build cars, provide companionship to the elderly, or greet customers at store entrances, exploiting the physical-chemical composition of solids and liquids such as wood and sour mash (the starter for bourbon production) in the distillation and aging processes, and building stacked barrel storage racks to age bourbon properly (such racks allow air flow among the barrels). The use of material entities and arrangements thereof often requires that practices (1) be tuned (cf. Pickering 1995) to and grounded in the physical-chemical composition of the entities involved and the material events and processes that occur to them, and (2) cultivate the development of, and require of participants that they acquire, practical and propositional knowledges that are keyed to these matters (in this context, think of building a house, shoeing a horse, fixing an engine). Examples of relevant processes from bourbon production include fermentation, heating, evaporation, and condensation in distilling practices, and charring, oxidation, esterification, and evaporation in aging and storage practices. It is through learning, including being initiated into practices (e.g., Kemmis et al. 2017), and through experimentation with different mixes of mash ingredients, different still designs, different seasons of the year, and different timings and amounts of feed etc., that distillers acquire propositional and practical knowledge that is tuned to the materiality of grain, stills, alcohol, wood, brick, metal parts, horses’ hooves, and the like. In addition, it is by virtue of being effected or exploited that physical processes such as heating, evaporation, condensation, gravity, and digestion are incorporated into arrangements and become part of social life. Of course, some practices that are tied to material entities and arrangements thereof carry little knowledge of them. Digital devices such as cell phones, tablets, and computers incorporate extensive physical processes, but digital communication and gaming practices neither are tuned to these processes nor require much knowledge keyed to them: knowing how to use a touch screen or to handle a controller is about the only such knowledge involved. The material processes folded into these devices are largely cordoned off from users. As indicated, material arrangements include nonhuman organisms that intersect with human lives: pets, zoo animals, dolphins, wheat, yeast, farm animals, stocks of cattle, potted plants, insects, microbes, and so on. Humans bear a myriad of relations to these organisms arising from, among other things, what people do, what these other life forms do, and the spatial relations and processes that attend or arise from human-nonhuman intersections and interactions. In the last forty years, theoretical issues have arisen about the nature of agency and who or what possesses it. These issues point at the related issue mentioned in chapter two about whether humans alone can carry out practices. A further, closely connected question is whether entities other than humans can cocarry on the practices humans do (see Kuijer 2018, Strengers 2018, Gram-Hanssen 2018). As suggested, issues such as these are insistent, not in relation to organisms,

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nonhumans, or material entities in general, but in relation to specific such entities, above all, dolphins, super intelligent robots, and aliens. These issues cannot be examined here. As they carry out their practices, humans endlessly cope with and take into account arrangements of material entities and the material events and processes that befall them, for example, building a distillery near a source of water, taking account of what happens to grains, malt, and the like when heated, anticipating hard freezes in the early spring, and never leaving home without a phone charger. The material dimension of social phenomena also opens these phenomena to physical, chemical, and biological events and processes—­including the ingression or eruption of microbes, pests, and thermodynamic flows (cf. ­Oppermann and Walker 2018)—that sustain or damage arrangements and bundles and can become or lead to matters of concern (cf. Latour 2004). Examples of relevant matters of concern include the mealiness of an old apple, wear and tear on the human body, infection, the angling of a high speed turn on a highway, crop and building damage, the deterioration of distillation equipment, still explosions, contamination of raw materials such as water, the production of foul-tasting liquors through the mixing of distilled spirits with certain liquids and flavorings, cracked cell phone screens, inadequate bandwidth, and damage to electronic devices from power surges. Humans take measures in the face of such concerns. For example, they store bourbon barrels in configurations that, in permitting the passage of air, control temperature and retard mold growth, and they reconstruct power grids to prevent future blackouts from cascading through them (cf. Bennett 2005). Humans are also eternally required to maintain and to repair and restore arrangements (e.g., Arendt 1958, Graham and Thrift 2007). Weather, too, as a suffusive condition that envelops and permeates bundles and constellations, becomes an inescapable social concern. And in becoming matters of concern or simply matters of collective attention, phenomena such as lightening, forest fires, erosion, poison ivy, bee decline, weather, and climate change are confronted and sometimes coped with. Indeed, bundles have attended to some of these matters for millennia. Finally, material processes that link the entities that compose material arrangements, including human bodies, can likewise become matters of concern. Examples are the complexes formed by rubbing, shoes, and blisters; heating, stills, and burning skin; infestation, houses, and rot; biting, dogs, and bleeding forearms; and power substations, electron flows, and glowing screens. In these ways, the material world is present in, passes through, and bears on the practice plenum and, therewith, social life and social phenomena. Material entities, properties, and processes support, tune, effect, and are used as well as coped and interacted with in bundles; cause, lead to, and prefigure changes in bundles; and are part of what changes in them. Because many material phenomena are substances, acknowledging the significant role of materiality in social life entails marshaling the category of substance in addition to those of event, process, structure, and relation in comprehending social life.

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Doings and sayings Practices are composed of organized doings and sayings. A doing is the doing of something and a saying is the saying of something. Both are performings of action. As noted in chapter two, a key feature of doings and sayings—at least up until the present point in history—is that they are performed through bodily actions. The salesperson sweet-talks the liquor wholesaler (and thereby tries to secure the contract and to beat her annual sales minimum) by opening her mouth and uttering articulated sounds, words and sentences, all the while gesticulating and shifting in her seat. Practically all actions are performed through performances of such bodily actions, which Arthur Danto (1965) called “basic actions.” These bodily actions are actions, that is, they are performed or carried out. More materially conceived, they are voluntary movements, voluntary physical movings of a person’s body (including utterings of sounds), that, in the context in which they are performed, constitute the doing or saying of something. It follows that actions are spatially localized at the bodies of the people whose voluntary bodily movings constitute the performing of the action, thus at the places where these bodily actions are performed. The carrying out and pursuit of tasks, projects, and ends can be localized in the same way: at the body of the person pursuing them and at all the places where she performs actions that are part of their pursuit. Note that the performing of an action is an event that befalls the person who carries out the physical movements or utterances that constitute it (Schatzki 2010; omissions of movement can also constitute performances of action). Performings of movements and utterances are likewise events. The location of an action can be complex, multiple, or vague. Suppose the sales representative holds a Skype meeting with a customer in Japan. Her doings and sayings during the meeting can be localized at her body and her chair. But such activities as conducting the meeting and concluding it involve more than her actions alone; they also involve the activities of the customer as well as events and processes bound up with the electronic processing of and transmission of information. The latter are part of the occurrence of the meeting since the activities involved would be physically impossible in their absence. The location of this meeting is, accordingly, complex. A different kind of complexity lies in the multiple places where any material phenomenon exists. Consider a group of workers setting up a still. This joint act (Blumer 1969) happens at the particular place in the immediate material arrangement where the workers’ bodies are active and the still is set up. It also, however, takes place at, inter alia, the wider material arrangement that embraces this particular place, the surrounding equipment, and the room where it is installed. The joint act takes place at wider arrangements because it inherently involves particular material entities, and, together, these entities, their embedment in an immediate material arrangement, and the connections between this arrangement and others define multiple material places where the act takes place. The setting-up takes place in the corner, in the room, in the building, at the distillery, along the banks of Glenns Creek, and so on. Of

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course, this kind of multiplicity characterizes all action performances as events localized at bodies. Consider, finally, winning a basketball game with a shot as time expires. Where does it occur? Where the shooter releases the ball? At that spot together with the arc followed by the ball and the location of the net it swishes? Unlike in the first two examples, the location of this action is vague. The act does occur in a gymnasium, which houses arrangements that encompass balls, court, baskets, aisles, bleachers, and bodies (those of players, officials, spectators, and gym employees). “In the gymnasium,” however, is not very specific. This is where many other actions are performed, including some with much more specific locations, for example, selling popcorn. But it is difficult to pinpoint any more specifically where the player wins the game. The specific locations of the material entities that compose the arrangements there do not help. It also does not help to say that winning the game is not an action but the result of an action and that this putative action should be divided into the act of shooting, which is located where the player shoots, and the consequence of that act, namely, winning the game—for this simply shifts the vagueness involved to the location of that result. In sum, complexity, multiplicity, and vagueness of the sorts just discussed often affix the actions that people perform and attribute to one another in their practices. This fact, however, should not obscure the fact that action performances take place at bodies and at complexes of material entities. These bodies and complexes determine where in material space actions are performed. Practices are composed of organized doings and sayings. As a result, they are multiply located, at all the bodies and material complexes at which their constituent actions are carried out. These locations are likely to be spread out spatially and temporally, thereby giving concrete meaning to the idea of spatial-temporal extension that theorists of practice typically attribute to practices (e.g., Giddens 1990). It is possible, consequently, to plot the spaces (and times) of bundles graphically, with due allowance to the vagueness just discussed. The bodily location of bodily and intentional actions also gives rise to the idea of the spatial trajectory of actions, which is an important aspect of the trajectory of a life. This idea was well exploited in the time-geography of Torsten Hägerstrand (e.g., 1975) and associates; see below. It joins two senses of trajectory through their coincidence in space-time: trajectory in the sense of continuous motion through space-time and trajectory in the sense of sequences of performances. As I will begin discussing in the following section, the idea of a life trajectory holds great significance for social thought.

The organization of practices The activities that compose a practice are organized through a pool of understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities. Particular constituent activities express particular items that are part of this structure. But the structure itself encompasses more components than any given activity, or even the totality of actual

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activities, expresses. It follows that the organizational structure of a practice is not localized in the way action performances, singly or collectively, are. At best, traces of particular organizing phenomena—particular ends, projects, emotions, rules, understandings—inhabit the bodies through which, and the material setups where, action performings take place and practices are carried on. Ends, projects, and emotions might be materialized in other ways, too. Emotions, for example, clearly have a physical dimension and can alter brain, physiology, muscle, and skin. Some researchers, furthermore, think that the ends, projects, and rules people pursue are somehow etched in their brains. As noted, for instance, Giddens claims that the rules that (according to him) structure practices are materialized as memory traces in the brain. Finally, practical understanding is widely conceptualized as a property of bodies or a bodily property of people (e.g., bodily skills). I am not sure, however, that it is ever clear in this context exactly what is accomplished by referring to the body. It is not necessary to comment further in the current context on any of these matters.

Inscriptions One way that sayings and rules, including statements or specifications of any aspect of bundles or of social life, gain material form is though inscription, that is, as formulated, specified, or described in some (written) text—whatever the form—or as informationally stored in some physical medium and reconstructed for uptake through hearing, sight, or touch. One can argue that speech (or rather, what is said qua the words said) is likewise a material form of language, but that issue goes beyond the present discussion. Inscriptions are an important class of material entity because language, which is exceptionally critical as a medium of communication, coordination, institution, and expression, takes material form in them and can thereby durate or propagate over time and space. It is precisely the materiality of inscriptions (or of their physical storage) that enables the morphological units and semantic properties of language to traverse space-time and to organize knowledge and knowledge practices (e.g., Goody 1977). Material properties are likewise a key component of artworks, though art does not pervade or make the differences to the practice plenum and social life that language does.

Relations I have discussed in this section how material entities and processes support, carry out, and are used or coped with in practices; suffuse, pass through, and damage bundles; and locate, track, and embody components of bundles. Some of the relations that join practices and arrangements into bundles or link bundles into larger constellations reveal additional roles that material entities play in social life. I wrote in chapter two that relations of nine prominent sorts exist between practices and arrangements: (1) use, (2) setting-up, (3) directedness toward,

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(4) bestowal of meaning on, (5) inseparability from, (6) inducement, (7) channeling, (8) prefiguration, and (9) essentiality to. Some of these already figured in the above discussion of arrangements. Channeling is the most overtly material of these relations since it denotes material entities constraining and shaping voluntary bodily movement. Channeling, moreover, converges with, and is in a sense a subgenre, of inducement, that is, of entities and events inducing or leading people to perform particular actions. Material entities, events, and processes clearly number among the phenomena that achieve this. Channeling and inducement are also spitting cousins of prefiguration, which is another way material arrangements bear on activity. All three relations represent ways that materiality helps determine how people act. Determining activity is an important general role that materiality plays in the practice plenum and social life. Using and setting-up are the converse of channeling, inducement, and prefiguration. They capture, not differences that material entities make to activities, but differences that activities make to material entities. One might say that they reveal the command of human activity over material entities: how activity takes up entities and intervenes in and alters the material setup of the world. Being commanded by human activity is a further general role that material entities play in the practice plenum. None of the other types of relation among practices and arrangements disclose additional undiscussed dimensions of the extensive entanglement of action and material entities. What is more, only two types of relation between bundles do this: chains of action and material connections. As indicated, a chain of actions is a sequence of actions, each member of which responds to the previous member or to a change brought about by the previous member in the world. Actions and changes do not need to be bodily present to people who respond to them; people can respond to prior acts and changes after coming to know about them through linguistic, communicational, or informational channels. Material entities, events, and processes thus mediate chains of action by constituting links in them or helping to disseminate the knowledge on whose basis people extend them. Materiality, consequently, plays three important roles in chains of action. First, material entities and processes (e.g., satellite transmissions) mediate chains. Second, people intervene in the world and bring about material changes there. And third, material entities and events/processes induce, or lead, people to perform particular actions. I return to the importance of action chains in the next chapter. Finally, material connections between arrangements are, as their name suggests, material in character. Material entities and processes contribute to social life by connecting arrangements. It does not matter in this context whether the connections involved are natural or artifactual. Natural connections often follow distinguishable features of land- and seascapes such as ridgelines, ravines, swells, and ocean currents. Prominent types of artifactual connections include infrastructure, communication ties, transportation links, and building complexes.

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Constellations Bundles are linked practices and arrangements. Constellations are linked bundles, thus larger nexuses of practices and arrangements. As a result, the material dimension of constellations combines the material features of practices, arrangements, and bundles with those of the relations among bundles that link them into constellations. The material dimension of any constellation, like that of many bundles, is clearly fabulously complex. Think, for a moment, of the material entities and processes involved in a sports league, a war, an international financial market, a distillery, or an Instagram group. How researchers cope with complexity is a topic for chapter seven. In sum, material entities and processes pervade practices, bundles, and constellations. Material entities and arrangements thereof, and physical and chemical (and biological) events, processes, and nexuses thereof, support, localize, track, anchor, channel, carry out, damage, pass through, induce, and prefigure components of bundles and constellations. They are also used, coped with, and set up by bundles and support, mediate, tune, connect, and effect changes in them.

The ecology of social life I indicated in chapter two that the entities that compose arrangements link with material entities that lie aside the practice plenum. The existence of these latter entities suggests that social phenomena, in addition to consisting in slices or aspects of the practice plenum, subside in a wider ecology. I use the term “ecology” in this context because the ecology of something embraces everything, of whatever character or type, that hangs together with and can make a difference to it. And the entities I have in mind can, in particular circumstances, bear on social life: they can make a difference to the events, processes, and changes that befall social phenomena. Two domains of entities are involved. The first is the expanse of material entities that lie beyond—though they might connect to—the practice plenum. The second embraces certain of the phenomena that compose the entities that make up the material arrangements that belong to bundles. It is useful, though not necessary, for present purposes, to draw on the concepts of nature and artifact to characterize these two domains. I call “natural” any phenomenon—thing, event, process, mechanism (cf.  Soper 1995: 132–3)—whose character, inner structure, and existence have been relatively little or not affected by human activity (cf. Schatzki 2002: chapt. 3). I thus count as natural some, though hardly all, entities that others have described as hybrids (examples below). Note that entities that humans have fabricated, modified, or are responsible for, and that therefore count as artifactual, can still exhibit natural material properties and be subject to natural material processes (that attend, for instance, their composition). I emphasize that nothing hangs on this distinction between natural and artifactual entities.

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It is possible to explore the wider ecology of social phenomena without these concepts, instead speaking of material entities alone; cf. LeCain’s (2017: 126–8) conception of the material environment, which does not distinguish between arrangements and ecology. But it is useful to have concepts that pick out the two sides, or rather directions, of the spectrum of material phenomena that runs from mostly due to human activity to not at all touched by it. The world contains many material phenomena that human activity has obviously altered or fabricated as well as many other such phenomena it has left relatively untouched. It also contains entities that are best conceptualized as hybrids of one or another sort. Artifacts, hybrids, and things of nature alike lie beyond the practice plenum. The things of nature involved can be characterized as “broader” nature. ­Examples are tubular life in continental rift zones, geological strata beneath the surface of the earth, grizzly bears in the British Columbian wild, earthquakes, and El Ninja. The artifacts and hybrids I have in mind are ones that have decayed and become deteris or been abandoned and forgotten. Such entities were once part of the plenum but have receded from it, though they can lie about or remain for decades or centuries. Examples are sunken ships, discarded genetically modified organisms and products, abandoned cut stone building materials, remains of older cities buried under present-day ones, and remnants of past material infrastructures encased or lying around in present-day built environments (cf. Shove and Pantzar’s 2005 notion of social fossils and Olsen’s 2010 discussion of discarded objects). A second part of the ecology of social life embraces natural phenomena that compose the entities that make up material arrangements. It does not include the artificial (or hybrid) materials that humans incorporate into the things they construct because such materials are part of the plenum. The natural phenomena I have in mind can be dubbed “inner” nature. Examples are the physical-­chemical compositions of mesas, the basic anatomical structures of human and other organisms, and chemical bonds among the ingredients of bourbon or among the materials that compose the glass, wires, and liquid crystal display that make up cell phone screens. The ecology of social life, consequently, includes broader nature and forsaken or decayed artifacts and hybrids, on the one hand, and inner nature on the other. Any of the material entities that lie beyond the plenum of practices, and any phenomenon of nature that helps compose the entities that make up arrangements, can become part of the plenum. This can happen to mountaintops, wild animals, chemical bonds, sunken ships, cut stones, and buried cities. Phenomena of nature and decayed/forsaken artifacts/hybrids (re)join the plenum either when they are used or otherwise apprehended and dealt with in people’s practices or when they directly support practices, up close or at a distance (for the idea, and an example, of a threshold at which artifacts rejoin the plenum, see Edgeworth 2016). Only a small part of overall nature and a few forsaken artifactual or hybrid complexes ever qualify. Note that natural phenomena do not automatically cease being natural when they support or are used, apprehended, or dealt with in

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practices. They remain natural if, in being involved in practices these ways, they are not significantly altered. Any of the material entities that lie beyond the plenum or that compose the entities that make up its arrangements can also become part of social life by becoming something that mediates human coexistence. Again, natural phenomena do not automatically cease being natural when this happens: a broken branch picked up and used as a walking stick by a member of a hiking party who later brandishes in jest at a companion and eventually discards it remains a natural ­entity. Note that, in mediating coexistence, natural phenomena and forsaken artifacts do not automatically become components of practice-arrangement bundles and, thus, part of the practice plenum. Things of nature can remain separate from bundles even as people orient toward and interpret them. Examples are the rising of the sun welcomed in human ceremonies, mountain tops gazed at from an observation point, and collisions of subatomic particles observed in accelerators (cf.  Knorr Cetina 1997). I should add that the veins in marble exploited by a sculptor, like the coral reefs through which vacationers swim, are examples of entities that help to compose bundles that were phenomena of nature but have become a type of hybrid I call “mongrels” (Schatzki 2002) in being significantly altered by human activity. In short, nature, on my account, both is part of and beyond society and also something that is transformed into phenomena of hybrid sorts. I include weather, and thus atmosphere, among the phenomena that lie beyond bundles and constellations yet are connected to them. In this instance, however, the phenomena that are beyond are all about. For like air, weather— by which I mean local atmospheric conditions—suffuses and envelops bundles and constellations. At the same time, weather, again like air (Ingold 2015: 70), mediates human coexistence, even though it is not part of bundles but envelops them. The earth, too, lies beyond the plenum, though it is connected to it. In this context, earth must be opposed to land, parcels of which are part of material arrangements. Earth, however, does not, like weather, suffuse and envelop bundles and constellations. It is, instead, that on which they rest. Historically, the bundles and constellations that constitute human society have existed primarily on, but also in and more recently above, the earth, suffused by weather. Today, this inclement terrestrial condition is noticeably and measurably evolving, and likely to expand extraterrestrially. Broader and inner natures, and forsaken and decaying products of human activity, are not the only phenomena that, together with bundles and constellations, form the ecology of social life. A further component is life trajectories. Chapters four and six will explain how life trajectories can bear responsibility for social changes. Here, I will introduce the phenomenon in some detail. Practices are composed of organized doings and sayings. Doing and sayings are performings of action. Practices, accordingly, comprise multiple action performances. Each of these performings, moreover, befalls a particular person, and each of these people leads a life. For present purposes, I conceptualize a human life as composed of the sequences of sometimes overlapping and mostly durating

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life conditions (actions, states of consciousness, emotions, conative and cognitive states) that belong to a given person, as expressed in his or her bodily doings and sayings and as contextualized in the worldly situations through which he or she lives (see Schatzki 1996; cf. Dreier 2007). More tersely stated: a life consists in the sequences of its possessor’s bodily expressed, situationally instituted, and largely durating actions, mental states, and cognitive conditions. A life, consequently, comprises sequences of actions, among other things. ­A lmost every action involved, however, is a component of some practice(s) or other (cf. Shove et al. 2012: 39–40). Two different basic ordering principles of action are at work here (cf. Reckwitz’ 2006 distinction between life forms and practice/discourse complexes). Actions are components of a practice by virtue of expressing elements of the practice’s organization. Practice organizations are thus one organizing principle of action. Actions are also components of particular people’s lives. People are thus a second organizing principle. Practices and people are distinct ordering principles, neither of which can be reduced to the other. A given action is at once a component of some practice and part of some life. It is at once performed by someone and part of a manifold of actions performed by different people that is governed by a common organization. People and practices are distinct—though not separate—realities. As already indicated, the sequentiality of the actions and other life conditions that compose a life helps found the idea of a life trajectory: the sequence of actions (and other life conditions) that make up a life. Such sequences are at once spatial-temporal trajectories since a person is located in or moves about in physical space and through time as he or she performs actions and expresses, undergoes, and possesses other life conditions. The idea of a life trajectory resembles Ingold’s conception of leading a life as wayfaring along paths (2011; cf. 2015: 132–3) or laying down a line (2015: 118). As I have discussed elsewhere (2010: 187–95), I do not agree with Ingold (e.g., 2015: 126) that life trajectories can be interpreted, Deleuze- (or Bergson-) like, as lines of becoming. Life trajectories encompass, at best, bursts of becoming in the form of unfolding activities, emotions, and states of consciousness. These conditions, however, coexist with instantaneous actions and durating conditions. And all of these conditions transpire in worldly situations and are expressed by an active human body. Another difference arises from Ingold’s idea that sociality consists in correspondences between and knots formed of different life lines (2015: 11, 14). This idea ignores the bundles and constellations amid which life trajectories correspond, converge, or entangle. At the same time, Ingold’s notion of a meshwork of corresponding lines closely resembles the idea of a nexus of action chains and material and other processes that I will develop in chapters four and five. Again, however, Ingold disregards the context of bundles/constellations in and through which such meshworks (­nexuses) propagate. In place of this context, he offers (2015: 147–57) an account of correspondence and knotting that highlights the perpetually “in-between” dynamic becoming of the world, in their attentional attunement to which lives grow and sympathetically abide by, sojourn with,

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and answer to one another. According to this account, so attuned meshworks of corresponding lives advance upon the earth under the sky through the medium of atmosphere on which they depend. The idea of a life trajectory bears even more resemblance to Torsten Hägerstrand’s (e.g., 1975) account of space-time paths. This is so even though Hägerstrand focuses primarily on the spatial-temporality of movement in and between physical settings of action and somewhat disregards the actions, mental conditions, and situations that are bound up with this. In this regard, Alan Pred’s (1981) analysis of spatial-temporal paths as bound to projects brings Hägerstrand’s and the present account even closer. Life trajectories, however, should not be treated as the paths taken by people who—like other entities—follow the principle of least resistance in moving along “fluid vectors” that are established, gravity-like, by other entities (see ­Bryant’s 2014 account of space; his model is intended to apply to all entities, including people). There are a number of problems with this aggressively materialist picture. First, human activity and movement do not follow the principle of least resistance. There is no master principle such as this that governs what people specifically do. Teleology, for example, is not such a principle: although people generally act teleologically (see Schatzki 2010: chapt. 3), their orientation toward ends does not differentiate among the ends they might pursue or the ways they might do so. Nor, moreover, can the relevance of the world to life trajectories be assimilated to the gravitational effects of material entities on one another (see Bryant 2014: 188). States of the world do induce or prefigure what people do where. But gravity lays down (movement), whereas prefiguration narrows (­activity) and inducement draws (it) out. In addition, the notion of inertia bound up with the idea of fluid vectors has no pendant vis-à-vis human activity. And, I should add, human activity is indeterminate (see chapter four), so the entire idea of prior states of the world determining what people do is misguided. Prior states of the world instead help compose the context in which activity proceeds. Bryant, in short, overmaterializes human activity and life trajectories. As noted, life trajectories are distinct from bundles of practices and arrangements. At the same time, since most activities are at once components of a life and components of a practice(s), trajectories and bundles episodically coincide. More generally, life trajectories and bundles relate as follows (for parallel ideas cut toward comprehending learning, life trajectories, and the conduct of life, see Dreier 1999, 2007). First, people’s lives proceed on the background of bundles. The latter are states of the world, given which individual lives proceed as they do. What I mean is that bundles are always already there whenever an individual person begins to participate in them and subsequently carries them on, regardless of how much bundles evolve in the process. The givenness of bundles helps defines the situatedness of individual people in the world. Second, lives proceed as part of and as dependent on bundles. As noted, lives, or rather, most life episodes take place as part of bundles since at least most

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actions that help compose a life are components of bundles. The sequences of actions that help compose particular episodes of people’s lives can transpire as part of single bundles or across them. Life trajectories also proceed dependent on bundles. Three important features of lives that are dependent on practices are perceptual experience, learning, and action. To begin with, because people undergo perceptual experiences while performing acts of perception, and acts of human perception, like human actions more generally, are elements of practices, people undergo perceptual experiences in carrying on particular practices (for further discussion, see Schatzki 2014). Similarly, for learning to take place within bundles is for people to acquire knowledge, judgment, character traits, and self-understandings (among other things) as they perform—or as a result of their performing—actions that help compose bundles (see Schatzki 2017c). Activities, too, depend on practices since people are always sensitive to the practices they themselves have been carrying on, both the activities that compose these and what organizes them. In particular as discussed, people are sensitive to the normative character of organization and uphold or take this into account as they proceed. Third, people’s lives proceed through bundles. Interrelated bundles are spread out across the face of the earth. People move about on the earth through this given reality, perpetuating as well as transforming it. This proceeding through has two principal dimensions. First, people, proceed amid metamorphosing three-dimensional spatial distributions of material arrangements. The physicality and geometry of these arrangements always set real constraints on action and must be accommodated, even while they are shifting and being altered. By virtue, moreover, of the bodily location of intentional actions, people’s lives lay down paths through these arrangements: a life trajectory as a sequence of performances and other life conditions takes a physical path through the world (cf.  Hägerstrand’s time-geography). Second, people proceed amid arrays of places and paths that are anchored at these arrangements, where a place is a place to X and a path is a way from one place to another. Arrays of places and paths form one dimension of existential space; the nearness and farness, or presence or absence, of entities in experience make up the second component (see chapter eight). People proceed amid such place-path arrays in the sense of being sensitive to them; sometimes, for example, actions are performed at particular entities because a place to perform that action is anchored there (e.g., sleeping in a bed). Through such anchoring, moreover, existential spatiality assumes material form. Proceeding amid material setups and the arrays of places and paths anchored in them is what it is for life trajectories to proceed through the interrelated ­practice-arrangement bundles that are spread out across (and below and above) the surface of the earth. Life trajectories pass through, occur on the background of, and are part of as well as dependent on bundles of practices and arrangements. Lives and ­practice-arrangements are distinct phenomena even though they episodically coincide and are mutually dependent.

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It might seem odd to aver that life trajectories are part of the ecology of social life. Claims to the effect that individual lives and their trajectories are part of society are far more commonplace. My contention reflects the thesis that social phenomena consist in slices and aspects of bundles and the observation that life trajectories are distinct—though not separate—from these bundles. Life trajectories, moreover, like broader and inner nature and forsaken or decaying artifacts and hybrids, can bear responsibility for changes in social life. (Indeed, marking the distinctiveness of lives from bundles opens a path toward gauging the extent to which life trajectories bear this responsibility in particular cases.) So, they join the latter phenomena as part of the ecology of social life. Bundles inherently, life trajectories and inner nature sometimes, and broader nature and forsaken artifacts/hybrids occasionally, bear responsibility for social changes. Comprehending social phenomena always requires grasping the ­practice-arrangement bundles of which such phenomena are cuts or aspects. But it often also requires attending to life trajectories that pass through these bundles, and it is at their own peril that investigators (and others) forget the existence of phenomena of broader and inner nature.

Flat ontology and the material world Social phenomena are aspects or slices of the practice plenum. This conception qualifies as a flat social ontology (see Schatzki 2016b). Exploring the flatness of this conception deepens appreciation of the significance of the material world for social life and its analysis. Flat ontology is a general kind of ontology under which very different social ontologies allegedly fall. This is so for two reasons. First, the notion of flat ontology is polysemic; my understanding is just one. Second, social ontologies of noticeably different sorts qualify as flat on my understanding of the concept. Two prominent understandings of flatness exist in contemporary social theory. One holds that the ontologies promulgated in what I call “theories of configuration” are flat (cf. Schatzki 2002: xii–xiii; Morgan-Thomas 2018). The three most prominent such theories are found in the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Actor-Network Theory, in particular, Latour. As noted in chapter two, what joins their theories is a vision of [s]ocial things organized in configurations, where they hang together, determine one another via their connections, as combined both exert effects on other configurations of things and are transformed through the actions of other configurations, and therewith constitute the setting and medium of human action, interaction, and coexistence. (Schatzki 2002: xiii) The appellation “flat” is often applied to Deleuze and Guattari’s version of this picture (see, e.g., Dittmer 2014: 396), whereas Latour (2005) explicitly embraces the label. The term is hardly ever, however, applied to Foucault’s

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accounts even though, as Reckwitz (2002) notes, Foucault’s ontologies became flatter with time. It is not clear to me that these theorists’ accounts should be said to propagate flat ontologies. Commentators who ascribe flat ontologies to them (e.g., Fox and Alldred 2016: 25, 56) note that they analyze social phenomena as composed of entities of heterogeneous sorts. The significance in the present context of the claim that social—and other—phenomena have heterogeneous compositions lies in its opposition to the idea that entities can be segregated into separate, possibly hierarchically ordered domains such as society and nature. The fact that some entities (e.g., dirty air, genetically modified organisms) seem to be neither natural nor social but hybrid undercuts the idea that entities neatly fall into these domains; so, too does the fact that social phenomena are composed, not just of entities traditionally assigned to the domain of society, but also of entities traditionally assigned to the domain of nature (e.g., mountain glaciers). Undermining the consignment of entities to separate domains throws them all into a hopper, thereby leveling erstwhile significant differences (see DeLanda 2006: 28; I acknowledged this situation in the previous section in noting the feasibility of using the concept of material entity instead of those of nature and artifact in analyzing the ecology of social life on the earth). The result is “flatness.” Exactly why, however, “flat” is an appropriate term, and why some other term such as “mangled” (cf. Pickering 1995), “monist,” or “symmetrical” is not better, is not clear. Perhaps commentators believe that heterogeneous assemblages à la Deleuze and Guattari and heterogeneous networks à la Latour (as well as heterogeneous apparatuses à la Foucault) are stretched out horizontally. Horizontality jibes well with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of planes, but it is at odds with Latour’s concept in the 1980s and early 1990s of blackboxing and the accompanying idea of embedded compositional levels. The connection with flatness remains tenuous and arbitrary. A second prominent understanding of flatness, one that I uphold (2016b), is that a flat ontology denies the existence of fixed levels or hierarchies of phenomena in social life (see Latour 2005 and Seidl and Whittington 2014). According to my understanding, levels exist when systematic relations of causality or supervenience exist between entities of two general kinds. The existence of such relations qualifies the domains composed of entities of these two kinds as higher and lower. Two principal levels often attributed to society are the level of individuals and the level of social structures, institutions, or systems. Two other prominent putative levels are micro and macro phenomena. What qualifies individuals or micro phenomena, on the one hand, and structures etc. or macro phenomena on the other as levels is that systematic relations of causality or supervenience are held to hold between them. For example, the claim that social structures and institutions systematically arise from individuals’ actions or situated activities transforms the sets of individuals or situations, on the one hand, and of social structures/institutions on the other, into levels. An opposed example would be the more “structuralist” position that structures, institutions, or systems systematically determine individuals or their situations.

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Flat ontologies oppose stratifications of these sorts and deny that phenomena of some general type (e.g., social phenomena) are composed of levels. They thereby oppose both “top-down” and “bottom-up” determination (Allen 2011a: 155). Flat ontologies can, however, recognize causal relations among ­phenomena—e.g., individuals and social institutions—that stratified ontologies segregate into levels. They can do this by (1) analyzing the phenomena involved—e.g., individuals and institutions—in terms of whatever the flat ontology claims constitutes social life, for example, practice-arrangement bundles (e.g., individuals as participants in practices and institutions as slices of bundles) and (2) uncovering causal relations among the phenomena so described (see Schatzki 2016b for an example). The ontology of Sallie Marston, J.P. Jones, and Keith Woodward (e.g., Marston et al. 2005, Jones et al. 2007, Woodward et al. 2012) that garnered considerable attention in geography a decade ago is flat in this sense. In envisioning social life as composed of myriads of semi-autonomous, self-organizing local sites of order, it denies that local sites are determined by entities of other sorts, including “­underlying” or “higher up” ones that would “encompass,” “control,” “give rise to,” or otherwise systematically determine them. An important feature of flat ontologies in the sense of flatness I advocate is the idea that all phenomena of some general type (e.g., social phenomena) have the same basic composition. Flat ontologies claim this because denying the existence of distinct levels of entities, that is, of systematic relations of causality or supervenience among entities of certain general types such as micro and macro, suggests that entities of these types involved should be handled alike. On my account, this idea becomes the thesis that all social phenomena—micro or macro— consist in slices or aspects of the practice plenum. The plenum contains all the ingredients or “materials” that make up social phenomena. Social phenomena vary in the practices and arrangements that compose them and in the density, continuity, and space-time spread of their constituent relations. In elucidating the first prominent conception of flatness, I introduced the notion of horizontality. Flatness as the absence of separate domains does not explicitly draw on or entail horizontality. Horizontality, by contrast, is implicit in the second primary understanding of flatness as lack of hierarchy or levels since denying vertical (top-down or bottom-up) causality suggests that causality must work horizontally. Admittedly, horizontality, invoked this abstractly, is just an intuition that needs to be filled out. Nonetheless, this intuition is often associated with flat ontologies (of both general sorts): flat ontologies spread out social phenomena and nexuses thereof horizontally. This is true of my account, too. It is important to see, however, why this is so. Spreading social life out horizontally has nothing to do with the notion of flatness as such. Rather, it arises from the ontology’s particular analysis of the composition of social phenomena. This analysis is only abetted, and not entailed, by the ontology’s opposition to levels. For the claim that social reality has no levels suggests only that social phenomena share the same basic composition. It does not dictate what that composition is. Now, as I have been writing, social

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phenomena on my account are slices or aspects of the plenum of practices. It is the material dimension of that plenum, the arrangements with which practices are bundled, that is responsible for social phenomena being stretched out horizontally. For it is the distribution of material entities across the earth that stretches out the phenomena they help compose horizontally, i.e., across the surface of the earth, as well as a little ways under it and somewhat more above it (Elden 2013, Steinberg and Peters 2015, and Allen 2016 are wrong to suggest that flat ontologies are two-dimensional and unable to accommodate verticality and volume). Consequently, “horizontal” means, more concretely, stretched out across the earth; cf. Vadim Flusser’s (2006: 275) analysis of life-space as a “flat [three-­ dimensional—TRS] geometric surface.” This more concrete sense of horizontality can be combined with the intuition that causality works horizontally to yield the idea that causality in social life operates through the expansive plenum of practices that is stretched out across the earth. What this idea amounts to, more specifically, is spelled out in chapters four and five. Note that because individual life trajectories proceed through, as part of, dependent on, and on the background of practice-arrangement bundles, the horizontally stretched-out plenum is at once the stage on which individuals appear, live their lives, and make whatever differences they make to the world. Notice, too, that an implication of this analysis of horizontality is that social life will cease to be horizontal to the extent that humans burrow into the earth or travel into space—though it will continue to be flat regardless of how deep into the earth or how far into space they manage to get. The terrestrial surface horizontality of the material dimension of the practice plenum has other implications. Flat ontologies dispense with any segregation of entities into micro and macro levels (see Latour 2005 and Schatzki 2016b for more discussion). The distribution across the earth of the material entities that compose the arrangements with which practices are bundled highlights properties of these arrangements and bundles that can arguably replace micro and macro. Prominent among these are size, shape, and density. Following Durkheim (1981) and Halbwachs (1960), these features can be labeled “morphological.” Density, size, and shape are not properties just of the material dimension of social phenomena. Since individual activities and the manifolds of activity that compose practices are localized at bodies, these morphological properties also characterize practices. And since bundles are composed of arrangements and practices, size, shape, and density are also properties of bundles and, therewith, of social phenomena. Social phenomena have a size marked out by the spread of the bodies and other material entities that localize, anchor, compose, embody, carry out, and track the bundles in which these phenomena consist. Size, however, is not the same thing as area. The distribution of material entities that helps compose a social phenomenon is finite, and not every point contained in the region defined by connecting (graphically or in imagination) the “outermost” entities involved, thereby creating a perimeter enclosing an area, is occupied by one of the material

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entities involved. The material extent of bourbon distilling is laid down by the distribution of the material entities that compose the phenomenon. These entities cluster in certain geographical locations (e.g., along streams and rivers, at the edges of urban areas, or at inland crossings near railroads and water sources like wells) that lie at distances from one another. As a result, much of the area staked out by joining the “outermost” clusters concerned is filled with the constituent materialities of social phenomena other than bourbon distilleries (or with broader nature). Similarly, the size of massive online gaming is defined by the distribution of the equipment, bodies, and communications systems involved in the phenomenon. This distribution defines the extent of the phenomenon even though a perimeter drawn around the distribution encloses vast regions that lack any online gaming. Size is not area; it is, instead, how far-flung something is, how extensive the material distribution or scatter definitive of it is. Social phenomena can be bigger or smaller in this regard. Note that another measure of how big or small certain social phenomena are (e.g., crowds and online practices) is how many people participate in them. The spread-out clusters of bourbon distillation and the pointillist fragmentation of online gaming are two examples of the second property of social phenomena, shape. Shape is spatial form, and social phenomena can possess an indefinite multitude of them. Others are the areas of Ferdinand Tönnies’ (1955) village communities (see chapter eight), the star shapes of cities, the spindly networks of international financial markets, the center and periphery of capitalist formations, the central mass and satellites of many universities and some corporations, and the scatter patterns of other universities and corporations as well as youth sports. It is often difficult to describe the shapes of social phenomena in words, and efforts kin to those in network analysis can be undertaken to specify them mathematically. Due, moreover, to the mobility of material entities, the shapes (and sizes) of social phenomena metamorphose, many glacially, others rapidly. Density, finally, intuitively complements size and shape. It is the number of activities, practices, or bundles per unit area. Community interactions are dense in the way that spying operations are not, just as corporate headquarters and many people’s offices are dense while football pitches are not. My intuition is that the combination of size, shape, and density can substitute for the distinction between micro and macro, or for that between local and global, in analyses of society. This intuition can be compared to Latour’s (1993: 117ff; cf.  DeLanda 2006: 6–7) idea that size—especially number but also extent—­ replaces micro and macro as key properties of networks. Together, an entity’s size, shape, and density map its presence in the world, a presence that likely connects in various ways with the differences that that entity makes in the world. This connection is rooted in the fact that size, shape, and density indicate something about the number and sorts of interfaces and connections something can have with other entities. Larger, porous, or airier phenomena such as international financial networks, governments, the bourbon industry, and online social networks generally offer more points of access and attachment than do smaller,

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closed-in, and denser phenomena such as branch offices, communities, and assembly plants. The combination of size, shape, and density also says something about the extent to which something’s workings are internal to it, that is, found in the bundles that compose it, as opposed to spilling over beyond these, involving further bundles. The suggestion that combinations of these properties can substitute for the distinction between micro and macro does not mean that the latter distinction can be spelled out by reference to these properties. Substitution does not imply equivalency. Rather, it connotes alternativeness. Sometimes the distinction and relation between putative or erstwhile micro and macro phenomena can be described in terms of these properties. But only sometimes. The proposal is, instead, that the micro-macro distinction be abandoned and that researchers look at these other properties in its stead. Finally, the material dimension of social phenomena also ensures that material spaces are crucial to social life. By “material spaces” I mean the three dimensional spaces that are instituted and occupied by distributions of material entities. These material spaces are relational and geometric in character. The arrangements that help compose bundles and constellations automatically define relational geometric spaces that are three dimensional in the sense that the entities that occur in them have locations that can be defined by coordinate-triplets and graphically plotted along three perpendicular coordinate axes. It does not matter in the present context that the locations of indistinct entities are imprecise. Social phenomena exhibit material spaces that relationally devolve from the objects and arrangements that compose them. These are the spaces of social life. This claim that the material spaces of social life are relational does not rest on the belief that absolute space does not exist. Rather, it reflects the conviction that absolute spaces—if they exist—are irrelevant to social life. The relational spaces that devolve from the arrangements of material entities that help compose bundles are the spaces through which people and other entities move, the spaces where practices and bundles transpire. These spaces are continuous with the broader spaces that devolve from the huge numbers of material entities that exist beyond the plenum. It is important to emphasize that the material composition of social phenomena makes material spaces an important dimension of social life. Many contemporary social theorists of space search for conceptions of space or spatiality that neutralize, substitute for, or limit the significance of material space. This search is complemented, and sometimes even animated, by a desire to circumscribe and, in some cases, to bracket the presence of the material world in society. These longings exist disciplinarily alongside recent “turns to materiality” that highlight that world. On my view, the very distribution of arranged material entities that stretches social life out horizontally makes material space an inherent, pervasive, and immensely significant feature of sociality, something with which human beings must and ceaselessly do cope. The omnipresent relational geometric spaces of social phenomena make it plausible to claim that morphological features can be important for understanding social life and social change.

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I hasten to add that material space is not the only sort of space pertinent to social affairs. Another relevant sort is existential spatiality. Existential spatiality is the spatiality of being-in-the-world. Although it has been interpreted variously (e.g., Heidegger 1978, Merleau-Ponty 1962, Bollnow 1971, Malpas 1999), in the original form articulated by Heidegger it has, as mentioned above, two components (see Norberg-Schulz 1971, Fell 1979, Tilley 1994, Schatzki 2007). It encompasses, first, the arrays of places and paths that are anchored in the material settings through which people move. It embraces, second, the nearness and farness, the bringing near and making far, of entities in ongoing activity, where being near means being present in, available to, or relevant to current activity (e.g., a hammer is picked up and used) and being far means being absent to, unavailable for, or irrelevant to current activity (e.g., the hammer breaks, can’t be found, or is set aside after being used). Nearness to and farness from ongoing activity is clearly not the same thing as the smaller and larger distances that define near and far in material spaces. Nearness/farness from activity are, instead, features of being in the world, that is, of human existence. A third sort of space pertinent to social life is represented space, that is, representations of space, for example, maps, blueprints, and globes. Note that this triad of material, existential, and represented space closely resembles Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) trio of perceived space (physical space), conceived space, and lived space (physical space as symbolically, emotionally, and passionately apprehended in people’s lives). Both triplets need to be supplemented with conceptions of bodily or performance space that capture the spatiality of lived bodily movement and engagement in the world. I am skeptical that conceptions of space beyond these need to be marshaled to comprehend social life. In chapter eight I will take up the notions of ­v irtual-digital space and topological space, which diverse theorists aver have become eminently pertinent in the contemporary world. I will show that these notions are not needed to understand the formation and transformation of digitally mediated associations. I should add that the many versions of what are sometimes called activity space, inhabited space, or lived space can be analyzed as combinations of material, existential, and represented spaces, often in relation to particular activities and practices (an exception is Bachelard 1969). Activity spaces qua distributions of activity in material spaces are an obvious example, as is Ratzel’s (1901) living space (Lebensraum) and the varied spaces of habitation, inhabitation, or dwelling in which people are said to live or proceed (e.g., Seamon 1979, Norberg-Schulz 1985, Seamon and Mugerauer 1985, Ingold 2000, Stock 2006). Note, however, that this claim is just a statement of faith: I have no intention of showing the sufficiency of material, existential, and represented spaces beyond my discussion of virtual-digital and topological spaces in chapter eight. My emphasis on the materiality of social life and what follows from this in no way amounts to advocacy for social physics. This needs to be stated because properties such as size, shape, and density have been mapped by scholars who seek to develop such a physics (e.g., Wilson 2000, Batty 2013). One difference between how I work with these properties and how social physicists do so concerns the

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use of mathematics. Measurements of density, size, and shape, and the use of these properties as variables in equations and models, are prominent in social physics. Density, size, and shape as I use the notions can be quantified. This is straightforward, for instance, regarding density. Size, moreover, as discussed, is how far-flung the material entities that constitute a social phenomenon are. It is a function of the distances between those material entities involved that are farthest from one another. Like features of networks in network analysis, finally, various features of shape can be mathematized. But although density, size, and shape can be quantified, there is little evidence that explanations of the resulting values illuminate social affairs or that these values themselves contribute much to the ends of understanding and explaining social phenomena. By contrast, insightful generalizations about, say, bigger and smaller or more or less dense phenomena can be made, and grasping the relative density, shape, and size of this and that phenomenon can be illuminating. It is revealing, for instance, to superimpose the shape of the distribution of distilleries in central Kentucky on the shapes of the waterway system, the railroad system, and other industries such as farming, milling, brewing, and tanning (see chapter seven). What’s more, unusual sizes, shapes, and densities can signal that something noteworthy is transpiring in social life. But precise measurements of or values for these properties are not needed to achieve this illumination, draw these generalizations, or read these clues. The study of shape, size, and density is less like mathematical science and more like morphology in the older sense of this term as the logic-study of form. I am even more skeptical, moreover, that equations and models of social affairs that treat density, size, and shape as variables and assign these variables values illuminate social affairs. Some researchers will pronounce the concepts of density, size, and shape useless if precisely measuring them or using them as variables in equations and models does not contribute to understanding or explaining social life. My response is that not all uses of the concepts rest on assigning numbers to them. I just suggested, for example, (1) that knowledge of relative sizes or densities and of kinds of shape can further the enterprise of social understanding and explanation and (2) that insightful generalizations can be made on the basis of the sizes, densities, or shapes of social phenomena, for example, about the dependence of scattered industries such as distillation on other industries and features of the material landscape. Juxtaposing the density, size, and shape of spatially overlapping or adjacent social phenomena offers clues about how the phenomena work and the sorts of connections that exist between them. Density, size, and shape can also contribute to how social affairs work and evolve. For instance, the shape assumed by a social phenomenon can affect how it evolves over time. I am skeptical that it is possible Durkheim-like to explain general features of social life by reference to these properties. But size, shape, and density characterize and devolve from the accumulation of material entities and arrangements thereof over time, which Bjørnar Olsen (2014: 185) nicely describes as “the swelling persistence of the past.” This accumulation is key to grasping the historical trajectories of

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social phenomena because it is inherently part of the perpetually metamorphosing starting point for what happens next in social life. More generally, the label “social physics” covers varied approaches that share the conviction that social affairs can be modeled as if they were physical states of affairs (contrast Bourdieu’s (1990b: 122) construal of social physics as the treatment of social life as something purely objective and Pentland’s (2014) construal of it as the predictive mathematical analysis of human behavior). This conviction suggests that models for physical systems should be used or adopted for analyzing social phenomena. The problem with this overall approach is the very treatment of social phenomena, or rather, the practice-arrangement bundles in which they consist, as physical systems—even if this construal is heuristic. This treatment commits, in Ryle’s (1949) words, a category mistake. Practice-arrangements bundles neither are nor are like physical systems. Rather, they contain such systems. The models, however, that social physics import from the physical sciences can treat social phenomena only as if they were physical systems. As a result, social physics must revise these models in ways that overcome or eliminate this difference. Doing this involves making the models truer to social reality, that is, more “realistic.” Using social reality both as the standard for gauging the realism of models and as the object to be reconstructed, the researcher makes these models more realistic by introducing into them nonphysical elements of bundles and constellations, thus features of human activity, existence, and practice (cf. Hillier 2005). The result is that the enterprise of revising these models can only hope to reproduce social reality, not to chart or explain what happens there. For example, some social phenomena, for example, cities (e.g., Batty and Longley 1994), might have interesting fractal properties. A model of fractal physical structures that fits the material development and form of a particular city simply reproduces this development and form: it does not explain why the city developed that way or why it has this form. This chapter completes the analyses that furnish basic conceptual ingredients of the account of social change presented in the next two chapters. These ingredients include explicit concepts of change, event, and process and the thesis that social phenomena are slices or aspects of the practice plenum and thus composed of practices, arrangements, relations that bundle these, and relations among the resulting bundles. The ingredients also include an enhanced sensitivity to the significance of the material dimension of society for social life, social change, and their analyses.

4 Social dynamics I Chains of activity

Chapters one, two, and three laid the ground for the study of the central topic of this book, social change. Chapter one examined, among other things, the nature of change, its relation to difference, and the connection of these to events and processes. The concepts of change, difference, event, and process, together with those of activity, practice, material entity, arrangement, and bundle, form the basic conceptual armature with which social dynamics is to be analyzed. Chapter two then explored the composition of the practice plenum, the overall nexus of practices and arrangements. Social phenomena are constituted, and social dynamics play out, in this plenum. And chapter three explained both that the material world forms a crucial dimension of the practice plenum and that the ecology of social life encompasses, not just the practice plenum, but also life trajectories, phenomena of broader and inner nature, and forsaken as well as decaying artifacts and hybrids. The present and succeeding chapter analyze social dynamics, that is, directional motion, or more generally, change in social life. They are concerned with the nature, temporal features, and determinants of social change. The account that emerges over these chapters conceptualizes social changes as significant differences in social phenomena, treats these changes as features of the temporal course and phases of such phenomena, and maintains that changes in social phenomena arise from events and processes that befall them. Most important, because social phenomena consist in slices and aspects of the plenum of practices and arrangements, the account holds that the events and processes from which social changes arise befall or bear on practices, arrangements, and bundles. The present chapter explores one of the two major generators of significant differences in the plenum: chains of activity. The discussion ranges over a series of topics. After general comments about the nature of social change, I address the import of human activity generally for change, the phenomenon of chains of

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activity, the alternative accounts of action chains found in the work of Tarde and Latour, key properties and types of activity chains, the inflection of chains in individual lives, the ex post facto qualification of particular activities as originary, and the uneven front of change.

On social change Chapter one claimed that change is significant difference and that differences and changes arise from events and processes. In particular, changes in phenomena of a given sort arise from events and processes that pertain or bear on phenomena of that sort. Chapter two explained that social phenomena consist in slices or aspects of the plenum of practices, thus in slices or aspects of bundles of practices and arrangements. This ontological thesis implies that changes in social phenomena consist in significant differences in practices, arrangements, and bundles. An evolution in the bourbon market, the development of new social associations through ICTs, the formation or demise of a sports league, the establishment of new government regulatory powers, changes in religious rites, new trends in parenting, and resurgences in overt prejudice—all these and further changes consist in changes to practices, to arrangements, to relations between practices and arrangements, or to relations among bundles. Changes of these sorts, moreover, arise from events and processes that befall practices, arrangements, bundles, and their components. That is to say, social changes emerge from the events, continuous unfoldings, complexes of continuous events, and sequences and nexuses of these occurrences that befall bundles and their components. In light of the facts that the world embraces endless events and processes and that sequences of events and unfoldings intersect, this formulation can be further amplified, to wit: social change is the emergence of significant differences in practice-arrangement bundles from the intersecting and connected events, processes, and sequences and nexuses thereof that happen to practices, arrangements, and bundles. Theoretical disquisitions about change, like concrete explanations of particular changes or complexes thereof, must refer, directly or indirectly, to these intersecting and connected events, processes, sequences, and nexuses. Keep in mind, moreover (see chapter one), that events, processes, and nexuses of these are responsible, not just for changes, but also for the persistence and stability of social affairs. Social changes consist in significant configurations of differences in bundles. As a result, the basic components of bundles underwrite a typology of ingredients of change. Social changes usually embrace configurations, often complex configurations, of these. Significant differences can exist in activities, practice organizations, arrangements, relations among practices and arrangements, relations among bundles, and space or time. Since practices are composed of activities, differences in which activities compose practices can amount to changes in the latter. Differences in organization, too, can amount to changed practices. Differences, for example, in how given actions are bodily carried out implicate differences in practical understanding, thus in practice organizations. Organization differences

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can also lie in reshufflings of both the rules that are upheld in a practice and its teleoaffective structure (acceptable and enjoined ends, projects, and emotions). Meanwhile, differences in which entities make up arrangements can constitute changes in arrangements, as can differences in material and other events and processes that befall or are captured, created, or controlled in arrangements. Differences of these sorts must be distinguished from alterations to material entities such as tattoos, wear and tear, and repairs, which far less often amount to change. Finally, differences in relations among practices and arrangements can constitute changes in bundles, just as differences in relations among bundles can amount to changes in constellations. And differences in space and time, that is, in spatial and temporal features of practices, arrangements, and bundles, can constitute spatial and temporal changes.

The centrality of activity Boiled down to basics, the central kind of event bound up with social change is human activity: human activity is the principal generator of difference and change in social life. I will not seek to defend this proposition argumentatively. Indeed, I am not sure how one could win over doubters through argument. Instead, I will try over the remainder of the book to build on this conviction, showing how it anchors an insightful account of social change that is useful to investigators. Human activity is an event. It is an event that befalls people. Another word for activity is “performance.” Performing an action, accordingly, is an event that befalls people. This might sound counterintuitive since we normally think of performance as something people do, not something that happens to them. It is true that to perform (an action) is to do something. People, however, do not perform their performances. Rather, these performances happen to them. The activity-events that happen to people are performings of action (for discussion, see Schatzki 2010: chapt. 4). The events that are performings happening to people happen in the world. Happening in the world, these activity-events can connect to further events or states of affairs there. In particular, many activities are interventions in the world that alter its setup. Intervening in the world, making alterations there, is a form of causality (of the bringing-about sort). I understand that the concept of causality is contentious and that some theorists of the physical or social worlds believe that the physical or social sciences can do perfectly well without it. I don’t presently want to take up abstruse discussions of the nature of causality. It suffices for the purposes of this book to recall Aristotle’s four types of cause and to appropriate Heidegger’s (e.g., 1977) interpretation of the Greek word aition, of which “cause” is the standard translation, as: that which is responsible for something else, alternatively, that to which something else is indebted, that on which it depends. Aristotle (1941b: A3) identified four ways in which something can be responsible for something else: formally, materially, efficiently, and final-ly, that

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is, teleologically. An act of intervening in the world, altering it, certainly bears responsibility for the resulting alteration; in this sense, the alteration depends on the intervention. It is in this straightforward sense that those activity-events that are interventions in the world bear a causal relationship to the alterations of the world that result. Interventions directly alter material arrangements and material connections among arrangements. Indeed, many of the differences that interventions introduce in the world concern material arrangements and connections. Interventions do not directly reorganize practices or that often alter how practices and arrangements bundle or bundles connect. As we will see, the material alterations that interventions bring about can play important roles in the generation of social change. Of course, not all activities are interventions. Dance moves, expressions of anger, acts of imagination or thought, requests for help, indeed, sayings in general, are not—at least not in the first place—interventions: they do not in themselves alter the setup of the world. What, however, is true about activities generally—including interventions—is that their occurrence automatically generates differences—typically small, but sometimes larger—with other doings and sayings that compose the practices of which they are part. Differences in relations between practices and arrangements can likewise arise from activities of all sorts, not only vis-à-vis causality, as when people reorganize a workplace, but also vis-à-vis directedness toward, as when someone through discussion acquires a different attitude toward, thinks differently about, or uses material objects and arrangements differently, or vis-à-vis essentialness, as when alterations in repair practices frees these practices from their dependence on particular pieces of equipment. Similarly, activities of all sorts can institute spatial and temporal differences in where and when practices occur, as when shopping practices migrate to a new shopping center built at the intersection of two major roads. Through sayings, people can also, among other things, formulate new rules, discuss what ends and projects they should pursue, and argue about whether a given emotional display was appropriate, thereby setting into motion the reorganization of one or more practices. Some activities are inventive or innovative. Practically all activities are inventive in the minimal sense that they are attuned to the situations in which people find themselves and do not simply repeat prior actions irrespective of the specifics of these situations (“mechanical reproduction”). Inventive activities in this sense are often simply adjustments and utterly trivial, as when a person has to hold her cell-phone at a cramped angle when talking because the rush-hour subway car is jammed full of people (though what makes this example trivial is that we who are imagining it simply suppose that nothing of consequence follows from her holding the phone at an odd angle; we can all come up with unlikely alternative scenarios). Some actions, however, are more overtly inventive or innovative. A new dance or football move, a twist on an existing bourbon recipe, a novel color combination, a creative combination of emojis—what makes these actions overtly inventive or innovative in comparison to omnipresent adjustments to

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circumstances is that they introduce significant differences into the world. What makes the differences significant, moreover, can vary. In some cases, it lies in further differences that arise from these. Technological innovations are often like this—they lead to new ways of doing things, altered material arrangements and practices, and even, eventually, transformed constellations. In other cases, significance arises, less dramatically, from the fact that others can, and might be motivated to, adopt or imitate them. The aforementioned inventions or innovations are like this. In all cases, the significance of difference is tied to how the world reacts to it. Activities can generate differences, but it is how the world reacts to these differences that bestows significance on or accords them status as innovative or inventive. This includes the reactions of observers, commentators, and researchers, that is, their judgments and juxtapositions of the differences in question with other phenomena. Even though many of the events through which social changes come about are activities, relatively few social changes are intentionally brought about by individuals. Human activity is the medium through which many changes come about, and human intentionality is an important feature of social life. But people do not aim to produce the bulk of the changes that arise through their activities, and they have limited knowledge of the chains of action starting in or passing through their lives that are responsible for these changes. Two of the promises of social research are greater knowledge of the generation of difference and change and an enhanced ability of people, individually or as associated, to control social affairs.

Chains of activity Many activity-events, including many interventions in the world, are reactions. People’s activities react, for example, to others’ remarks or actions, to events in the circumjacent setting, to changes in social affairs, to new opportunities, and to natural events. Whenever a person responds to something, what she does is beholden to it. It may be true in each case that she could have acted otherwise, including not reacted to this thing at all. But if what does happen is that she reacts to it, then what she does reacts to it. Consequently, it bears some responsibility for her action: if it had not existed or occurred she likely would have proceeded differently. Whenever, therefore, someone reacts to something, the something qualifies as a cause of her activity. An alternative way of putting the matter is that whenever someone reacts to something, that something leads to, or induces, her action. This leading-to or inducing sort of causality differs from the bringing-about sort manifested in intervening in the world. But it is causality nonetheless. It is a way that one thing can be responsible for another, a way that the latter can be indebted to or depend on the former. It follows that activity qua event is often bound up with two sorts of causality: bringing about alterations to the world and events as well as states of the world leading to particular activities. Acting for an end is a third sort of causality involved (Aristotle’s final

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causality). I  should point out, incidentally, that bringing about alterations and inducing activity are actual relations. They are not, as a result, subject to the sort of analysis of causal relations common in the qualitative social disciplines that construes such relations as combinations of necessary and sufficient conditions (see Mahoney and Goertz 2006). These analyses are Humean in character: they presume that causality is not an actual relation and that what there is in the world that answers to the concept of causality is regularities. Causal relations of the intervention and leading-to sorts underwrite the existence of chains of actions. As noted, a chain of actions is a series of actions, each member of which reacts to the prior action in the chain or to a change in the world that that prior action brought about. An example of a chain is one person sending a text, to which a second person reacts by sending a text to someone else, to which that other person reacts by saying something to the friend next to her, to which the friend reacts ….and so on. Perhaps the person who sent the initial text was reacting to a car crash that she had witnessed, which itself arose from a driver looking down at his phone after receiving a text and not doing anything as the physical processes activated in the automobile moved the car along the pavement toward another car that had suddenly lurched into the road from a d­ riveway—as a result of the physical processes at work in that other auto consequent on its driver suddenly stepping on the gas in reaction to being late to pick up his child from school. Most of the things that anyone does are reactions to events and states of affairs in the world. As a result, people continually extend chains of action through their activities, even though they are typically unaware that this is occurring: they are focused on whatever they react to and usually ignorant of the activities and other events or states of affairs that make up the chains that eventuated in this. In simply going about one’s business over the course of a day, one extends a myriad of actions chains, which thereby pass through one’s life. Chains of action are composed of activities (among other things). Each of these activities is a component of some practice(s) or other. Chains of action, consequently, transpire within and across practices. Many practices are complex enough for chains to circulate within them. Examples are car repair practices, cooking practices, distilling practices, marketing practices, online gaming practices, and communication practices (online, offline, or combined). For a chain to circulate within a given practice is for the activities that compose it to be components of the practice, that is, for people to carry on the practice by reacting to one another’s actions (or to changes in the world that these actions effect). What they do, and hence the chain formed by their actions, upholds the organization of the practice. Note that chains that circulate within given practices typically embrace a considerable dose of interaction. By contrast, chains cross practices when successive actions in them are components of different practices, that is, when someone carrying on one practice responds to someone else carrying on a different practice. When this occurs, an activity that upholds the organization of one practice reacts to an activity that upholds the organization of a different one. Someone who sees his neighbor next door cooking might call to ask whether he

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can come over, thereby extending a chain from cooking practices to practices of communication and friendship. Note that in crossing practices, chains of action can pass through and, thus, link different bundles. Particular links in chains can also effect relations (e.g., of causality, constitution, and mind/action—see chapter two) between practices and material arrangements, thereby bundling them. To the extent that this occurs, the stability of bundles depends on the reoccurrence of particular chains. How people extend chains of action, whether within specific or across different practices, can depend on the roles and positions they occupy in these and other practices. In the car crash example, for instance, how someone reacts to the crash is likely to differ if she is a police officer, a parent of one of the individuals involved in the accident, or someone who occupies no position or role relevant to the incident or those bound up in it. Roles and positions are often built into the organizations of practices: rules, like the enjoinment and acceptability of ends and actions, are often articulated by reference to roles or positions. Because of this, role-based divergences in how people react to given events and extend chains more generally typically reflect the circumscribing effect of practice organizations on activity. This circumscription often leaves space for individual idiosyncrasy or initiative. Chains of action can be responsible for a wider range of differences in bundles than can single activities directly. Differences of many sorts result from people’s reactions to others’ actions and others’, including the original actors’, responses to these reactions (etc.). Reorganizations of practices, especially of the rules and teleoaffectivities that govern them, sometimes result from people responding to one another’s actions: differences and changes in normativity arise from chains of action. Differences in which doings and sayings compose a practice can likewise arise from chains of action; a cooking innovation that rewrites the range of doings and saying that compose cooking practices can be a reaction to something the innovative cook saw on TV the month before. Indeed, the multiplicities of activities that make up chains of action can be responsible for accumulations of differences in bundles. Similarly, chains of actions can be responsible for far more differences in (1) material layouts and (2) relations between practices and arrangements than can individual actions directly. Chains of action also cross, join, and form complexes that are responsible for multitudes of differences in practices, arrangements, and bundles. Because changes in constellations involve such multitudes, large nexuses of chains are needed to lead to and bring such changes about. Individual activities can directly alter practices, arrangements, and maybe simple bundles, but they are powerless to alter more complex bundles.

Tarde and Latour on chains of activity The idea of chains of action has a history. Two illustrious exponents are Gabriel Tarde and Bruno Latour; Norbert Elias likewise makes crucial use of the notion

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(see chapter eight). Chains of action are also an example of what Mahoney (2000: 526) calls “reactive sequences,” which are sequences of “temporally ordered and causally connected events.” According to Mahoney, sequences of this sort are central to historical sociology. Note that, despite linguistic similarities, Collins’ (2004) interaction ritual chains are not chains of action. An interaction chain is the series of interactions that an individual person experiences. In principle it extends to the end of his or her life, and the only inherent connection among its links—the interactions—is that the same person lives through them. It is true that interactions are a type of action chain (see following section) and that a person can respond to an interaction or some component of it. These facts only imply, however, that action chains can coincide with interaction chains for short stretches. According to Tarde (1899), the most basic relation in any of the three principle domains of reality he distinguished (the physical, the biological, and the social) is repetition. In the domain of the social, repetition takes the form of imitation: the imitation by one person of another person’s use of a word, expression of an idea, use of some artifact, or way of behaving (etc.). For Tarde, however, repetition is not the mechanical replication of an use, expression, or behavior. Rather, each act of imitation is original. An imitative act takes over the use of a word or a way of behaving etc. from someone else. But as a performance it is sensitive both to the peculiarities of who acts and to the particular circumstances of performance (on this mix of passivity and activity in imitation, see Karsanti 2010). Tarde called a series of imitations, each link of which appropriates a word etc. from its predecessor, a “ray of imitations.” The totality of imitation rays branching out from a single action is the imitative radiance of that action. By themselves, furthermore, imitation rays tend to infinity; that is, people, other things being equal, keep imitating predecessors. Imitative rays also make up the substance of tradition and custom, and the job of education is to initiate youth into their propagation. People who extend a given ray or partake of the same radiance are also thereby associated with one another, as when the circulation of beliefs and ways of behaving forms a religious community. Of course, other things are not equal. The imitation rays branching out from a given action collide with the imitation rays branching out from other origins. These collisions take place in individual people, and the resulting moments of opposition are marked by hesitation—between two words, two ideas, two artifacts, or two ways of behaving. These moments can be resolved in two basic ways: the individual can either decide to continue one but not the other ray or, more interesting, combine the rays to create something new, an invention. If the first option is seized, one of the intersecting imitation rays continues. When the second option is seized, a new ray arises from the invention (also called an “adaptation”) and joins the overall field of propagating rays. Other obstacles to the propagation of rays include the boundaries of families, tribes, nations, castes, and social classes. Tarde does not describe imitation rays as causal phenomena. Because, however, people are so constituted and trained as to propagate rays, the rays have a

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kind of momentum that is reminiscent of causality. At the same time, as indicated, imitation is an action and not mechanical reproduction. Imitation is certainly an important feature of social life. Traditions in the sense of customs and folkways are imitative phenomena, and children to some extent imitate others as they mature. However, Tarde’s idea that the social world is essentially intersecting lines of imitation wrongly accords omnipresence to the phenomenon. It also provides a rather narrow picture of what people do when they speak and act. Much human activity is not imitation in Tarde’s sense. Although the relationship between earlier and later uses of the same word, expositions of the same idea, or enactments of the same way of acting is, strictly speaking, one of repetition, it might or might not be one of imitation. For encountering someone using a particular word or behaving in some way does not automatically grant any particular significance to that encounter vis-à-vis the encountering person’s subsequent usage or performance: the encounter yields an imitation only when the encounterer’s subsequent use of the word etc. specifically takes over that use from the other person, and this occurs only under certain circumstances. What’s more, most uses of a word in speaking and writing are not illuminatingly conceptualized as imitations of a previous use: doing this ignores how circumstances, communicative intent, and lexical options inform usage. Like Tarde, Latour views the social world as composed of chains of action. Unlike Tarde, he does not think that the actions that make up these chains are performed by actors. Latour (2005: 46, 216) rejects the word “actor” because, he claims, it suggests the idea of a source: actors as the source, or starting point, of actions. Much the same, he thinks, can be said about the term “doing:” it suggests that a doer initiates it. According to Latour, the problem with the notion of source is that it badly fits with the experience people have of being made to act by agencies outside themselves over which they have no control. When someone experiences this, her act is not a doing that she initiates, and it is not clear that it is she who acts. Latour generalizes this experience and claims that it is always fundamentally uncertain who is acting and why (ibid.: 45). Activity is, instead, an event (ibid.). Making something else act, the experience of which Latour marshals to dismiss the notions of actor and doing, characterizes what he calls a “mediator:” the action of a mediator is to make something else act. The actions that compose the chains that Latour espies in the world are the work of mediators, not actors: each is an action of making something else act. In such chains, of course, the action of something that is made to act is to make some further thing act. As a result, a mediator chain is composed of one entity making another entity act, which makes a further entity act, which makes yet another entity act, and so on. The social world (like any other world, however worlds are demarcated) is populated by mediator chains, thus by chains of making act, not by chains of actors and doings. “[T]here is no society, no social realm, and no social ties [all of which would concern interrelated actors-TRS], but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations” (Latour 2005: 108, italics in original)

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Most crucial, chains of mediation are not series of cause and effect. According to Latour, the cause-effect relation involves the faithful transmission of something and is thus predictable; nothing ever exists in the effect that was not already in the cause. Mediators, by contrast, “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning of elements they are supposed to carry” (ibid.: 39) Whereas in causal systems inputs fairly well predict outputs, in mediator systems unpredictability and uncertainty reign (ibid.: 58). Finally, although I have been speaking of human beings, Latour holds that there is no privileged form for mediators. Not only human beings, but also desires, statistics, governments, ghosts, animals, art works, storms, and imagined scenarios—indeed, anything that can make something act—can be mediators. Latour’s opposition to the notions of actor and doing rests on an overly substantial, even causal sense of source, starting point, and initiative. He also seems to treat this source as internal (the subject). Latour’s argument ignores notions of performance that avoid construing actors as subsistent (internal) sources of initiative. An influential example is found in Butler (1990); many other versions exist. As explained, for example, my view is that activity is an event that happens to ­people. The activity events that happen to people are performances, or doings. As  a result, the people to whom these events occur are performers of actions (­actors), and as performers they can be held responsible for what they do. But ­people are not substantial sources or starting points of initiative: activity befalls them. As for causality, Latour, as noted, contrasts mediation with causality. It is not clear, however, what making X act amounts to if it is not some sort of causality. In the end, Latour needlessly handicaps himself. He is right that the past does not reliably determine present (and future) action. But the transmission sort of causality he criticizes is not the only sort that might be associated with activity. For example, Mead (1980, see also Schatzki 2010) held that activity itself determines what in the past causes it. In sum, the notions of actor and doing that Latour rejects form only one possible—and today widely rejected—pair of such notions, and he does not cleanse the notion of mediation of causality. There is no reason to substitute the notion of mediation for that of acting (doing, performing). Despite these criticisms, I use the notion of action chains much as Tarde and Latour use the notions of imitation rays or mediator chains, namely, to envision the social world as filled with a myriad of linked, crisscrossing chains that generate a myriad of differences in practices, arrangements, and bundles and thereby are responsible or coresponsible for most social changes. These chains provide the energy that is responsible for change, to speak with Collins, or the movement that leaves change behind in its wake, to speak with process theorists. They dynamize bundles. This picture also updates my earlier (2002: 189) claim that “agency is the central motor of a constant becoming that sweeps” through social life. I now prefer to say that human activity is the central component of the labyrinthine nexuses of events and processes that permeate social life maintaining and transforming it. These activity-events, in continuously unfolding, are process-like in Bergson’s sense.

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Features and types of activity chain Several feature of chains of action should be distinguished. To begin with, links in chains can be intentional or unintentional. What I mean is that an activity that reacts to and thereby creates a link to a prior activity can be the performance of an intentional or unintentional action. Most activities in chains are performances of intentional actions, but occasions occur when something leads a person unintentionally to do something, which in turn leads to others’ responses. For example, if someone reacts to an upsetting personal text by writing a painfully personal reply and inadvertently sending it to everyone on some recipient list, and this blunder leads to consternation and conversations among the recipients, an unintentional action plays a key role in the nexus of action chains in the situation. Of course, although people usually extend action chains by performing intentional actions, and although they extend action chains and react to prior events in acting intentionally, they rarely intend to extend the chains involved or to react to the events concerned. The actions are intentional, but their being part of action chains is not. A second feature of chains of action is that they are distributed through the plenum of practice. They can be denser in certain spatial-temporal locales or regions—small or large—and thinner in others, and happen quicker on some occasions or in some places than in others. Chains also, as intimated, join to form larger nexuses (see below) that pervade particular bundles and link them with others. In addition, chains en masse can funnel into or fan out from particular bundles. This phenomenon is nicely highlighted in Latour’s (2005) notion of power centers, which are particular sites through which masses of consequential mediator chains pass. Latour distinguishes three sorts of power center: oligoptica, panoramas, and centers of calculation. Oligoptica are sites that are capable of seeing other particular sites in great detail. Examples are prisons and military command centers. Panoramas, by contrast, are sites that are capable of seeing many other sites but not in much detail or in only particular ways. Examples are state census bureaus, political headquarters, and board of trustee meetings. Centers of calculation, finally, are sites where calculations are made that either spawn or are carried along chains of mediation to other sites where they make a difference to what goes on there. The statistics and budget offices maintained by organizations such as governments, corporations, and universities are prime examples of such centers. The funneling of incoming, and fanning out of outgoing, action chains that characterize power centers is an important feature of the practice plenum; their existence illuminates what is going on in the sectors of the plenum connected with them. Pace Latour, however, power centers do not control what happens in the practice plenum. They certainly make a difference to what happens there. But not only does whatever control they exert depend—as Hegel pointed out—on the activities that compose the bundles they allegedly control, but much more of the plenum than these centers alone contributes to events and developments there. Their actions also can be drowned in the cascades and waves

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of action chains that occur in fads, panics, consolidations of opinion, losing and winning streaks in sports, collective reactions to public events, and the like. Actions chains have important temporal properties. Examples are speed, rhythm, and acceleration. The speed of chain is how quickly its links occur measured against a clock (or by reference to order of occurrence in an individual’s experience), whereas the rhythm of a chain is the repetition of any sequences or patterns that help compose it. The rhythm of distillation, for instance, is the repetition of the sequence of phases that compose it—fermentation, preparation of the mash, distilling, barreling, storage etc. Action chains can affect temporal properties of things. The use of ICTs, for example, disrupts many rhythms while originating or anchoring relatively few new ones. The temporal properties of things can also lend themselves to a certain mystification. For example, the fact that action chains, bundles, and social phenomena exhibit different speeds and rhythms engenders the idea, pervasive today, that social life exhibits multiple times. This way of talking is a bit of a misnomer since the phenomenon it describes amounts simply to social phenomena displaying different temporal features. In this sense, social life, and individual bundles as well, automatically displays multiple times. Another feature of chains of action is that they can form loops. Loops exist when a person at t1 performs an action that is part of a chain that then continues beyond him and later at t2 performs another action that is part of the same chain. Due to the time element involved, it might be better to call such chains spirals instead of loops. The social world is full of such loops, or rather spirals, many of which are insignificant. Spirals are important, however, because they can effectuate feedback. Feedback exists when an actor learns about ramifications of earlier acts of his and performs particular activities as a consequence, including activities that counteract or amplify these ramifications (negative and positive feedback, respectively). For a chain to constitute a feedback spiral, it must transmit information to actors about the ramifications of their actions, regardless of whether they realize that their actions are responsible for these ramifications. A distiller who samples the awful taste of his experimental recipe might be moved to change his recipe. So, too, might a distiller who learns about consumer evaluations through consumer surveys. Economic crashes also result from feedback loops since they involve economic actions leading to deleterious consequences (selling leading to a fall in prices), information that these consequences have occurred making its way back to the actors, and these people therewith being induced to perform the same actions again (sell further), thereby worsening the situation. A key variable in spirals is whether actors are aware that the states of affairs to which they react are effects of their own (and maybe others’) earlier actions. Even in a market crash people might not be aware that that the depressed prices that are inducing them to sell again are the results of their own earlier actions. In today’s world, this example might seem a little fanciful. But many other spirals exist in which people are not aware of their responsibility for a situation that they

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are making worse through their reactions to it. Often, for instance, people are unaware of the effects their remarks have on others. If the responses that these others make to the remarks lead the people who make them to say additional things that only amplify the original effects, thereby making the situation worse, a spiral emerges for which the original actors do not grasp their responsibility. The chances of not cognized interpsychic spirals are immensely increased by contemporary ICTs and the communication practices they support. Feedback spirals are potentially of great significance for social life because they facilitate strong directional change. When feedback loops proceed within particular practices, bundles, or constellations, they contribute to the making of what can be called “islands,” “eddies,” or “plumes.” What I mean is that feedback loops can partly isolate bundles and constellations from others, cause rapid deteriorations in bundles and constellations, or quickly move these into new configurations. Another important feature of actions chains is that they form nexuses. To say that they form nexuses is to say that they hang together. I do not want to canvas all the ways that action chains hang together. It is important, however, to give some sense of the phenomenon. One way chains connect is by virtue of the same individuals propagating them. For example, numerous action chains, encompassing the activity of diverse participants, pass through the activities of the moderator of an online discussion forum and thereby form a nexus. Another way chains hang together is by passing through or circulating within the same bundles. The large variety of chains that transpire as people carry on educational practices in settings such as classrooms, halls, and offices form nexuses by virtue of circulating within these bundles. A weak version of this kind of nexus embraces chains that proceed through the same settings but belong to different practices, as when drug selling takes place in a park where young children are playing, teenagers are skateboarding, and adults are having picnics. Chains, third, form nexuses when they bifurcate or coalesce. When two people react differently to the latest component of some chain of action, that chain bifurcates into two. Correspondingly, when someone, in acting, reacts to activities that are components of different chains, chains coalesce. It is obvious that social life is filled with multitudinous bifurcating and coalescing chains. Indeed, social life embraces a veritable maze of action chains, whose details cannot be fully grasped, monitored, or registered. Patterns, however, emerge in this labyrinth. As discussed, for example, chains funnel into and fan out from choke points (Latour’s power centers). Chains, like relations among bundles, can also form regions—small or large—of greater or lesser density, indicating regions of greater or lesser activity. Chains can also circulate within given bundles or constellations, forming islands. Teamwork, for instance, takes this form. It is not hard to imagine a morphology of action chains in the practice plenum that maps the forms or shapes assumed by nexuses of chains there. Nexuses of action compose what many researchers and theorists call collective actions. The collectives to which such actions are attributed are many: gangs, political movements, employees, students, military units, sports teams, active

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learning groups in large classrooms, digital associations, and rival distilleries (etc.). To speak of these social phenomenon as collectives that take action is to pick out particular sets of individuals—those, or a subset thereof, who form a group or are members of an organization or community—and to mark the fact that actions of these individuals, together with chains that their actions are part of, are organized around the pursuit of particular purposes (cf. Welch and Yates 2018). The chains involved circulate in the bundles that compose the group or organization or connect these bundles to others, for instance, those composing rival gangs, government authorities, management, university administration, political action committees, insurgencies, and other sports teams or active learning groups. Collective actions consist in such nexuses of chains. Several types of action chain can be distinguished. These include interaction, dialogue, exchange, governance, and haphazardness. Interaction is a general category that encompasses some of these as subtypes. Interactions also exemplify the pervasively recognized category of relation discussed in chapter two: specific ties among individuals. Interactions exist when two or more people react reciprocally to one another’s actions. Sequential reciprocal actions constitute chains of action that bounce back and forth among the individuals involved. The category of interaction as such, moreover, places no restrictions on which reciprocal actions can compose interactions. Interactions can involve people who are in the physical presence of one another; individuals who are physically separated but able to see or hear one another (over Skype, say, or cell phones); individuals who cannot directly communicate with one another but who send messages to others, who send them on to their recipients; individuals who do not know each other or even with whom they are interacting but who interact under the direction of organizational (i.e., military, corporate, criminal) authorities; and so on. Faceto-face interactions, direct or mediated, are ubiquitous, familiar, and paradigmatic for the category. Interactions, however, exist whenever people reciprocally respond to one another’s activities. As noted, interaction is a general category. Subtypes are demarcated according to the sort of thing going on in interactions. One important subtype comprises exchanges. Exchanges exist when one party gives something to another party and receives something from the other party in return. Gift giving is a prominent kind of exchange. Gift giving is a kind of action chain in which one party gives a gift to another. Gift giving often is not overtly reciprocal, as when parents give presents to children or visitors give gifts to hosts. An exchange, however, is still effected in these situations, not of gift for gift, but of gift for, say, thanks, appreciation, salutes, bows, promises, or services. Gift giving thus comprises action chains in which actions that either are of these sorts or that express these matters respond to acts of giving a gift. Indeed, an act of giving a gift almost never occurs independent of such a chain; when it does, it might be perceived as inappropriate. The concept of gift, moreover, is broad, embracing not just material things but pieces of information, fealty and support, opportunities and protection, thoughts and emotions, and so on. As anthropologists have long

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explored, elaborate states of dependence among individuals and groups can be generated from gift-giving chains of action, more generally, from action chains of the exchange variety. These chains involve a gamut of emotions and attitudes and an entire range of bonds of attachment and indebtedness, often extending over long periods of time. A given exchange, moreover, might involve a nexus of action chains instead of a single one. Exchanges between entities other than individuals, for instance, between governments, tribes, and cities, are like this. Such exchanges encompass nexuses of action chains that circulate within and cross bundles that compose the entities involved. A prisoner swap between states is an example, as are commercial arrangements between companies and trading relations between nations as well as the highly ritualized exchanges between groups that are documented in the annals of traditional anthropology. This observation about exchanges applies to other types of chains mentioned below, as well as to the more general category of interaction. Not all exchanges, of course, are instances of gift giving. Another paradigmatic kind of exchange comprises those that are economic in character, in which items of roughly the same or commensurate value are exchanged. Barter and sale/purchase are two prime forms of economic exchange; exchanges of the latter sort build markets. Barter and sale/purchase are interactions in which an exchange occurs between two parties, respectively, of goods or labor for goods or labor or of goods or labor for money. Such relations can occur face-to-face. They can also embrace elaborate nexuses of action chains: barters or sales/purchases to which groups and organizations are party often require extensive chains. Even when barters or sales/purchases among individuals are consummated in particular identifiable activities, these activities are components of extended chains that lead to and away from them and that are part of broader nexuses of chains. A second important type of interaction is dialogue or conversation. In such interactions, sayings dominate what people do. Nondiscursive doings often transpire, too, but sayings are what qualify an interaction as a dialogue or conversation. Dialogue is a crucial element of social life, and it is often part of the nexuses of action chains through which exchanges are executed. Particular stretches or phases of action chains can also take the form of dialogue, as when a discussion at headquarters leads to the nexuses of action chains that implement a new ad campaign or a new maneuver at the front. The ever-growing import of the (social) interactionist literature writ large means that many analysts are wont to see interactions whenever people react to other’s activities. It is important, consequently, to emphasize that not all chains of action are interactions. A recent, very interesting example of action chains that are not interactions is found in contemporary international finance markets. International finance markets are mediated by computer systems and computer monitors that, in displaying the same continuously updated information the world over (lists of large trades, purchase offers, price quotes, market directions), conspire with trading practices to establish “scopic” (Knorr Cetina 2003)

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“regimes of attention” (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002) to which traders and managers are subject. Participating in or observing such markets places people in dynamic “synthetic situations” (Knorr Cetina 2009) that require continuous monitoring and preparedness: traders and observers attend continuously to their monitors and react to the events and information scopically presented there. Moreover, the computer software that supports such markets makes a given trader’s actions part of the information available to everyone on the system. Other traders react to this information, just as it was other traders’ reactions to information earlier made available on their screens that became information to which that trader responded. Knorr Cetina (2009) claims that an interactionist analysis should be undertaken of the action chains that are mediated by such computer systems and of the scopic regimes of attention that these systems, in conjunction with the trading practices in which they are employed, underwrite. However, apart from side communications that take place over electronic systems that link traders separately from (or as part of ) the software that displays trading and market information, no interactions occur. No interactions occur (in the market) when traders watch the market. No interactions occur even when traders accept the sell offers of other traders or sell to them. For no back and forth transpires between them; there isn’t even any communication between them. Accepting the offer (1) simply adds a link to a chain of actions that the seller’s posting of an offer is an element of and (2) initiates the exchange of currency (or of shares for money) that is effected by the computer system. The process is the same regardless of whether the buyer knows who posted the sell order or only that there is an offer to sell at a given price but has no idea who posted it. I am more sympathetic with Knorr Cetina’s claim that synthetic trading situations should be analyzed “microsociologically,” though I would drop any reference to micro (see chapter three and Schatzki 2016b) and say instead that analyses of electronic trading should capture pertinent details of the specific nexus of bundles involved (for an example, see Jarzabkowski et al. 2015). The more that the activities of different people are linked through scopic information systems, the less do those linked activities compose interactions. A type of action chain that, depending on circumstances, might or might not involve interactions is governance. In using the term “governance” I do not mean, as does recent work in political science (e.g., Stoker 1998, Hajer and Wagenaar 2003), to call attention either to the proliferation of nonstate governing agencies in contemporary social life or to the demise of the state as the master governing agency. I mean something much simpler, namely, intentional shaping, directing, or making a difference. Individuals, groups, and organizations of all sorts aim to govern social life in the sense of intentionally shaping, directing, or making a difference to how others act, the practices they carry on, the bundles they are part of, and the emergence, evolution, and demise of social phenomena. Governance is found in basically all walks of life and domains of society and is pursued by almost all individuals, groups, and organizations found there, not

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just those in positions of authority or dominance. Indeed, governance is nearly inherent in social life and in how people are directed toward both one another and the practices and bundles they carry on. Of course, the ubiquity and vitalness of governance do not entail that attempts at it succeed. Indeed, such attempts probably fail at least as often as they succeed. The effects, moreover, that people’s actions have on others and their practices and bundles are often unintended: how people react to attempts at governance can be quite varied and labile, and the action chains that arise from these attempts can quickly exceed the awareness and intentions of their performers. None of these facts, however, entail that governance is an unimportant feature of social life. Quite on the contrary: it is a never-ending pursuit. In any event, all cases and attempts at governance work through chains of action, which can be short (as when a superior orders an inferior to do something) or long (as when a distiller seeks to affect the bourbon market by introducing a new brand). Chains of action form what can be called “avenues of access” by which activities that aim at governance connect, if they do connect, to what their perpetrators aim to effect or alter. These chains can involve considerable interaction, exchange, and dialogue. (For a more extensive discussion of governance, see Schatzki 2015.) It is characteristic of interactions, exchanges, dialogues, and governance that the people whose activities compose them have some awareness that they are participating in a chain of action, perhaps even a chain of a particular sort, regardless of whether they would use the concepts I am employing here to describe the situation (e.g., chain, interaction, exchange, governance). What I mean is that they have some sense that what they are doing is tied to others’ activities, though this awareness might exhaust itself in the cognizance of responding to a specific person’s action or to a change in the world that the actions of a specific other person brought about. There is a vast dominion of chains, however, of which this is not true. This domain contains chains that are haphazard, undirected, and circumstantial. Such chains typically occur when people respond to changes in the world that others have brought about, utterly ignorant of the others involved or even that what they are responding to is an effect of some person’s or persons’ actions. Suppose that someone who picks up a piece of trash on the sidewalk and throws it into a bin extends a chain of actions whose preceding component is the litterer throwing the trash out a car window in response to his companion complaining about a messy automobile, and whose succeeding component is a city employee emptying the overflowing bin. The good citizen and the city employee probably have no knowledge of who is responsible for the states of affairs to which they react. This would have equally been the case if the good citizen had initiated—as opposed to extended—a chain, for instance, if the litterer had just absent-mindedly thrown the trash on the ground, in response to nothing. People endlessly react to features of the world that others are responsible for and therewith unwittingly extend action chains, short or long; they also unwittingly initiate chains. It is haphazard or circumstantial which lives such chains connect, and participants have no specific knowledge of the other participants and

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maybe also no inkling that their lives are interconnected. Social life is full of such chains, which are often trivial and irrelevant to the emerging state of the world but which can, under the right circumstances, lead to major developments. Occasions also exist when someone responds to others’ activities but the chain ends with her response: no further activities react to her’s. Indeed, action chains can consist of as few as two activities. Different reasons can exist why no one reacts to a given action: it might be unwitnessed by others, unknown to them, fail to alter the world, or be too trivial for others to care (etc.). The world is presumably full of short (and long) action chains that have concluded. An interesting example is the communication of information leading a recipient of that information to do something like “make a mental note of something” or simply acknowledge its receipt without further reacting to the communication. Information can also be simply “taken up” without being noted or acknowledged. In cases of these sorts, chains end; the uptake of information simply subtends the person’s future performances. A response to an action can also in principle come any length of time after the action is performed. Offers, insults, and awkward or inspiring situations that are left hanging are sometimes responded to weeks, months, or years after they occur. A lifetime is the longest that the temporal gap can take between an event and an individual person’s response. Gaps can also collectively persist over generations, a state of affairs that is effectuated through other chains of action among members of the family, organization, or nation involved. As noted, action chains link bundles when successive components of chains are components of different bundles. This idea, which was discussed in chapter two in the section about relations among bundles, has broad application. Chains, for example, can link bundles that share a given setting; examples are TV entertainment and gaming bundles transpiring in a living room and distilling and business bundles transpiring in the production room that houses a particularly impressive still. Chains can also link physically dispersed bundles such as those of distilling, marketing, and distribution. Chains, furthermore, not only link, but also circulate within and propagate through bundles. And in practically all cases bundles inform, even shape, chains of action. For example, both that and how people extend particular chains can reflect facts about the material entities and arrangements amid which they act. Contemporary ICTs, for instance, are crucial to how people link to others’ actions; indeed, the powers of ICTs in this regard make them potent shapers of interpersonal relations today. The spatial configuration of a room, building, or public space can likewise make a difference to how people extend or initiate chains of action. How, for instance, chains of action propagate through a distillery is tied to the organization of the facility into interconnected rooms (mash rooms, fermentation rooms, still rooms, equipment rooms, powerhouses, warehouses, bottling houses, mill houses, granaries, feeding pens, offices, loading docks, and train spurs etc.). In addition, material arrangements and their components prefigure, and also channel as well induce (see chapter two), how people react to prior activities and states of the world.

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And the broader constellations of bundles to which the bundle that a particular chain is circulating in or passing through also prefigure the extension of the chain. The broader constellations that compose the distillery and the bourbon business, for instance, prefigure how the master distiller reacts to a bad whiskey that the operation had put effort into producing. Of course, practice organizations circumscribe what people do in reacting to others’ actions, just as the antecedent, regularized, and patterned sayings and doings that have composed a practice up to any given point in time prefigure how people at that point extend or initiate chains. In short, chains of action do not proceed across a frictionless plane. They are informed and shaped by the bundles and constellations through which they pass. As a result, analyses of actions chains must keep track of the practice-arrangement bundles and constellations thereof as part of which social life plays out.

Individuals and inflection Every link in a chain of actions is a component of some life or other. A chain, as a result, is made up of elements of different lives. Note that every component of a chain is at once an element of a life and a component of some practice. Activities compose all at once chains, lives, and practices. Facts such as this undergird the asseveration that action is a, if not the, central phenomenon in human existence. Life trajectories do not themselves generate differences and changes in the practice plenum and, thus, in social affairs. For it is not life trajectories as such, but instead activities that make them up qua components of activity chains, that generate these differences and changes. Because, however, every activity composing a chain is an element of some life or other, the “reasons” (motives and ends) why individual links in chains occur are tied to the life trajectories of the people performing them; this holds equally of links that generate change and those that effectuate persistence or stasis. How, on a given occasion, someone reacts to others’ actions or to a state of the world usually has something to do with his prior experiences and actions, what he has learned, the routines he has established, what he believes, and what he is willing to act for, as well as with how things had been standing with him just prior to the reaction and what he had been up to then. Such matters form a context in which he reacts as he does. Occasions exist, of course, when differential features of the lives of the people performing certain actions—for example, floor traders during a precipitous oneday market plunge or Shakers welcoming orphans to their villages—are secondary or even irrelevant to their actions. On those occasions, everyone has the same “reasons” for how they act. Usually, however, including on trading floor and in Shaker villages, differential features of people’s lives make a difference to how they act. When, consequently, a specific individual’s actions contribute significantly to social change, the life trajectory of that individual bears on that action. The activities of specific individuals significantly contribute to change when (1) these

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activities set significantly different headings for chains of action of which they are components—what people do significantly diverges from existing precedents, regularities, and patterns—and (2) significant differences in social life result. Activities that qualify can be called “originary” activities (see the next section). The extent to which these two conditions are met is an empirical question. The introduction of successful hardware or software is often tied to the efforts of specific individuals. Few people are involved, particular actions of theirs set significantly new headings for ongoing chains of action, and it turns out that the new headings result in change (the extensive appropriation of the new hardware or software). The actions of these individuals thereby qualify after the fact as originary. The evolution of social associations that follows the introduction of certain new hardware and software can also depend on a few people who do things differently (see chapter seven). But it need not, and even when it does it depends much more on the activities of people more widely, who follow, copy, are inspired by, in general, carry out possibilities opened up by the activities of the few. The activities of people more broadly set only minutely different headings for ongoing chains, and the resulting evolution in associations is built up cumulatively through them. These activities, unlike the activities of the few, do not qualify as originary. The idea that individuals inflect the chains of which their activities are components is straightforward. How one person reacts to another person’s action can make a difference to how a third person in turn reacts to her act. For example, two people’s different reactions to a third person’s scathing slight of a mutual friend might lead a fourth person to act very differently depending on which of the two reactions she responds to. An upset reaction might induce the fourth person to do something to repair the situation, whereas an expression of sympathy with the slight might lead the fourth person to ignore the situation and leave the slighted person to her own devices. The two reactions to the slight thus have divergent implications for the collective and personal friendships involved. In ways such as this, different reactions to the same thing can lead to quite different sequels: the different reactions give different headings to the chains they initiate or extend, and different headings can lead to different results. Any activity automatically inflects a chain of which it is part by virtue of being its next component: the extension (or initiation) of the chain it effects is ipso facto the chain’s latest heading. Inflection in this sense bears some resemblance to Lucretius’ notion of the clinamen, which has been resurrected lately by Gilles Deleuze (1990) and Michel Serres (2001). For Lucretius, the clinamen is the infinitesimal, spontaneous, and thus unpredictable swerve of an atom from its previous path of fall. This swerve enables atoms to collide and changes to occur and also allows for free will. Similarly, each link in a chain establishes its latest heading. Inflection is not the same as the clinamen, however, because Lucretius conceptualized the clinamen as a swerve from a previous trajectory, whereas chains of action have trajectories only after the fact. It is not the case that each further link in a chain swerves from the chain’s previous trajectory; each further

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link instead establishes the chain’s latest heading and hence the trajectory of the chain up to that point. A chain’s trajectory thus constantly shifts as new links are added: activity chains have no “intrinsic sequentiality” (Griffin and Ragin 1994: 13) or “inherent logic” (Abbott 1992). The latest heading established by the most recent link in a chain, moreover, can deviate more or less from previous (latest) headings. Each further link in a chain thus establishes a more, less, or infinitesimally different direction for it. Due to inflection, practices and bundles are subject to a drift that arises from people’s responses both to others’ actions and to changes that others’ actions bring about in the world (the same conclusion follows from Bourdieu’s conception of habitus as a spontaneity; see chapter six). Drift affixes not just the doings and sayings that help compose given practices, but the organizations of practices and the material arrangements amid which people proceed as well. Drift is an omnipresent but often insignificant feature of the world, one facet of the endless production of differences that is characteristic of the dynamic world in which humans live. At the same time, the steady generation of ever more differences affords endless opportunities for change to arise; some of the endlessly accumulating divergences might prove to be significant, as determined by people’s reactions to them in conjunction with observers’ judgments and juxtapositions of them with other differences (see chapter one). In particular, endless differences offer endless opportunities for reactions to occur that ramify over time into changes, small or large. The more distillers there are, or the more users of cell phones or of electronic devices there are, the more opportunities there are for significant changes in distillation or in the use of electronic devices to arise from humdrum adjustments to circumstances or micro innovations. As a result, the endless production of differences through drift in practices and bundles can be a highly significant feature of social life. It can, over time, lead to change. As noted, some latest headings diverge much more from predecessors than others do. Larger deviations can instigate drift (though most drift results from smaller or miniscule deviations). But larger deviations can also quickly precipitate unfolding or larger complexes of difference and change. Inventions and ingenious fixes in problematic situations are obvious examples of larger deviations that often lead to larger changes. James Crow, for instance, revolutionized the Kentucky whiskey business in the 1820s by applying scientific principles to it and vastly improving and regularizing the quality of its products. In addition to new methods, he introduced the continuous still (around 1830), which was much more efficient than the pot stills that had exclusively been used up to then. Use of this still was quickly adopted by other distillers and soon became standard, thereby drastically changing the business (and setting it up for industrialization). Other examples of larger deviations leading to larger changes are found in the lives of “world-historical individuals,” as Hegel (1975) called them, such as Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon; the lives of many less rarified individuals whose actions send chains of actions in new directions furnish examples, too. Of course, most inflections are minimal or infinitesimal. Still, some latest

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headings eventuate in consequential differences in bundles and, thus, generate social change. As noted, the fact that the activities that make up action chains are components of individual lives implies that individual people form a kind of link between chains of action: chains link by virtue of the same person or people extending them. Indeed, any given person links indefinitely many chains in this way. To the extent that social changes arise from the chains involved, he also links changes in the sense of his activities contributing to their etiologies. And if his activities also significantly inflect the chains involved, he also links changes in the stronger sense of having a hand in bringing them about. For example, the moderator of an online discussion forum connects many of the changes of action and opinion that befall users of the forum through their use of it, and he helps bring these changes about if his interventions in their interactions are partly responsible for them. The etiologies of social changes sometimes include the concentrated, dispersed, or persistent efforts of certain people (or groups), whose activities make significant contributions to the chains of action yielding the changes. Successful collective action is one example. A topic that is not immediately pertinent to the present book rears its head here, namely, changes in particular lives, that is, in individual people. This is an important matter studied generally by psychologists, philosophers, and social scientists and in specific cases by biographers and historians. Examples of changes—noteworthy differences—in individual lives are performing actions one has never performed before, switching routines, carrying out quite different combinations of practices, and new (for the individual) desires, beliefs, thoughts, and emotions. The causes of changes such as these are the object of much thought and research. Of equal interest is continuity, or lack of change, in actions, routines, practices, and mental states, a phenomenon that is often captured with such concepts as character, personality, habit, and disposition. As I will touch on in chapter six, changes and continuities of these sorts can be pertinent to explaining social affairs when they bear on those activities of individuals that generate social changes. As a bridge to the following chapter, recall—as mentioned in chapter three— that material things, events, and processes are crucial components of and supports for chains of action. Material properties and movements of the human body, for example, are essential to the performance of bodily activities. They thereby underlie the performance of actions and, as a result, the occurrence of chains. Material entities, moreover, mediate chains in multiple ways. Sometimes, as noted, changes in the material world, brought about by activity, are that to which subsequent activities react. Whenever this occurs, a material object, event, process, or state of affairs helps form a chain of actions. Material and biological events and processes also regularly mediate chains by inducing people to act: lava flows, infestations, and equipment breakdowns do this as much as do beautiful sunny days, the antics of pets, and signals that equipment has completed tasks. Material and biological arrangements, moreover, often subtend the flow of information

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through which people learn about actions and states of affairs to which they subsequently react. As noted in chapter three, finally, material and biological states of affair subconsciously bring about human activity—including reactions to others and interactions between people—by affecting bodily systems. Examples are quality of voice or release of smells subconsciously determining people’s responses to someone. This is a third way materiality can mediate reactions and chains. Finally, it is important to emphasize that chains of action amount to a kind of causal thread in social life. As discussed, at least two sorts of causality imbue such chains: intervening in the world and inducing people to act. Any chain of action comprises a series of causal relations of these types. These processes, moreover, are linked. Chains, consequently, are spatial-temporal threads of causal relation that meander through the practice plenum. Since a myriad of linked, crisscrossing action chains peregrinate through the plenum over any period of time, the plenum is always marked by an elaborate lattice of propagating causal threads, through which differences and changes in practices and bundles arise. Intervening in the world and inducing people to act are not the only sorts of causal relation at work in the plenum (see chapter five). They are, however, crucial. A researcher interested in ascertaining how or why social affairs came about as they did needs to attend to chains of action. I wrote at the beginning of this chapter that changes in social phenomena arise from events and processes that befall the practices, arrangements, and bundles in which such phenomena consist. I am now suggesting that actions and chains of action are the most crucial events and Abbot-like processes involved; they constitute much of the energy that pervades and transforms the practice plenum. Chains of action accomplish much in social life. Among other things, they can embrace or result in (1) novel extensions of practices (as when a master distiller responds to an assistant’s comment by creating a new and successful recipe), (2) reorganizations of practices (as when a discussion of what ends and tasks are acceptable alters the matter), (3) altered arrangements, (4) newly or rebundled practices and arrangements (as when a district manager of a distribution company implements the company’s plan to set up an affiliate in a new city, a process that involves, among other things, moving nexuses of practices to new arrangements), and (5) altering relations among bundles (as when new bourbon products upend competition between distillers). Chains of action can also (a) effect the hybridization of two or more bundles (as when one distiller buys out another), (b) effect the bifurcation of a bundle (as when a dance teacher leaves one studio to start another, taking most of her students with her), (c) constitute a line of flight (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1984) as when someone is so put off by being locatable by others in her social network that she closes her account in the network, and (d) effect additions to existing bundles (as when a dance studio buys the next door storefront to open a smoothie bar). In all these and more ways, change centrally embraces or results from chains of action. As suggested at the beginning of this chapter, changes of all the just mentioned sorts also can be ingredients in more complex social changes. I return to this topic in chapter seven.

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The uneven front of change In a previous book (2010), I discussed the indeterminacy of activity: how, before a person acts, nothing about the world can determine, settle, or fix what she does. Whatever she does is motivated and done for some end, but what motivates activity and what activity aims to realize are dimensions of the activity event itself and thus open until activity occurs—at which point, as dimensions of something that has occurred, they are settled affairs. All human activities are indeterminate in this sense. One implication of indeterminacy is that what someone does on any occasion can deviate from extant regularities and patterns and confound expectations, both those at work in people’s everyday lives and interactions and those taking the form of professional judgments or the generalizations of the human sciences. People do act regularly and in line with expectations much of the time; it is hard to imagine how social life would be possible if this were not the case. Occasions exist, however, when people deviate from regularities and patterns and confound expectations. No one, including the actors themselves, can know ahead of time which occasions these will be. Social life, accordingly, proceeds in profound, ineradicable uncertainty about people’s life trajectories. Luckily, this uncertainty can be usually ignored: because people are somewhat regular, expectations—­ especially general ones—work well enough. Of course, some people’s expectations and generalizations work better than others’. Social life widely relies on expectations and generalizations. As a result, ­exceptions can induce, even “require,” responses from people. Sometimes these responses reign in the divergent, irregular, or surprising activity, deflecting or domesticating it in some way that restores or extends the status quo ante. When this occurs, nothing changes. Occasions, however, when divergent, surprising, or irregular activities happen can be disturbing, turbulent, or agitating. Not for this reason alone can such activities solicit different, even new, or familiar but distorted responses, only serendipitously expectable or anticipatable, even by their performers. These are moments from which social change can grow. Every occasion of activity is potentially an originating moment of change. For people can act irregularly, divergently, or surprisingly anytime. Change, consequently, can originate in any practice and any bundle at any moment. In order for activity to originate change, moreover, it is not enough that it deviate from existing regularities and patterns. As discussed, no activity can originate change on its own. An activity can be the germ of change only if the world reacts to it in a way that constitutes or leads to the world being significantly different than it was prior to the activity. An utterly original, unparalleled activity (though this is not really possible) that no one ever learns about dissipates when it concludes. Nothing follows from it, and the world proceeds on its way. The invention, for example, of a new type of still will fail to cause change if it is kept in a cave and only discovered 300 years later when its relevance to human life—apart from being a historical curiosity—has likely vanished. Similarly, an original dance move

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hatched alone in a studio and then forgotten—or whose originality is lost on the performer—makes no difference to the development of dance. It is others’ responses to an activity, responses that in turn lead to further responses, including possibly from the performer of the initial action, that eventually lead to significant differences in practices, arrangements, bundles, or constellations. The magnitude of the differences that are generated via the chains of action that fan out from originary activities is utterly variable. If, for instance, the inventor had brought the new still to his workplace at a distillery, it might—or might not—have led to considerable change at the distillery. If it did lead to considerable change there, this might have in turn led to similar changes at other distilleries, eventually “revolutionizing” the industry. This is how inventions such as the continuous still, the cotton threshing machine, the telegraph, or the microscope came to be revolutionary. These examples, however, are possibly misleading. Activities do not lead to change only when they are inventive: in principle they can do so whenever they diverge from extant regularities, patterns, and expectations. What’s more, any action can be something to which a divergent activity reacts; chains of activity that eventuate in change can arise from or pass through any activity whatsoever. Originary activities are not origins in any standard sense of the word. One reason for this was just mentioned, namely, that activities cannot originate change on their own: their status as origins depends on how the world reacts to them. A second reason is that an originating activity is not an origin in the sense of the moment when novelty enters the world. An activity is an origin in the less impressive sense of the start of change, the event when the world begins to change. Novelty might not occur until later, after sufficient or the right changes take place. A final reason why originary activities are origins of a nonstandard sort is that such activities can be mundane in character. Origins, by contrast, are often thought to be rarefied and unusual. The magnitude of the social changes that follow from an originary activity (1) rests on people’s responses over time to it and to the activities and alterations that compose the action chains that arise from it, as well as on the material and other events and processes that all these activities set off, and (2) embraces the entirety of the different doings, sayings, organizations, arrangements, and bundles that result from these chains. The more that practices, organizations, arrangements, and bundles are altered, and the more of them that are altered, the larger are the changes involved. Note that changes often arise from multiple origins and not a single activity alone. For the sake of simplicity of formulation, I bracket this fact in what I write. I do not mean to suggest, moreover, that difference and change can be quantified: differences are too numerous, and significant differences too relative to judgment and choice of juxtaposition (see chapter one), for counting either to make sense. “Smaller” and “larger” differences and changes are, instead, qualitative judgments that researchers can discuss and disagree about. Still, the magnitude of the social change(s) that results from an originary activity (1) rests on the volume and reach of the bundle-altering chains

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and events/processes that arise from it and (2) lies in an entirety of changes that thereby befall the bundles involved. Of course, not all social changes are like this. An earthquake seizes large swaths of bundles and potentially alters social life there profoundly. Other natural “disasters” have similar reach. Still, many social changes arise through nexuses of activity chains that include single or multiple retroactively originary activities, in conjunction with material events and processes. Other changes arise through drift. Relevant social changes in this context include (1) those that are spatially-temporally scattered (such as widespread changes in how associations or groups are formed), (2) those that mark different bundles (such as layoffs at different retail outlets or factories of a company), and (3) changes that seemingly happen all the time (such as changes in interpersonal relations), thereby giving rise to the sense that social life is always changing. What sometimes masks this situation is that many originary activities are themselves responses to prior activities or states of the world, hence elements of existing chains of action that pass through them only to multiply and floriate afterwards. Being elements of chains that emerge from the past can obscure their originary qualities (see the discussion of inflection in the previous section). Change is rarely an instantaneous affair and instead typically needs time to gather. It depends on responses to activities that at the time they occur cannot be grasped as originary, by people who might or might not being carrying on practices at the moment of response that are pertinent to the changes that eventually result. At other times change depends on drift. So long, moreover, as something is known or remembered, responses to it can occur, and at any pace. These facts underpin great variability in the speeds at which chains propagate (as measured by the occurrence of activities composing them per unit time). The rates at which significant differences in practices and bundles arise also, as a result, vary. Since larger changes embrace numerous smaller ones, and the speeds at which chains of action propagate, material events and processes unfold, and changes in practices and bundles arise are variable, larger changes in social affairs transpire at quite different rates. A revolution in the distillation industry can take months, years, or decades depending on the pace at which distillery bundles change, which itself depends on the chains of action (and material events/processes) that pass through, circulate in, and constitute or bring about changes to these bundles. Situations do exist, of course, that “require” swift response. Emergencies form one important class of such situation. A second comprises situations that arise in practices or social phenomena in which success requires swift response, for example, sporting events, game shows, debates, and warfare. Since responding swiftly is part and parcel of successfully carrying out the practices involved, such responses do not typically lead to change but instead merely perpetuate the practices. Like its speed or rate, the spatial distribution of change is variable. Any occasion of activity is potentially an originating moment, but only certain activities actually originate change. Originary activities can occur in all sorts of practices and bundles. Although reasons exist when such activities happen in certain places

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and not in others, or when they cluster in certain locales, it is clear that the geographical spread of originary activities is uneven and itself changes over time: today Menlo Park, tomorrow Shanghai (maybe)! The uneven front of change consists in the differential distribution of originary activities through the plenum and the differential rates at which the changes, small or large, that arise from these origins (or from drift), unfold. The concept joins the uneven scatter of the particular events and processes that eventuate in change, the different, sometimes multiple speeds at which changes arise, and the different sizes of the resulting changes. The fact that change forms an uneven front suggests that it is utterly contingent. It is indeterminate at any particular moment whether divergent or irregular activities occur and whether and how others react to these activities if they do occur. It is likewise indeterminate, as a result, whether these activities lead to change and whether any changes they do lead to are small or large. The same holds of the slightly deviating activities that constitute drift. If divergent or irregular activities occur and other activities react to them, there are reasons why. But the fact that there are reasons why reactions, if they occur, do occur, does not imply that they will occur. Change—minute, small, or large—is thoroughly contingent. The precise form that the uneven front of change assumes in a certain period of time is a contingent matter, whose explanation lies in the details of social life at that time. The present chapter has explored what is arguably the chief dynamo in social life, namely, chains of activity. The following chapter turns to the other such dynamo: material events and processes.

5 Social dynamics II Material events and processes

Chapter three spelled out the breadth and depth of the material dimension of ­society. Material entities, events, and processes localize actions and practices, track social events, anchor existential spaces, support practices and bundles, channel activity, damage and pass through social phenomena, and induce as well as prefigure activities and practices. They are also used, coped with, and set up as well as fabricated in bundles and themselves mediate, tune, and connect bundles. Given the extensive presence and bearing of materiality on social life, it is no surprise that material events and processes form a second important general type of generator of significant differences in social phenomena. As noted in chapter three, however, although social theory has increasingly attended to materiality over the past thirty years, it still routinely underestimates the contribution of the material world to social change. I should state at the start that events and processes of sorts other than material ones contribute to social change. Biological events and processes rank high on any list of these, though many theorists categorize biological entities, events, and processes as “material” phenomena (see chapter three). The present chapter, however, will concentrate on material events and processes alone. Their significance for social life and change is great but still underappreciated. I remind the reader that the account in this book works with two conceptions of process: integrated whole nexuses of continuous events (Rescher) and unfolding advancings (Bergson). Examples are, respectively, the process of bourbon distillation and certain components of this process such as heating or condensing. Sotto voce, these two conceptions of process have governed to this point in the book my identification of particular occurrences as processes as opposed to events or series of events. They will continue to do so in what follows.

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Chains of action constitute or effect differences and changes of all the sorts that befall bundles: in activities, in what organizes practices, in arrangements, in relations between practices and arrangements, in relations among bundles, and in space and time. The direct contributions of material things, events, and processes to difference and change are narrower in scope, embracing differences and changes in activities, arrangements, and relations. As discussed, for example, material events and states of affairs can induce activity. Material events and processes can also directly effect differences and changes in material entities, arrangements thereof, and material connections between arrangements. Material events and processes regularly effect differences and changes in bundles and constellations in these ways. In addition, material events and processes are crucial to the operations of all manner of bodies and artifacts, including machines and electronic devices. And, as discussed in chapter three, the material world extends deeper and farther than the plenum of practices, thereby opening up social life to inner and broader nature and decaying and forsaken artifacts. A rain-swollen river can reorder arrangements by altering its course, solar flares can knock out communications systems, and tornados can collapse buildings, just as biological infection can attack bodies and affect practices and bundles, and informational processes can overload and cause computer system malfunction. In the end, practices and bundles mediate most of the effects that material events and processes have on social life, that is, the differences and changes in practices, arrangements, and bundles that arise from captured, created, and exploited material processes, the material entities and flows thereof that course through social life, the material conditions and processes that suffuse or cut into the plenum, material connections among arrangements, and, of course, material things and events mediating chains of action. For instance, the ability of a new chemical energy storage process or a new electronic data transmission process to effectuate differences and changes in what organizes practices of, respectively, battery production or digital communication is mediated by activities composing these practices: for changes in the organizations of these practices are effected by activities that react to these processes. The same holds of the differences that weather conditions such as drought, heavy rainfall, and wind make to social life. Practices and bundles mediate most effects of material events and processes on social life in part because people, in carrying out their practices, often seek to capture, utilize, transform, create, anticipate, or counteract such events and processes, usually in or through the material entities and setups thereof that they design and construct. Think of the bundles at a distillery or server—or, for that matter, agricultural—farm. Indeed, the construction of the built environment (like the fabrication and use of technology) is partly, in effect, an attempt by humans to capture, transform, create, counteract, link, and utilize material (and biological) events and processes; it is also, of course, an attempt to create spaces and places for human practices. The material relations and processes that are captured etc. in technology and the built environment can contribute to social changes. Consider changes that

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ensued in the formation of social associations consequent on the introduction of new ICTs and the cascade of software that immediately followed. Exploitation of material properties of electronic media and of the electronic processes bound up with these enabled new practices, new forms and means of interaction, and the development of new ways for personal ties, emotional attachments, “we” conditions (see chapter seven), and common orientations toward ends to come about. None of these changes would have come about as they did in the absence of the capture, creation, and exploitation of certain material processes. Similarly, significant changes in the bourbon industry have stemmed from changes in the material processes captured, created, and exploited in the distilling and aging processes. No better and more significant example exists than the use of charred barrels to age distilled spirits, whereby the resulting whiskey obtains the amber colors and distinctive tastes that mark it as bourbon (this technique has been used since the 15th century in France to age brandy). Because alcohol is a solvent, it breaks down substances in the interior wood walls of the barrels in which it is stored. Charring barrels before filling them with distilled spirits creates a toasted layer just underneath the charred layer where the natural sugars in the wood are caramelized and baked. During warm weather, barreled whiskey pushes through the charred layer into the caramelized layer underneath, and later in the year when temperatures cool the liquid retreats, retaining flavors and colorings that it has absorbed. Successive cycles of warming and cooling, mingling and retreat, age the whiskey and give it a flavor and coloring distinctive of bourbon. This is a fine example of specific natural processes that are captured or set up in a technological arrangement—in this case, processes of caramelization, absorption, warming, cooling, and the expansion and contraction of liquid—contributing to social change, in this case, the development of the form of whiskey called bourbon in the early-mid 1800s. This example also shows how material processes can mediate relations between social life and the wider realm of natural phenomena, in this case, the cycles of the seasons and the temperature swings that accompany them. Another material phenomenon that is connected to arrangements and crucial to the bourbon industry, indeed, to all businesses involved with consumable alcohol, is the effects of alcohol on human behavior and the human body. These effects are essential to the very existence of the industry. They have also proven to be the cause of many detrimental situations in social life, and, among other things, have motivated the various temperance and prohibition movements that have accompanied the consumption of alcohol in modern societies. Whether ICTs have effects on the body of this direct causal sort is a matter of controversy. As any reader of this book knows, articles and reports periodically appear claiming that the use of monitors or cell phones has this or that deleterious effect on the body. If these claims prove meritorious, there is a slight chance that ICTs will follow alcohol in inducing social movements against them. These two examples illustrate, moreover, a broader point, namely, that material and biological processes in the human body not just underlie people’s participation in practices, but

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are directly engaged, exploited, and altered by practices and bundles. Practices of food consumption and of drug and perfume/cologne use are only three of a multitude of practices that accomplish this. Although a vast array of practices and bundles are directly dialed into bodily processes, the interfaces between these processes and practices are understudied (see Roepstorff et al. 2010, Niewöhner and Beck 2017, and Maller 2017). Material structures, events, and processes also enable and bring about changes in bundles and constellations by connecting arrangements to one another. A fine example of a natural connection is the flowing of the Mississippi River, down which early sellers of Kentucky whiskey—beginning in the late 1790s and continuing as Kentucky whiskey evolved into the product known as ­bourbon—sent their products to the city of New Orleans. Prior to the arrival of railroads in Kentucky in the 1840s, 95% of exported Kentucky whiskey was sent to this metropolis for consumption and for distribution by boat to the Eastern seaboard (though most whiskey made in Kentucky stayed in Kentucky for consumption by locals and use as currency). Railroads, meanwhile, like canals and roads, were important artifactual material connections that linked distillers, so-called rectifying firms that mix whiskeys with other ingredients, middlemen and distributors, taverns and stores, and, inevitably, state and national governments agencies. In fact, as railroad systems became more extensive, distilleries began to relocate from the banks of streams and springs to railroad sidings and spurs (Raitz forthcoming: chapt. 3). Beginning in the 1810s, the advent of a succession of better transportation networks—steamboats, canals, railroads—contributed to the transformation of the whiskey industry in the “Western” states (Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, Illinois, Tennessee) from a largely agrarian pursuit of farmers and millers for local consumption to one involving commercial distilleries producing whiskey for wider markets (Mitenbuler, 2015: 87–8, Carson 1963: 83). Each of these kinds of material connection also opened, or further opened, social life to wider phenomena of nature, for example, freezing, buoyancy, aquatic life, and chemical bonding. Electronic transmissions between devices such as computers, tablets, and cell phones form an important sort of material connection among bundles today. These transmissions have important natural properties, which are reflected in the construction of ICTs and the effectuation of transmissions. The transmissions, however, are created through human activity. An important ramification of contemporary ICTs is that they shuffle the relative importance of different material connections among arrangements in social life. Fixed natural or artifactual transportation connections such as rivers or road systems cede significance to the sometimes omnipresent electronic communications systems that link ICTs. With the advent of locational technology, moreover, material spaces acquire new significance, enabling the surveyable localization of people (via their bodies) and thereby facilitating new possibilities of human encounter, relation, and association. Contrary to what some enthusiasts have mused, ICTs hold out little prospect of allowing humans to conquer materiality or of making material space irrelevant.

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As broached in chapter three, microbes, wind, and flows of energy, including heat, suffuse or course through the plenum. Their effects on social life are partly tied to the material composition of practices, bundles, and their components. This is reflected in the susceptibility of humans and other organisms to heat overload, hypothermia, and infection, of built structures to infestation and deterioration, and of electronic systems to solar failure and overheating. Vulnerability to material flows has also affected the production of bourbon. Mashes, for example, are subject to infestations that can ruin them, and water sources, like whiskeys aging in barrels, have often become contaminated. Energy also courses through the distilling industry, and also through digital environments, as captured and organized in distilleries, still operations, barreled and bottled bourbons, batteries, and electronic devices; as conveyed by water wheels, fire, electricity, infrastructures, and electronic transmissions; and as generally expended in all the material and biological processes that befall the bundles composing individual distilleries, the distillation industry, consumer practices, government regulation and supervision, electronic communication and association, online massive gaming, and personal mobility. As indicated in chapter four, material things, events, and processes are crucial components of the action chains through which social life evolves. For example, it was the presence of biological infection in “sweet mash” that led to the development of “sour mash” in the 1820s, which being more acidic than its predecessor was much more immune to infection (Mitenbuler 2015: 89). Sour mash subsequently became the germ of practically all bourbons. As likewise noted in chapter four, moreover, around 1830 James Crow invented, or introduced to the United States, the continuous still (the secondary sources do not agree about the relation of Crow’s device to ones developed in Europe, above all, the stills of the same sort patented by the Scottish inventor Robert Stein in 1828 and the Irish inventor Aeneas Coffey in 1830 or 1831). Prior to the advent of the continuous still, distillers cooked the fermented mash-beer in a pot and conducted the resulting vapor to a tube immersed in water where alcohol condensed from the cooled vapor. In contrast, a continuous still continuously pumps the fermented mash into the still, where it drips through a series of vertically stacked perforated plates while being steamed and giving up its alcohol as vapor, which is then conducted to the coiled condensation tube called “the worm.” The invention of the continuous still allowed distillers to produce quantities of whiskey previously not dreamed of. It also required less labor. As a result, distilleries produced more whisky while being able to sell it at a lower price and still cover their costs. At roughly the same time, the construction of new transportation networks (­canals and steamboat travel) allowed distillers to sell their products at a greater geographical distance through middle men. The result was elevated production and consumption, the first wave of consolidation in the history of the still nascent “bourbon” “industry,” and the initial emergence of larger firms focused primarily on distilling (on all this, see Mitenbuler 2015: 87–8). The complex of action chains that effected this consolidation resulted from changes in material

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arrangements (stills, canals, and steamboat technology). In turn, these material changes directly resulted from human interventions in the world. I stated in the previous chapter that chains of action form causal threads in the practice plenum. Material events and processes fill the plenum with endless additional causal relations and processes of the bringing about sort. These relations and processes typically collect around or transpire as or as part of action chains, technological setups, built environments, and incursions of broader nature into social life. This acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of material causality does not follow from a philosophical preference for physicalism or a theoretical belief in material determinism. It instead reflects the extensive presence of material entities, events, and processes in the practice plenum and the fact that they bear responsibility for all sorts of differences and changes there. As discussed in chapter three, however, material things, events, and processes do not just shape the plenum causally. They also profoundly prefigure people’s courses of action there. How they do this is always tied to what people are up to, the practices they carry on, and the bundles in which they participate, as well as other states of the material world. Consider this example. Concurrent with the first wave of consolidations in the whiskey-bourbon industry in the 1830s and 1840s, the first “brand” names appeared. This development was preceded by the emergence of higher quality products, which in turn was enabled by Crow’s efforts to regularize distillation practices scientifically. The aim of branding was to distinguish high quality products from others and to identify the provenance of the whiskeys people consumed. At first, the two primary ways of advertising a brand were branding the distillery’s name on the barrels in which its product was sold (Mitenbuler 2015: 90) and placing advertisements in newspapers and magazines. Advertising disseminated brand names and offered manufacturers of quality products a way both to assure customers of this quality and to set their products off from the hordes of more cheaply produced inferior whiskeys. Although it would have been possible to festoon barrels, too, with images and texts, doing this would have been difficult. Then, in the middle of the century, bourbon began to be sold in bottles. For many years bottles were handmade and expensive, and it was not until decades later that mass production of bottles would come about. But the appearance of bottles led manufacturers to design and affix labels to them on which identifying text and guarantees of quality were proffered. The advent of smooth, hard glass bottles thus made a path of action that previously had been difficult and not considered—namely, advertising by placing images and texts on the product—easy, obvious, and insistent. In this way, the advent of the bottle prefigured the emergence of the elaborate labels that were soon proudly adorning expensive bottles of whiskey. Material spaces—relationally defined by the legions of material entities involved in social life—also, in conjunction with practices and bundles, make significant differences to social change. For example, propinquity in material space enables associations that are initially formed through electronic digital media subsequently to incorporate face-to-face interactions among physically copresent

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people. The introduction of such interactions can palpably change the character of associations: it can abet the development of deeper emotional ties or of a greater capacity to act collectively, thereby advancing the metamorphosis of the association into a community, strengthening the power of a teleological organization, or hastening the association’s demise. Another example is the power of material spaces to underwrite and be incorporated into mass location-based mass games such as Dodgeball or, more recently, Pokémon Go (see chapter seven). Such spaces underwrite new game practices and the formation of associations of a novel sort that Rheingold (2002) calls “smart mobs.” A final example was broached above, namely, material spaces effecting new ways of encountering, relating to, and associating with others via digital displays that show the physical locations of people and places. Material spaces were partially responsible for various large changes over the history of the bourbon industry. Indeed, material spaces contributed to at least most significant economic changes in human history up until the present millennium. I wrote above that the development of transportation networks in the early-mid 1830s (also telegraph systems in the 1840s) facilitated the transformation of whiskey distilling from a largely agrarian pursuit to an industrial business producing for a wider market. Prior to this development, the larger sizes of the Western states had helped establish the association of whiskey with them (see Mitenbuler 2015: 73–4). Eastern farmers, living in smaller and more densely populated territories, could easily sell their entire grain harvests to millers, traders, and wholesalers. In contrast, Western farmers, living in larger and more sparsely populated lands, sold less on the market and needed to convert grain into whiskey in order to avoid spoilage. In addition, corn, the bulk ingredient in bourbon and some other whiskeys, grew much more prodigiously in Western than in Eastern states (Minnick 2016: 15–16, Carson 1963: 26). As a result, considerably more whiskey per farmer or inhabitant was produced in the West than in the East, whiskey became a form of currency in Western states (also for trade with Eastern ones), and people nationwide came to associate whiskey with the Western lands. The role material space plays in this example was tied, of course, to the transportation bundles available at the time. But this connection does not negate the difference that material space made; parallel scenarios have played out endlessly in human history. Another example of space at work occurred after the Repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s when the bourbon industry was emerging from the distortions wrought by the Prohibition and again becoming a regular industry (Mitenbuler 2015: 197). Distilleries in the still relatively rural state of Kentucky had often been located away from cities, whereas distilleries in other states which had developed strong reputations for whiskey such as Pennsylvania and Maryland had been located around cities. The greater value of land in proximity to cities meant that during Prohibition the land that shuttered distilleries had stood on in the latter states was converted to other uses and the distilleries destroyed, whereas the distilleries in Kentucky simply sat empty. After Prohibition ended, distillers

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in Kentucky could reopen shuttered but basically intact facilities, unlike competitors elsewhere who had to begin from scratch. This space-derived advantage in an industry whose products take years to mature, together with the location in Kentucky of four of the six major manufacturers that survived Prohibition by making and selling so-called “medicinal whiskey,” strengthened the national identification of bourbon with Kentucky. It also eventually led both to bourbon conquering the whiskey market and to the state, in the 1930s, becoming the biggest producer of whiskey by volume. More generally, the association of bourbon with Kentucky bespeaks the enduring effects that material phenomena can exert on social life. Over the years, many commentators (e.g., Carson 1963, Veach 2013) have claimed that the water in central Kentucky is ideal for the production of whiskey and that its use is at least partly responsible for the association of bourbon with the state. This claim cannot be true as stated since distilleries in different locations in central Kentucky used water from different sources with quite different chemical signatures (Raitz forthcoming: chapt. 3). Kentucky distilleries located along the Ohio River even used river water until it became too polluted. What might be true, however, is that the spring or groundwater used by many of the distilleries located in the socalled “inner Bluegrass region” close to Lexington was good for bourbon because it had been filtered by the limestone-rich soils abundant there (this would not be true of stream water, which quickly became polluted after settlement). Such water allegedly keeps whiskey alkaline (cf. Carson 1963: 43). The 19th-century distilleries that used this water never became large industrial operations, unlike their brethren in Louisville and Covington. They instead specialized in the production of “authentic” straight bourbons of higher quality (straight bourbon is composed purely of bourbon, whereas blended bourbon mixes bourbon with spirits distilled from grains other than corn and other colorings and flavorings). Hence, even though other 19th-century Kentucky producers of “authentic” higher quality whiskey were located in the Eastern Pennyroyal region instead of the inner Bluegrass, to the extent that the association of bourbon with Kentucky rests on the production of fine bourbon in the state (see chapter seven), it might have something to do with limestone-filtered water. As noted, what, by contrast, was definitely true is that corn, the central ingredient in bourbon, grew prodigiously in central Kentucky. Because of this, one distinctive feature of Kentucky whiskey—the use of corn—was set in place when whiskey was first distilled in the state (elsewhere in the US, whiskey was distilled from rye). Plus, it so happens, the kinds of trees prevalent in the region in the early-mid 1800s (e.g., white oak) were ideal, once charred and made into barrels, for flavoring whiskey in the aging process. Material conditions thus favored the inception of a successful bourbon industry in Kentucky (see Veach 2013). Of course, much more than the mere existence of these conditions was required for the development of bourbon, the bourbon industry, and Kentucky’s place in the industry and for the often strong, though historically fluctuating, popularity of the spirit. These conditions, however, contributed to the production of

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distinctive, high quality products. And the distinctive, high quality of Kentucky bourbons—notwithstanding the vagaries of quality (and taste)—repeatedly redounded to the advantage of the distilleries producing them. Surprisingly often, it enabled Kentucky bourbon producers, in times of cut-throat competition (after the Civil War), changing tastes and metamorphosing cultural practices (in the 1980s and 1990s), severe governmental scrutiny (in the final third of the 19th century), or bootlegging (after Prohibition), to successfully fall back on claims of quality to defend or reinvigorate sales. As a consequence of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, a number of individuals of Scots-Irish heritage who were skilled distillers or familiar with distilling practices from their homeland fled Pennsylvania and settled in Kentucky. This Rebellion had arisen in Pennsylvania in opposition to the tax that President Washington, at the urging of James Madison, had put on whiskey to pay off the new nation’s debt from the Revolutionary War; it was put down by threat of force after Washington sent troops to the state. This migration of skilled distillers was not, as legend and the bourbon industry have often had it (Veach 2013: 15, 21), the origin of the Kentucky whiskey and later bourbon industry. But it was not accidental that they fled to Kentucky. Kentucky’s favorable natural conditions were already becoming manifest (Minnick 2016: 15, Carson 1963: 25), and the State’s distance from the capital city of Washington and the Federal military and tax authorities located there made it even more attractive. After settling, these distillers remained in Kentucky, and the advantageous natural conditions combined with, among other things, their skills, contributed to the emergence of the extensive whiskey business there. The same relative remoteness again proved advantageous after the Civil War (see Mitenbuler 2015: chapt. 6) when whiskey (i.e., bourbon) production resumed more quickly in Kentucky than elsewhere in part due to the lesser destruction that the war had rained on the state, which is at least partly attributable to Kentucky’s location. Of course, Kentucky’s reputation and prominence, once established, had to be maintained. Such matters do not automatically perpetuate themselves, and the effects that material conditions have on social phenomena can disappear or be lost. But from the pre-Civil War era onwards the task was to maintain advantage and prominence, not to create them, and the latter becomes that much harder once someone else possesses them. Another material phenomenon that is crucial to social persistence and change is the mobility of material entities. The mobility of, above all, human bodies, but also of other material entities, underlies everything written above. If humans were not mobile, there could be no practices, for the successful enactment of practices requires that doings and sayings be performed at different locations in relational material space. Human mobility is obviously key, moreover, to all sorts of social affairs. Transportation and trade, meetings and encounters, business negotiations and deals, migrations of rebellious farmers, gaming guilds, and ­location-based social networks etc., all involve or depend on mobility. The mobility of other material entities is likewise critical to social life, including bourbon, bottled bourbon, coal, cash, cell phones, tablets, pets, and digital information

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(see Dourish 2017 for a propitious account of the materiality of information): the circulation, or threading through, of such entities in social life connects bundles and effects manifold events, processes, differences, and changes. As Latour (1987) particularly well explained, moreover, “action at a distance” takes place in social life through the circulation of material entities. People’s activities in one setting are able to make a difference to others’ activities in other settings through the movement between the settings of material entities such as documents, sound waves, visible displays, coins, and digital information-encoding transmissions. The mobility of material entities is also an important aspect of how “power” is exercised across settings of action (see chapter eight). The mobility of organisms, especially of prey, domesticates, and infectious agents, is another important aspect of social life, as is the mobility, i.e., suffusive flow of such phenomena as weather, air, heat, and light. More generally, all social phenomena come into being at a certain point in time, even if this time is obscure, diffuse, or not discoverable. All social phenomena also cease to exist at some such point. In between origin and demise, a social phenomenon by definition persists, regardless of how much or little evolution it undergoes during this time. Because any social phenomenon consists in slices or features of bundles and constellations, its course over time embraces an evolving set of doings and sayings, organizing elements, arrangements, and relations both between practices and arrangements and among bundles. Its course thereby embraces a shifting amalgam of events, processes, structures, substances, and relations. Shifts in these matters result from chains of action and material, biological and informational (etc.) events and processes that cross and circulate within the bundles involved. These shifts also characterize the course of the phenomenon, including its origin and conclusion. The phenomenon’s course and phases thus arise from (1) the chains of action that circulate in or through its constituent bundles or connect these bundles to those constituting other social phenomena and (2) the material and other events and processes that bear on and are incorporated into these bundles and likewise connect them to others. This nexus of linked, successive events, chains, and processes maintains the phenomenon while it persists: the constant small, nonramifying differences and changes that these chains and processes produce during this period are never so large or numerous that the phenomena dissolves or is transformed into something new. The persistence of social phenomena also rests on both the stability over time of material entities the phenomenon encompasses and the sensitivity to normativity that underwrites the organizations of practices. In short, material things, events, and processes contribute significantly to the production of differences and changes in bundles and, thus, in social phenomena. Note that I am not claiming that the material dimension of social life is a substratum (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987) upon which social life is erected or from which it emerges in some technical sense of “emerge” (see Sawyer 2005). To be such a substratum, material entities would have to systematically underlie social entities. Material entities and social entities would have to constitute

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distinct levels of reality. As discussed in chapter three, entities of two general sorts form levels when systematic relations of causality or supervenience exist between entities of the two sorts. Material entities do not form a substrate for social affairs because no systematic causal relations exist between material entities and social phenomena. This is so even though countless causal relations, and maybe relations of supervenience as well, exist between particular entities of these two categories. Nor is the relationship between material and social phenomena that of emergence. Emergence is an epistemological relation that obtains when entities of one sort (e.g., social institutions) arise from the activities of entities of a different sort (e.g., individuals) but cannot be explained by reference to these activities. The activities of the generating entities might, for instance, be too complex to be captured in an explanation. Social phenomena do not emerge from the material world in this sense because they do not arise solely from material events and processes. They also arise from chains of action. Although the material world does not form a substratum for social life, material entities always, and material events and processes usually, subtend or underlie social affairs. Material phenomena, however, are also distributed throughout social life, where people, in addition to building and arranging, endlessly encounter and cope with them: material things, events, and processes help make up situations of action and are, or are responsible for, matters that concern people. Hence, beyond subtending and causing activities, practices, and bundles, material phenomena also result from, are dealt with in, and help form the contexts of human activity. They, in addition, invade, infect, suffuse, and pervade social phenomena. The material world bears a complex relationship to social life. The idea that society arises upon a material substratum was advocated by Durkheim (1981) and his student Halbwachs (1960), who used the term “morphological” to categorize facts about materiality, including those upon which society arises. Halbwachs analyzed the morphological substratum of society as (1) the movement and spatial distribution of populations and built environments and (2) biological facts about populations (e.g., births and deaths, the age distributions of populations). He had a confused understanding, however, of the relation between this substratum and social life. On the one hand, he held that these morphological facts form a sui generis stratum of reality in the way that social facts, according to Durkheim (1938), do. Also like Durkheim vis-à-vis social facts, he believed that explanations of these facts refer to other facts in the same domain. These explanations rest on law-like regularities among these facts. On the other hand, Halbwachs conceded that morphological facts depend on social facts, though he seems never to have worked out how law-like regularities among morphological facts are compatible with this dependence. Halbwachs also believed that the physical forms of institutions/societies are crucial to them. Yet, he also claimed that these physical forms acquire significance only as mediated through thought and consciousness, that is, in so far as people become aware of them. These propositions make for one murky position. Halbwachs would have done better to analyze the significance of materiality for social life as lying in

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(1) arrangements of material entities helping to compose social phenomena, (2) material events and processes injecting causality into the practice plenum, (3) material entities, inter alia, localizing and channeling activities, subtending and tracking practices, anchoring existential spaces, and suffusing the practice plenum, (4) arrangements prefiguring possible actions, and so on. Halbwachs could have also emphasized the significance of density (as Durkheim did), size, and shape. Proceeding thus would have obviated or narrowed the needs for law-like regularities and for mediation through consciousness. Still, I am in effect arguing, Halbwachs and Durkheim were right to emphasize the material dimension of social life. Material things, events, and processes bear extensively on the composition, etiology, persistence, and evolution of social affairs. What’s more, Halbwachs (1960) made a strong point when he noted that facts of population (including movements thereof ) form a substratum for societies/institutions (read: social phenomena) in “transcending” particular sets or types of societies/institutions. I interpret him as meaning that because a given population participates in multiple social phenomena, facts of population always impact many such phenomena. Material entities do form a substratum of this sort for bundles and constellations. The movement of population through bundles and constellations also points toward the distinctness of life trajectories as a component of the ecology in which society unfolds. All told, materiality looms large in the practice plenum (social life), much more so than is usually acknowledged. This and the previous chapter have examined the two major generators of difference and change in social life: chains of action, and material events and processes. This analysis of the causal strands responsible for social change undergirds the account of explaining change presented in the following two chapters. It also underlies the challenges laid down in chapter eight to the causal and explanatory cogency or significance of several social theoretical explanatory stalwarts.

6 Explaining social changes

The previous chapters have been “ontological” in character, concerned with basic features of social life. Chapter one considered the nature of change and dynamics, linking these to the categories of event and process. Chapter two dissected the plenum of practice-arrangement bundles; social phenomena consist in slices and aspects of this plenum. Chapter three highlighted the material dimension of this plenum, the wider ecology of social life to which it connects, and the implications of materiality for the horizontality and spatial character of social life. Meanwhile, chapters four and five offered a detailed account of the dynamics of this plenum, arguing that nexuses of activities, chains of activity, and material as well as other events and processes are responsible for social changes and for the emergence, persistence, and disappearance of social phenomena. The present and following chapters complete this account. They examine particular social changes and the emergence as well as evolution of particular social phenomena and show what is involved in explaining them. Whereas the first three chapters are ontological, these two are epistemological. I should point out at the start that the following exemplifies what Mahoney and Goertz (2006) call an “outcome explanation” approach to the topic of explanation. Such an approach holds that the task of explanation is to identify the causes of particular outcomes, for example, particular social changes or the emergence and evolution of particular social phenomena. Abbott (1992) calls the outcome approach “process theory,” drawing on a pervasive but thin conception of process (see chapter one). Mahoney and Goertz contrast this general approach to what they call the “estimation of effect” approach to explanation, which is largely found in quantitative analyses that draw on statistics and whose aim is to “estimate the average effect of one or more causes over a population.” What they call the effects-estimation approach converges with what others (see Geels

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and Schot 2010) call, among other things, the “variable-centered model” (Abell 1987), “variance theory” (Abbott 1992), or the “multivariate” approach to the explanation of classes of event (Hall 2006: 230). I am not going to develop the claim here, but my view is that the enterprise of estimating effects does not yield explanations but instead provides statistical information about the explanatory factors at work in populations of cases.

Explanations generally Extensive philosophical discussions exist of explanation, especially causal explanation. I agree with those philosophers and social theorists who maintain that all explanations are causal explanations. I recognize that for decades many thinkers have maintained that some explanations, above all, explanations of human activity, are not causal in nature. As I will explicate below, however, even explanations of human activity can be construed as causal on a sufficiently broad sense of “causal.” Of course, broad understandings of causality have fallen on hard times in the modern era. Consequent on the emergence of modern science, what was accepted in most intellectual, especially scientific, circles as causality shrunk to efficient causality alone. The efficient cause of an event is what brings that event about. This is an extremely important form of causality. It is, for example, the sort of causality instantiated in interventions in the world and in many material and biological processes (see chapters four and five). In chapter four, however, I indicated that I am partial to Aristotle’s idea of multiple types of causality and Heidegger’s interpretation of the concept of causality involved in this idea as responsibility for: X causes Y if and only if X is responsible for Y, that is, if and only if Y is indebted to or depends on X. Making something happen is not the only way to be responsible for an event. Another way, important for social affairs, is inducing people to act. I believe, incidentally, that mind bears on action in the manner of what Aristotle called “formal” causality, but this is not the proper place to discuss this matter (see Schatzki 2010: 114). Explanations of social changes are causal explanations. The sentence(s) that supplies an explanation of a change describes its causes, that is, the phenomena that are responsible for it (and maybe also how they are responsible for it). It follows that causal explanations can be conceptualized as answers to questions about what is responsible for things, that is, questions about what things depend on. What is responsible, for instance, for the transition from the agrarian to the industrialized form of bourbon distillation in the 19th century? On what did this transition depend? An answer to this question describes the causes of the transition and thereby explains it. Similarly, What is responsible for the resurgence of the Kentucky bourbon industry in the 1990s and 2000s? Or for the origin of the WELL and for its becoming a virtual community, for the coalescence of Swedish indie fandom and in the form of a teleological organization, or for the meteoric rise and sudden decline of Pokémon Go? Answers to these questions furnish explanations of the phenomena mentioned.

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I am not sure how widespread this conception of causal explanation is. It is found in Woodward (2003: 4–5), for instance, who writes: A distinguishing feature of [causal] explanations is that they show how what is explained depends on other, distinct factors, where the dependence in question has to do with some relationship that holds as a matter of empirical fact, rather than for logical or conceptual reasons. In the literature, explanations are routinely defined as answers to why-­questions (e.g. Hempel and Oppenheim 1948, van Fraassen 1980, Salmon 1998). The beauty of this pervasive definition is that it contributes to a neat diagrammatic association of important types of question that are asked about social affairs with important types of cognitive achievement pursued in social investigation, to wit: answers to what-questions are descriptions, answers to why-questions are explanations, and answers to means-what-questions are interpretations. The adequacy of this triadic diagram, however, is thrown into question by something missing from it, how-questions. The typology, of course, does not seek to include every sort of question that exist; whether- and which-questions, for instance, also are not mentioned. The typology instead aims to systematize questions that direct or orient the investigation of social life. Unlike whether- and which-questions, however, how-questions seem to qualify. Like what-, why-, and means-what-questions, indeed, like questions of any sort, how-questions differ significantly among themselves. “How did he like the bourbon?” and “How far is it from the distillery to town?” are questions of a different sort from “How did that distillery become so famous?” The first two ask, respectively, whether someone liked something (how he reacted to it) and about a distance, whereas the latter question inquires about the steps or processes that led to something, in this case, a distillery being famous. Whereas questions of the first sort are relevant to social investigation only if what they ask about happens to play a sufficiently significant role in social affairs (which is often not the case), questions of the second sort are of a form that is routinely asked about the social world. What’s more, in describing what led up to something, an answer to a how-question of the latter sort details matters responsible for it. The steps or processes through which, for instance, the bourbon business industrialized were responsible for the business’ state of industrialization in 1880. In this way, answers to some how-questions furnish explanations. If causal explanations mention that which is responsible for things, that on which they depend, then answers, not just to why-questions (and not all why-questions at that), but also to how-questions qualify. Answers to why-questions do not pull in a particular direction in the way answers to how-questions do. As suggested, those how-questions, answers to which furnish explanations, ask about the steps or processes that led to something: how did it come about? (As I will discuss in chapter eight, some theorists call types of event series or processes that lead to outcomes of a specific sort “mechanisms.”)

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Answers to these how-questions mention prior steps and thereby constitute causal explanations. By contrast, those why-questions, answers to which furnish explanations, do not as such uniformly point toward a particular sort of answer. Differences in the sorts of answers these questions demand instead reflect the subject matters that they are asked about together with the disciplinary contexts in which they are posed. Why did the bourbon industry evolve from an agrarian pursuit to an industrial one? Why did the industry revive around the turn of the millennium? Why did the WELL quickly become a virtual community after it was launched? These questions do not ask about the steps or processes involved; indeed, substituting “how” for “why” in them yields different questions. The questions instead ask for something like the chief factor or factors responsible, where the context in which the questions are posed, especially the disciplinary context, narrows the range of plausible answers. I might add in passing that answers to how-questions sometimes explicate answers to why-questions. Whereas answers to why-questions mention particular factors, answers to how-questions about the same event or change lay out how these factors made the differences they did. For instance, an answer to the question, Why did the bourbon business industrialize?, that claims that human greed lies behind the transformation is explicated by describing steps through which the industry industrialized, emphasizing the moments when greed reared its head. Two further points should be made about explanation in general. First, explanations have a pragmatic dimension. What this means is that what counts as an explanation, as explicating what is responsible for something, can be relative to factors other than the something involved and the events and processes connected to it. This idea has become commonplace through work in science studies, the sociology of knowledge, and the history of science. Philosophers, too, have made much of the idea, arguing, among other things, that such factors must be systematically acknowledged in an adequate account of explanations (for initial and detailed expositions of this position, see Scriven 1962 and van Fraassen 1980, respectively). What, for instance, is cited as responsible for a given array of exchanges of money for goods can vary depending on whether one is, say, an econometrician or an economic sociologist: whereas the former might explain the exchanges in terms of supply and demand curves, marginal values, and price points, the latter might explain them in terms of practices, regimes, and interests (for a “macroeconomic” example of such a contrast, see Shove 2017: 167). The pragmatic dimension of explanation can include features of the lives of the people who provide or receive explanations, not just their disciplines, but also their dissertation advisors, background knowledge, general beliefs, and the like. At the same time, the dynamics of disciplinary practices (e.g., contestation, peer-review) usually counteract or neutralize the dependence of explanatory power on factors that are idiosyncratic to person or considered illegitimate in the discipline. One difference between the natural and social sciences is that the pragmatic character of explanation looms larger in the latter. Its palpable presence both

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reflects and is manifested in the disunity of social investigation, the fact that a variety of explanatory approaches coordinated with a range of ontological frameworks, sometimes bearing different conceptions of causality, are actively—and in their users’ eyes, successfully—employed in each of the disciplines that investigate social life. This diversity is simply greater in the social than in the natural sciences. These approaches and frameworks shape people’s investigative aims and both how they conceptualize their subject matters and which explanations they find plausible. Statistics does not offer a way out of this disunity, despite its reliance on mathematics and more “formal” character. Nor do collectively developed discipline-spanning schemes such as Parsons and Shils’ General Theory of Action (1951) or alliances between compatible theoretical frameworks from different disciplines (see Schatzki 2018 on forming alliances between theories of practice and other theories). Such schemes and alliances do not “solve” the disunity of social investigation but simply reconfigure it. But, then, I do not know whether a solution is possible. My view, as noted in chapter one, is that multiple good theories—ontological and explanatory—exist in social research: this is the ineradicable condition of the enterprise. Arguments cannot pick out a small unique set of best approaches, and usefulness is to varying extents in the eye of the beholder. Students and empirical researchers must simply live with this plurality and search out the approaches and frameworks that are most useful in their empirical work. One task of theory is to develop concepts—the approaches and frameworks—from which they can choose. Which they do choose is dependent on pragmatic matters. Accordingly, the present chapter, and the book of which it is part, is likely to speak more to people who are sympathetic or just open to theories of practice than to someone who is an active partisan of an alternative position or adamantly opposed to practice approaches. This is not a conundrum but a fact of scientific life. The second point about explanation is that a virtue of construing an explanation as an answer to a question about what is responsible for something is that explanations then directly identify matters that might be usefully changed or counteracted if altering, eliminating, or improving the thing in question are desirable. It could be that counteracting or intervening in matters other than those the thing depends on might lead to changes, too, even similar ones. But knowing what the existence or occurrence of something depends on ipso facto identities matters, changes in which are likely to lead to changes in the thing concerned. As Woodward (2003: 6) writes, any explanation that proceeds by showing how an outcome depends … on other variables or factors counts as causal … [T]he distinguishing feature of causal explanations, so conceived, is that they are explanations that furnish information that is potentially relevant to manipulation and control. This conception of explanation closely jibes with a connection between explanation and intervention, and a broader connection between science and control,

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that diverse philosophers have affirmed (e.g., Collingwood 1940, von Wright 1971, Habermas 1971, Gadamer 1981, Woodward 2003). The first segment of the royal road to learning how to ameliorate deleterious social affairs is figuring out what those affairs depend on (the second segment is determining how to counteract or change these things).

Explanations of social change Chapters four and five argued that what is responsible for social changes, and thus for the emergence, evolution, and demise of social phenomena, are nexuses of action chains and of material events and processes. As a result, explanations of social changes and social phenomena are descriptions, specifications, and accounts of the nexuses involved. These descriptions and accounts capture (1) the chains of activity that led to and passed through those bundles, changes to which constitute what is to be explained, and (2) physical, chemical, biological, and technological events and processes that mediated these chains or befell, suffused, passed through, or were incorporated into these bundles. It follows that all explanations of social changes are historical. Theorists have offered different accounts of historical explanation or explanations in history, highlighting such matters as narrative, contingency, path dependence, detail, and interpretation. What I am claiming is that because social changes come about through nexuses of chains, events, and processes, explanations of changes consist in specifications of these nexuses. They are descriptions of the histories behind the changes. Hence, all explanations of social changes are descriptions of history. Note that this claim does not specify a particular form such descriptions should take, for example, narratives (see chapter seven). One implication of this position is that, to the extent that material and biological events and processes contribute to social change, explanatory social research must be prepared to draw on—and not just be compatible with—the results of the natural sciences (cf. LeCain 2017); this includes engineering. Perhaps it is obvious, but the distillation of bourbon cannot be understood without reference to physical-chemical processes, just as the spoilage of stored grain cannot be grasped sans reference to biological ones. Science reveals the nature, and sometimes the existence, of these processes. Because, consequently, physical-chemical and biological processes are relevant to the explanation of diverse facets of bourbon distillation and its history, sometimes as a result of people in the business possessing and acting on knowledge of these processes, explanations of social changes must be open to incorporating scientific knowledge. Indeed, advances in distillation have sometimes been based on scientific understandings of the processes and causalities involved. In 1895, in a compendium about US commerce written to commemorate the country’s centenary, James E. Pepper, the author of the chapter titled “American Distilleries” and himself a renowned distiller, somewhat self-congratulatingly wrote that “[t]he progress made in the distilling business during the past century has probably been greater

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than in almost any other line of manufacture, all the latest achievements in science having been used to bring about such a result” (Pepper 1895: 407). Even though material events and processes need to be understood scientifically, the fact that, and precisely how, material and other events and processes bear on social affairs typically depends on human practices and social affairs themselves. Human practices, for example, are responsible for the capture or production of the material properties and processes at work in a cell phone or in the distillation of bourbon, for the use or production of biological agents, and for the output of many products that are susceptible to biological processes such as fermentation or spoiling. Similarly, although the effect of alcohol on the human body must be understood scientifically, it is the twists and turns of social life that are responsible for the incorporation of alcohol and its physiological effects into social life, more specifically, into the bundles that compose or encompass drinking, driving, law enforcement, medicine, and families. However prominent the material dimension of social phenomena might be, understanding social change almost always requires the social sciences. As indicated, the principal explanatory principle that will be utilized in the following is that explanations of social changes detail the nexuses of action chains and material/other events and processes that lead to them. These nexuses include whatever ex post facto originary activities, if any, changes arise from. This situation raises the question of what role explanations of particular actions play in explanations of social changes. As explained in chapter four, activities of individuals are originary when (1) they set significantly different headings for chains of action that they extend and (2) these chains continue on and give rise to changes in social life. As I stated then, the second condition obtains only if other people react to these different headings in ways resulting in significant differences in social affairs. Explanations of social changes should mark the existence of originary activities that alter the trajectories of the nexuses of activity chains and material events and processes that bring about changes. It is highly circumstantial, however, whether explaining these originary activities will enhance explanatory understanding of the social changes involved. Often, grasping how people react to originary activities will contribute far more than grasping why these activities were performed to understanding what particular social changes depended on. What’s more, explanations of originary activities will contribute little to understanding social changes when the intentions of the individuals performing them have nothing or little to do with the changes that subsequently arose. On other occasions, however, explanations of these actions will enrich the understanding of why certain changes occurred. Explanations of actions are not otherwise elements of explanations of social changes. The facts that practices are carried on through people’s activities and that chains of action are composed, inter alia, of people’s activities do not imply that explanations of changes in practices, bundles, and thus social phenomena must attend to particular activities. If the causal nexuses leading up to particular changes do not contain originary activities, the enterprise of explaining social

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changes need not worry about particular activities or individuals. It is true that descriptions of the nexuses of chains, events, and processes that are responsible for social changes presume that explanations can be given of the activities that compose the chains involved. My point is simply that, in the search for explanatory understanding, originary activities are the only particular activities, specifications of whose causes descriptions of causal nexuses need to consider including. Hence, explanations of action do not systematically fill out or secure explanations of social phenomena. Explanations of action and explanations of social change are simply different creatures: what activities depend on diverges from what social changes depend on. Note that nothing I write implies that generalizations about, or broad brush characterizations of, what is responsible for people reacting to particular actions as they do have no role to play in explaining change (see chapter seven). Theorists have long argued about the contribution that specific individuals make to the advance of history (e.g., the so-called Great Man Theory of History). My account leaves room for great individuals, that is, for individuals whose activities make outsized contributions to complex social changes. As I will explain, moreover, the contingency, connectedness, and vulnerability to external redirection of the nexuses of events and processes that give rise to changes, complex or simple, make it eminently plausible that history would have gone differently if these individuals had never existed. Many social changes and social phenomena, however, are not attributable to great individuals. Because people can make contributions of different magnitudes to what happens in social life, it is better to think in terms, not of great individuals, but of a spectrum of greater and lesser individuals. Individuals do make noteworthy contributions to the occurrence of social changes. Consequently, it is important to say a few words about explanations of actions.

Explanations of action The social disciplines that investigate social life are ontologically and explanatorily fragmented. So, too, are the disciplines that study human activity. More disciplines are involved than merely the social sciences, and the range of available ontological and explanatory understandings of activity is great. Anyone familiar with the different ways that philosophers, psychologists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists conceive of and explain activity appreciates the diversity involved. I just argued that explanations of particular actions play a circumscribed role in the enterprise of explaining social change. As a result, it is not germane to the present discussion to canvas the variety of approaches to action. I will simply state that, on my view, following Heidegger’s account of the timespace of human existence (see Schatzki 2010), explanations of human activity detail the teleology, motivation, and emotion at work in people’s lives, as well as the situations in which they act and the practice-arrangement bundles as part of which

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they do so. These are the matters responsible for people’s performings of action, the matters on which these performances depend. Activity depends on teleology, motivation, and emotion largely in the sense that these phenomena spell out why it made sense (to actors) to perform particular activities. By “teleology” I mean a person pursuing ends and purposes, and by “motivation” I mean a person reacting to, or acting in the light of past, present, or possible events and states of affairs. Together, specifications of teleology and motivation provide explanations of most performances of action: knowing what a person pursues in acting, what she reacts to, and that in the light of which she acts usually yields sufficient grasp of what a person’s performance depends on to know why she does it. If you see someone crossing the street and ask why, being told that she is going to meet a lawyer (a purpose) constitutes an explanation for most people. Learning that she is also fleeing a creditor (motivation) makes the explanation richer. Practically all activities depend on teleology and motivation. Many activities also depend on emotions such as fear, hatred, joy, anger, grief, love, and disgust. Emotions can affect activity in three ways. First, emotions can determine which ends/purposes or motivations a given activity depends on. Fear, for instance, can be responsible for phone calls from a creditor mattering, that is, qualifying as something to react to. Second, emotions can determine, given certain states of affairs (motivations) and in pursuit of a given end (­teleology), which actions make sense to people to perform. For instance, suppose that a group of fans of one sports team encounter a group of fans of the opposing team on the sidewalk outside a sports venue. What the first group does for the sake of showing loyalty to its team will probably vary depending on whether what they do is determined by, say, pride or hatred. Emotions can affect activity, third, by directly causing it, independent of teleology and motivation. Throwing a malfunctioning phone to the ground is usually an example, as is jumping up and down for joy upon getting one’s hands on the last available case of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. One person’s understanding of what another person’s performance of a given activity depends on can be enriched when her grasp of the person’s purposes and motives is supplemented by an appreciation of the emotions expressed in the act. (For more detailed discussion of emotion and of activity generally, see Schatzki 2010: chapt. 3). I should add that knowledge of a person’s life trajectory can be relevant to understanding why she performed a particular action. When, for instance, grasping an actor’s motivation, teleology, and emotion does not yield a rich enough understanding of an action she performed, the investigator might plumb the actor’s past to learn more. This past can also reveal why the person exhibited the teleology, motivation, and emotion she did. Occasions even exist when the actor’s past is more accessible than is the teleology and motivation that inform a given activity of hers. Two other matters pertinent to the explanation of action are actors’ situations and the practices (and bundles) they carry on. A long line of thinkers (e.g., Schutz, Popper, Goffman, Garfinkel, Suchman) has held that situations of

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action are crucial to what people do. For present purposes, I will follow Schutz (1971) and conceptualize situations of action as comprising events and states of the world that are relevant to what a person is doing. A person’s situation thus includes but goes beyond what is motivating her. Matters that people could have responded to but didn’t form one prominent sort of phenomenon that help compose situations. Another is unnoticed things going on in settings of action that, had they been noticed, might have led people to act differently. Descriptions of situations enrich explanations of action by revealing the context on which people’s actions depend. A second contextual factor is the practices actors carry on. As discussed in chapter two, people are sensitive to the normative organization of their practices. As a result, what a person does on a given occasion might reflect the normative organization of a practice she enacts. She might, for instance, uphold rules and norms about which actions and which meanings (of objects and events, including people and actions) are acceptable or enjoined; she might also conform to regularities in action and meaning. Some theorists have described compliance and conformity of these sorts as the effect of culture or tradition on people’s activities. It follows that one person’s understanding of why another person does something can be enriched by uncovering the latter’s culture or traditions, i.e., by uncovering the rules and norms that are upheld in the second person’s practices or the regularities of action and meaning that characterize these. In addition, knowledge of the bundles that a person’s action are part of can not only—like a grasp of an actor’s past—reveal why she had the motivation and teleology she did on that occasion; it can also reveal normativities and regularities she overcame as well as situations she confronted. Appreciating such matters supplements that understanding of what was responsible for the actor’s behavior that grasps the teleology, motivation, and emotion at work. To conclude this section, I want to develop a general point about the relationship between activity and social change by examining one way Bourdieu’s account of the determination of social change diverges from the account developed in this book. First a convergence. Much of what Bourdieu wrote about change centers on habitus. Habitus, as is well known, is not a principle of mechanical reproduction that simply keeps regenerating the past. Rather, it is a spontaneity that produces what can be called “regulated innovation” (Calhoun 2014: 54) in response to circumstances. This idea is reflected in Bourdieu’s comment (1990a: 116) that the same habitus can lead to different practices depending on the conditions under which it operates. As a spontaneity, habitus, and thus the activities of individuals and groups, is a source of drift and new directions in practices, accompanied by gradual reshufflings of the social spaces and material environments tied to practices. As explained in chapter four, my account advocates a parallel idea, namely, that drift in social affairs arises from the inflection of activity chains by the activities that extend them. However, the idea that habitus is acquired under particular conditions, which it subsequently reproduces, led Bourdieu to conceptualize what he called

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“hysteresis.” Hysteresis is the situation that arises when social life so evolves that the conditions under which a person lives differ significantly from those under which she grew up and acquired her habitus (see Hardy 2008). Different things can occur when a situation of hysteresis arises. Sometimes habitus can handle changes in fields and their structures: people continue acting appropriately in the changed circumstances and are able to carry on the practices that reign there. Changed fields and practices can also foster changes in habitus (and rules) that allow people to continue coping (Bourdieu 1990a: 116). In many instances of hysteresis, however, habitus fails to generate appropriate activities, and new rules are not forthcoming; people cannot carry on the practices that have developed under the changed conditions. When hysteresis is disruptive in this manner, some principle of action other than habitus (or rules) must come into play if people are to get by successfully. This principle is reflection and rational thought (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Bourdieu thereby joins a long series of pragmatist and phenomenological thinkers (archetypically Dewey, Heidegger, and Dreyfus) who hold that reflection or thought—which they categorically distinguish from habitus, habit, ability, or skill—comes into operation only when the latter no longer can cope. According, moreover, to many such theorists and those who build on them, such situations of breakdown or crisis are prominent occasions for the generation of social change. This so-called “hysteresis effect” has no pendent on my account. My account cannot theorize hysteresis because what it recognizes as the basis of action in individuals does not have the fixity, or rather, default built-in longevity, that dispositions, i.e., habitus, exhibit. Ends, motivations, and emotions are more labile than habitus is; they are subject to continual development and to abandonment and accession as life progresses. Hence, the idea that when habitus and situation diverge, reflection kicks in and potentially fosters change, has relatively little purchase on my account. Indeed, as I see things, thinking can potentially kick in and potentially bring about change anytime (see Schatzki 2016a). This observation likewise challenges Dewey’s, Heidegger’s, and Dreyfus’ idea that thinking and reflection result from breakdown. Of course, people’s ends, purposes, motivations, and emotions can be out of sync with bundles and constellations amid which they live. This situation, however, simply amounts to people having difficulty carrying on certain practices or participating in particular bundles. Situations of this sort might—or might not—be conducive to social change. Pace pervasive intuitions, they have no general structural connection to it.

Explanations of simpler social changes I will divide my detailed discussion of explanations of social changes into two parts. The first, found in the present chapter, considers simpler changes (including most changes to simpler social phenomena), whereas the second, found in chapter seven, examines more complex changes (including most changes to more complex phenomena). By a “simpler” or “more complex” social phenomenon I

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mean one composed of fewer or more practices, arrangements, and relations, and by a “simpler” or “more complex” change I mean one composed of fewer or more changes to practices, arrangements, and relations. The statuses of simpler and more complex are obviously relative. Note that the fact that a phenomenon or change is simpler or more complex in these senses does not preclude them from being relatively complex or simple in others. I have no illusions that it is always clear-cut whether changes or phenomena should be treated as simpler or more complex. The number of components a change or phenomenon possesses can be inscrutable, and where fewer shades over into more can lie in the eyes of the beholder. I am also aware that philosophers object to using the notion of complexity to categorize entities on the grounds that at least most things are, strictly, of infinite complexity. My definitions of simpler and of more complex, however, neutralize this observation. Although, moreover, simpler and more complex are, according to my definitions, matters of quantity, I do not deny that people often treat, indeed, often have no choice but to treat the difference between simpler and more complex social phenomena as one of quality instead of quantity. In the end, however, nothing hangs on the cogency of the distinction between simpler and more complex social changes and phenomena. For ultimately, as we will see, the same considerations apply to explaining both simpler and more complex—as well as smaller and larger—changes and social phenomena. The difference between simpler and more complex plays just a heuristic function in the following. Many simpler social phenomena are also smaller, where by “smaller” I mean relatively less far-flung (see chapter three). Many small social phenomena, moreover, are also simpler. Because, however, there exist simpler larger phenomena (e.g., an international finance market) and many more complex smaller ones (e.g., communities such as a Shaker village), the correlation between more complex and larger social phenomena is weaker (examples of complex large phenomena include governments, economic systems, and energy provision systems). In any event, because simple and small overlap, changes to simpler phenomena often occur relatively close to one another in material space in addition to befalling a small number of arrangements or practices. The nexuses of action chains and material events and processes that lead to these changes converge on particular bundles, often in particular places at particular times. The material processes involved include (1) those that mediate the action chains that lead to these changes and (2) those that bring about changes either in material arrangements that compose the bundles involved or in relations between these bundles’ practices and arrangements. How did WELL, the online discussion forum and then community sponsored by the Whole Earth Catalog, start? It arose (see Hafner 1997) from a meeting between Larry Brilliant, a physician-businessman from Michigan who owned a recently capitalized company that sold computer conferencing software that the market was ignoring, and Stewart Brand, the publisher of the Catalog who had also founded its quarterly publication, Whole Earth Review. Brilliant pitched the

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idea of using his underselling software to set up an electronic communications network. Brand, a technophile who was already familiar with conferencing systems, agreed and suggested that they invite interesting people to join and step back to see what happened. In their conversation, Brilliant and Brand laid down the chains that made up different stretches of the conversation, initiated new chains, and reacted to actions of or to states of affairs that had resulted from others’ actions, thereby extending action chains that had come from elsewhere. Action chains subsequently led away from and proliferated after their meeting, eventually resulting in the particular bundles that constituted the initial phases of the WELL. Saying that the meeting was responsible for the WELL is a way of gesturing at this nexus of conversational, command, and project-pursuing chains and of acknowledging the outsized role that it and these two individuals played. A better understanding of what the beginning of WELL depended on requires learning more about Brilliant and Brand; the description I gave in the previous paragraph furnishes just part of what needs to be known. Understanding the beginnings of the WELL also presumes familiarity with practices of meeting and making deals over lunch, the business practices that Brilliant was carrying on and responding to, and the existing Whole Earth bundles that Brand subsequently extended (see below). These meeting, business, and commercial practices and bundles form an essential context in which their meeting led to the significant differences it did. As we will see in chapter seven, although explaining the origin of the WELL requires understanding the actions of particular individuals (Brand and Brilliant), this is not true of explaining how the WELL became the first virtual community. Explaining this instead requires describing later nexuses of events and processes alone. I am not suggesting that had these two individuals never met virtual communities would have not come into existence. I am simply commenting on how the emergence of the WELL, which happened to become the first virtual community, should be explained. It is probably true, though, that if Brand and Brilliant had never met and the WELL had never existed, virtual communities would still have come about. At the same time, they probably would have been different than what they have actually been, in indeterminable small and possibly also large ways. I mention this because the contingency of the origin of the WELL characterizes the origin of endless relatively simple or small social phenomena. Not only might these phenomena never have existed, but in each case had the phenomenon not existed the social world would have been different in indeterminate ways. The practice plenum is in a similar situation. The plenum contains myriads of simpler/small phenomena, and much of its character and evolution arise from these phenomena and the contingent connections that exist among them. The plenum, consequently, could easily be different than it is, at both small and large scales. Understanding how it actually is requires attention to the details of this complicated mosaic. I just used the concept of contingency. I do not use this concept in any of several ways that social theorists have used it. For an event to be contingent is

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not (1) for that event to be uncaused, (2) for that event to be the realization of one of an array of possible events with different antecedent probabilities (reality being inherently probabilistic), or (3) for the occurrence of the event to confound theoretical expectations. “Contingent,” in the most general sense, instead means not necessary. I use the concept to mean, more content-fully, happenstance, the fact that an event happens to occur. An event that happens to occur could have just as easily not happened or happened otherwise. This is true even though the happening of an event that happens to occur depends on circumstances, on the particular conjuncture in which it occurs. It is my view—following later ­Foucault—that in so far as social life arises from human activity it is fundamentally and thoroughly contingent. After World War II, the bourbon industry was in the hands of a few big firms, with a few independents. Bourbon positioned itself as a luxury product and looked overseas—especially to Japan—for sales. In the 1960s, vodka conquered drinking tastes in the US. It represented the drink of novelty and youth in contrast to bourbon, which was the drink of the establishment. Bourbon sales plummeted, despite a 1962 Congressional Resolution declaring bourbon America’s native spirit. The industry hit the doldrums, declined through the 1970s and 1980s, and was kept alive primarily by a second wave of overseas success (bourbon had followed the US military to particular parts of the world). Swimming against this stream, above all (but not only) one brand, Maker’s Mark, increased sales during those years. One of the causes of its success was a clever, off-beat ad campaign which the brand launched in the early 1980s. Full of humor and tongue-in-cheek self-deprecations, these ads, several of which won awards, drew attention to the brand. The previous sentence points toward the complicated nexus of action chains and material processes that composed the ad campaign and consumers’ reactions to it. This nexus encompassed decisions made by the bundle’s owners, communications with ad firms and employees, the production of ad mock-ups, the publication of ads in magazines, readers’ reactions to ads, and their increased awareness of the brand. ­Claiming—as the sentence prior to the one just discussed does—that this nexus explains increased sales of Maker’s Mark implies that the nexus continued on to embrace readers’ subsequent decisions to try bourbon and, from there, their judgments of the drink’s quality and taste and the recommendations they made to friends, which in turn led some friends to purchase bottles. This is how the nexus gave rise to the increased incidence of acts of purchasing the brand. Of course, the owner’s decisions, the actions of the advertiser, the production of the ads, and readers’ reactions and subsequent purchases, judgments, and recommendations are all elements of particular bundles, which bear on the particular chains that took place. Consequently, a deeper understanding of what the increase in sales depended on requires a grasp of the wider advertising practices and advertising landscape that the Maker’s Mark ads were part of and the reading and drinking practices that were already in place when the campaign was launched.

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A pre-industrial bourbon distillery is another example of a relatively simple, small social phenomenon. The bundle that composed it was spatially located along a stream or spring. It embraced just a single building, and maybe also a shed, as well as paths, simple complexes of equipment, and a limited number of people, livestock, and other large animals (e.g., horses). A limited number of practices were carried out there. Like the WELL, the distillery originated in the actions of particular people. These originary actions ignited a diversifying nexus of chains, events, and processes that eventuated in the initial distillery bundle and, along the way, knitted the nascent operation into a constellation encompassing nearby agricultural, transportation, and production bundles that became essential to the distillery’s persistence (see the next chapter). Because the distillery originated in the actions of particular people, understanding what its coming to be depended on might be enhanced by grasping the reasons for these actions. This understanding always requires an appreciation of the nexus of chains, events, and processes that issued in the distillery bundle. Material phenomena were involved in the emergence of the distillery because material arrangements and processes were part of what was established and because ­physical-chemical and biological processes mediated and were incorporated into the nexus of chains that circulated in the distillery as it took shape and connected it to other businesses. Beginning in the late 1700s and lasting up until the 1830s, a plethora of simple and small distilleries were established in Kentucky. Each of these originated in the actions of particular individuals. If one wants to know what was responsible for the founding of so many distilleries in the state during this period, one would begin by looking at the lives and situations of the distilleries’ founders. Commonalities and differences will characterize these lives and situations. Among the states of affair that featured in them were the fact that farms were located far from grain markets and that farmers had to do something with surplus grain; that founders and owners were knowledgeable about distilling; that the demand for alcohol was such that distilled spirits could easily be sold or exchanged for needed items; that labor willing to build distilleries and to perform distillery work was locally available; that sources of power were at hand; and so on. Mention of these phenomena, all key features of the motivations and situations of the founders, yields some explanation of the plethora of distilleries. The explanation goes deeper if something is said about the nexuses of activities, events, and processes that circulated in the distillation bundles as the latter formed and tied them to nearby operations of other sorts; indeed, some of the matters that I characterized as features of the founders’ situations point toward these nexuses. The explanation then becomes even richer if something is said about the wider constellation of practices and arrangements that these matters and nexuses are part of: farming practices and the productivity of family farms, migratory practices and the migrations that brought Irish and Scottish settlers to Kentucky in the 1780s, 1790s, and 1800s, hiring and work practices on the then “western frontier,” and people’s insatiable desire for alcohol (debauchery is a prominent though often

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under-noted feature of American history). In this way, the richest explanation identifies particular activities and the reasons for them, the particular nexuses of chains, events, and processes instigated by these activities that led to and through particular bundles, and the particular wider constellation of bundles in which all this transpired. I mentioned in chapter one that there is a longstanding practice among theorists of change of constructing lists of the types or origins of change. One propitious such list due to Alan Warde (a proponent of theories of practice) reports that internal changes in a practice arise from controversy, competition, the pursuit of excellence, the development of procedures, and changes in environment, in affordances, and in adjacent practices (Warde 2016: 138). Each of these sources is either a type of activity chain/nexus or a feature of such nexuses (e.g., pursuit of excellence); changes of the three sorts that conclude the list are all events to which people carrying out a practice can react by changing it, thus—in so far as these events bear on changes in practices—components of activity chains. This observation reveals a key difference between typologies such as Warde’s and the account developed in this book. Warde’s typology tells researchers about things to look for when exploring changes in some phenomenon. My account aims, instead, to articulate features of sources and causes of change generally. Describing the sources of change that Warde identifies as types or aspects of chains and nexuses of activity reveals how these sources relate, thereby organizing and making them part of a larger scheme. Appreciating this scheme can have salutary benefits for research, including better abilities to see connections, to spot new phenomena, and to invent new ways of classifying and accounting for things. This is not, however, the only thing that the concepts developed in this book are good for. As I hope to demonstrate over the course of the present and succeeding chapter, concepts such as event, process, chain, practice, material entity, arrangement, and bundle can also be put to use in explaining social affairs. While Warde’s list of the sources of change complements my account of change and its explanation, Shove, Pantzar, and Watson’s account of forms of change converges with mine. As discussed in chapter two, Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012) conceptualize practices as blocks of meaning, competence, and material that are brought together in human activities. This conception points directly toward two prominent sorts of change. The first embraces changes in the mixes of elements that compose given practices. The switch from carriage driving to car driving in the early 20th century, for instance, involved a changed configuration of elements that are brought together in the activities of carriage drivers or automobile drivers. Changes to the elements of a practice can foster broader changes in this or other practices. With the introduction of smart phones, for instance, people had to learn to cope with both the phenomenon of individual accessibility (Ling 2015) and new ways of linking with others, and what it means to be a friend or associate evolved. What’s more, the meaning, gateway to the internet, migrated from computers to the new devices. This semantic migration hastened the spread

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of smart phones to a large variety of practices while also leading to the emergence of new practices (e.g., mobile and location-based gaming). The second general form of change embraces changes in which practitioners carry out given practices, that is, bring together the relevant blocks of elements in their activities. Practices compete for practitioners, and which people carry out which practices emerges from this competition. Over time, for instance, the range of people who participate in car driving practices has expanded beyond the wealthy to include men of lesser means and women as well. After the introduction of smart phones, moreover, communication practices had to compete with practices of mobile gaming and of surfing the internet or streaming videos, and all these practices gained converts at the expense of other practices with which they competed such as watching TV, reading books, and getting together with neighborhood friends. Shove, Pantzar, and Watson also argue that practices connect. Practices form bundles through co-location and complexes through dependence or codependence. Driving practices, for example, form bundles with pedestrian and advertising practices in particular locales and with refueling and shopping practices in others. They also form far-flung complexes with the practices and practice bundles that compose gasoline refining, oil drilling, and environmental clean-up. In addition, as just indicated, practices compete. These three types of relation—­coexistence, dependence, and competition—point toward a third kind of change, namely, changes in relations among practices, that is, with which practices any given practice bundles, forms a complex, or competes; changes in coexistence and dependence also often involve changes in the sequences and synchronization of the practices involved. Walking, for example, has always coexisted with driving, and over the past 100 years shopping practices have steadily become more sequenced and synchronized with them. The introduction of smart phones, moreover, quickly led to changes in which practices coexist with or entrain communication practices (e.g., practices of gaming and of government internet regulation, respectively). The existence of bundles and complexes of practices also underwrites the phenomenon of coevolving practices. Practices coevolve when they emerge connectedly or when changes in them are connected. Driving practices and shopping practices have closely coevolved in this sense in recent decades. I will return to the phenomena of dependence and coevolution in chapter eight. Finally, Pantzar, and Watson acknowledge that change can result from feedback loops. Such loops pass through monitoring, awareness, representations (e.g., graphs, statistics, analyses), and knowledge of practices, on the basis of which people maintain or alter their practices. Feedback loops can be crucial to the maintenance, alteration, or coevolution of bundles and complexes of practices. An example (see Watson 2012) is the introduction of free bikes leading more people to ride, which both encourages authorities to introduce more free bikes and contributes to the normalization of biking, which in turn leads to even more people riding bikes, and so on—until the program is ended, the pool of potential

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bike riders is exhausted, something intervenes and breaks the loop, or people just start reacting differently. Many of these ideas find parallels in my account. For instance, the idea that social changes can be changes in the mixes of elements that compose given practices becomes on my account the idea that what organizes given practices, like which arrangements they are bundled with, can change over time. Moreover, the idea that changes in social life can involve shifts in who carries on which practice becomes on my account the idea that which life trajectories coincide with given bundles can evolve over time. And the fact that series of actions can form feedback loops is recognized as a kind of action chain. One important difference between their account and mine lies in the thesis that changes arise from nexuses of action chains and material/other events and processes. It is not obvious how to translate the idea of an action chain into Shove et al.’s scheme. As I will explain in chapter eight, moreover, such nexuses do the causal work that such supposedly explanatory phenomena as dependence, competition, and coevolution allegedly accomplish in social life. These nexuses thus account for many of the changes in relations among practices that Shove, Pantzar, and Watson espy. The present chapter has begun elucidating the explanation of social change, that is, of changes in social phenomena. After discussing explanations and explanations of social changes in general, it considered the explanation of action and the explanation of simpler changes in social phenomena. The following chapter continues this exploration in turning to a topic that has concerned theorists and philosophers of social science for over 150 years, viz., dealing with complexity, in this case, complex social changes.

7 Dealing with complexity Overviews

Social reality, like most realities, is immensely complex. Social researchers endlessly confront the bearing of this complexity on their work, whether they are accounting for the behavior of a group or searching statistically for relations among qualities, or constructs based on qualities, that appear in a population of entities. This is no less true of social changes: they tend to be complex. Any account of explanation, more specifically, of explaining change, must explicate how this complexity can be dealt with.

Explaining complex social changes More complex social phenomena are composed of more practices, arrangements, and relations than simpler ones are. As indicated, however, “simpler” and “more complex” are relative terms. The pre-industrial distillery that I characterized in the previous chapter as a simple (and small) social phenomenon is complex in comparison to a particular face-to-face interaction there, say, the distiller-owner whispering something to his assistant after tasting the whiskey in a particular barrel. At the same time, the distillery is simpler than the dense landscape of distilleries stretched across Kentucky in the early 19th century, which is itself less complex than the Kentucky manufacturing economy, or the manufacturing sector of the US economy, at this time. I showed in the previous chapter that explanations of the comment, the founding of the distillery, and the formation of the landscape share things in common. Explaining the comment requires some grasp, however spotty, of the ends/purposes, motivations, and emotions of the two individuals, as well as their common situation, the distillery bundle, and maybe a wider constellation of bundles. Explaining the founding of the distillery involves grasping particular people’s lives and situations, the bundles in which

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they participated, and the complex nexus of activities and processes that led from these lives to the existence of the distillery within a wider constellation of bundles. And explaining the formation of the dense distillery landscape in Kentucky in the early 19th century requires a grasp of multiple lives, situations, and nexuses amid an even wider constellation of bundles. These similarities are one reason I wrote in the previous chapter that dividing my discussion into two parts, one on simpler and one on more complex changes, is heuristic. My interpretation of the difference between simpler and more complex social phenomena and changes—which is reflected in the similarities among the above explanations and grounded in the fact that all social phenomena evince the same basic composition (see chapter two)—points to an important feature of more complex social changes: such changes consist in numerous, even multitudinous, simpler and often smaller changes to practices, arrangements, and bundles. The pervasiveness of distilleries, to take just one example, resulted from the openings and survival of many individual distilleries. An important feature of the smaller changes that compose more complex ones is that they are extended over time and connected to one another. The transition from an agrarian to an industrialized form of distillation, for example, consisted of a long series of interconnected changes to particular practices and bundles: the opening of new, more “advanced” distilleries; the original or copy-cat incorporation of new equipment and techniques; the appropriation of technological advances from other industries, for example, hoisting machinery or metal alloys; the construction of larger buildings to house larger and more complex arrays of equipment; the purchase of older distilleries by newer, more up-to-date ones; the building of railroads from city A to city B and from city B to city C, with subsequent lines laid down from B and C to towns X, Y, and Z and additional spurs from X and Z to specific industrial locations; the construction of larger livestock pens to feed spend mash to livestock; distillers reacting to competitors’ large grain deals with particular farmers by making bigger grain deals with other farmers; and so on. Like the landscape of distilleries in the bourbon examples, the coalescence of Swedish indie music fandom is a large and complex phenomenon. The practices and bundles involved were spread over a broad swath of physical space, not just in Sweden but around the world. The coalescence of this fandom was also a slow, accretionary affair, involving, among other things, openings and revisions of websites, electronic communications among participants, movements of fans among sites, shifting, converging, and diverging interests, tastes, and knowledge, changing images and tunes on particular websites, and the efforts of bands and retailers. The coalescence thus embraced an abundance of differences in practices, arrangements, and bundles. Parallel remarks pertain to Pokémon Go. This is the largest phenomenon considered here, though not the most complex. Involving hundreds of millions of people on all continents of the globe, it was a true worldwide affair, of the sort made possible by advances in electronic arrangements. The changes that characterized the rise and decline of Pokémon Go embraced accumulating differences in practices and bundles, for instance, in

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people’s battle actions, the locations where they carried out particular practices, the people with whom they associated, the enjoyment they had, and the numbers carrying on the practices etc. The course of these changes was effected through events and processes that occurred to the evolving practices and bundles in which the game consisted, thus through combinations of such matters as manufacturer releases, players’ actions, downloads, group battles, mass movements through physical space, semi-random encounters among ever-changing combinations of players, and the like. A more complex, typically larger change such as the development of the bourbon industry, the coalescence of Swedish indie fandom, or the initial popularity and subsequent decline of Pokémon Go consists of simpler, usually smaller changes. Each of the simpler, usually small changes arises from a particular nexus of activity chains and material events and processes. As a result, the larger change arises from all the nexuses responsible for the simpler changes, that is, from these nexuses taken together. Because, moreover, each of these simpler changes arises from a particular nexus, and thus has a distinct, identifiable cause, all the components of the more complex change are accounted for. There is nothing left for any other kind of event or process to be responsible for. In particular, it is not the case that the more complex or larger change as such or as a whole arises from an event or process of a type different from nexuses of chains, events, and processes. It arises, instead, as indicated, from a nexus of such nexuses. The singularity of linguistic expressions that denote what is responsible for complex or large changes (e.g., “revolution,” “market process,” “oppression”) can mask the fact that revolutions, market processes, and states of oppression consist in nexuses of smaller nexuses. Of course, the smaller changes that make up a more complex change are interconnected. But the connections between them, and thus their fitting together as the more complex change, contingently arise from the particular twists and turns of the smaller nexuses of chains and processes that give rise to them, as these nexuses propagate through particular bundles and constellations. These smaller causal nexuses likewise connect; as I wrote, they themselves form a nexus. It is this entire nexus (of nexuses) that is responsible for the more complex change: the causal nexus that is responsible for a given complex change is the overall nexus of nexuses that is responsible for the myriads of interconnected changes that compose this complex change. In short, complex social changes arise from the cumulative and connected differences brought about by simpler, smaller nexuses of events and processes that take place, relatedly, in the practice plenum. This situation poses a challenge to the business of explaining change. When a researcher aims to explain a simpler or smaller change, there is at least hope that she can grasp the nexus of bundle-embedded chains and processes that led to it. Even in these cases, the task might be impossible: the causal nexuses responsible for simpler and smaller phenomena can be complex, and it might be impossible ever to fully understand what is responsible for what happens in social life. This is a second reason why dividing my discussion into one part on simpler changes

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and one on more complex ones is heuristic. Still, a researcher can at least produce a rich and authoritative account of what is responsible for, say, the founding of a given distillery or a particular experimental whiskey never being sold (she discovers a letter from the distiller-owner reporting that he told his assistant that the barrel was no good). If, however, the researcher is responsible to the entirety of the particular goings-on that lie behind a complex or large change such as the transformation of the bourbon business from an agrarian to an industrial pursuit or the evolution of the Pokémon Go sensation, she might as well give up before trying. She can hardly access all this material, let alone put it into words. One widespread response to this dilemma—the issue of dealing with the complexity of social affairs—is to call upon generalizations as a way of bypassing it: instead of detailing the causal nexuses that give rise to changes and phenomena of interest, researchers formulate generalizations about or apply generalizations to them. At one time many theorists believed that the generalizations involved must ultimately be laws (where laws, for present purposes, can be defined as true nonaccidental universal if-then or A leads to B sentences). The paucity of laws of human behavior and society has since led people to focus on nonuniversal generalizations that hold “usually,” “typically,” “in most cases,” and so on (see chapter eight). Vis-à-vis content, moreover, the generalizations that researchers wield typically concern how people or groups act or successions of social events or social phenomena. To explain the rise of Pokémon Go, for instance, a researcher might formulate generalizations about the people who got involved or draw on existing generalizations about how people act more broadly, for instance (and respectively), that people were drawn in by the opportunities for identity-­ construction and bonding that the game provided and that people react enthusiastically to new-fangled things and practices. The bandwagon effect is another psycho-behavioral generalization relevant to this example. A serious potential problem with generalizations is that they pass by whatever variety of causes characterizes the nexus that leads to a complex or large social change. Attempts to capture this variety when it exists quickly lead back to the dilemma that the use of generalizations aims to avoid: generalizations work when causes are relatively uniform but won’t work when causes vary. This is why some researchers incline toward the use of statistics. Another reaction is to attempt to construct a simulation of the situation. The great advantage of simulations is that researchers can work with large numbers of moving parts, above all, large numbers of agents (cf. so-called “agent-based” simulations): simulations can track quantities of actors commensurate with the large quantities of action chains and material/biological events and processes that arc through social affairs forming it. The price, however, of representing so many moving parts is the necessity of supposing that the parts, or large sets thereof, work in the same way: simulations ascribe the same action/interaction rules or the same “psychology” either to agents in general or to large groups of them. The models thereby lose the rich variety of “psychologies” at work in human affairs. What simulations say or entail about what actually happens in social life is also a

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contentious matter (e.g., Frey and Šešelja 2018). This is not to say that simulations cannot be useful, especially in suggesting how certain phenomena that do exist, for example, altruism (e.g., Axelrod 1984) or housing segregation (e.g., Schelling 1978) could have come about (for a longer list of examples, see Heppenstall et al. 2011). But it is not clear that simulations are very useful in understanding actual episodes in social life that have diverse causes, including the transformation of the bourbon business from an agrarian into an industrial pursuit, the coalescence of Swedish indie music fandom, or the sudden popularity and subsequent fall of Pokémon Go. Simulations can also model systems composed of entities other than human actors, for example, complexes of groups or organizations or even complexes of practices (Holtz 2014). Still, I am not sure whether such simulations will prove more useful than simulations of systems of human agents in explaining actual social affairs. I have, however, an open mind on this issue and await future developments. I want here to outline a different way of coping with the complexity of the practice plenum, that is, the number and diversity of causes that are responsible for particular social changes and states of affair. This alternative is to give an overview (Übersicht; Wittgenstein 1957: para. 122) of the complex nexus of chains, events, and processes that lead to a change or phenomenon to be explained.

Overviews An overview conveys the gist and significant, salient, or essential features of a field of entities. It does not attempt to map the details of this field. It instead characterizes the field in broad brushstroke and maybe synoptically, going into details only if particular details hold particular significance or are illustrative of wider states of affair. As a way of cognitively grasping a field of entities, an overview constitutes an alternative to preferring generalizations about the field, constructing simulations of it, and enumerating all its components and their relations. In my experience, overviews are what most historians and many journalists produce in their work (even though overviews are not a topic in historiography). I am not, however, confining overviews to historical narratives. Narratives are simply the form that overviews standardly take in the discipline of history. Any account that gives the gist of a complex field of entities, that captures what is significant, salient, or essential to it, provides an overview of it. A few sentences that characterize the causal nexus responsible for something in brushstroke constitute an overview even if they do not form a narrative. There is no reason, moreover, that numbers and statistics cannot be used in overviews, though overviews are usually formulated principally in words. It is sometimes claimed that historical explanation, or explanations in history, is narrative explanation, that is, explanation through narratives. What I am presently claiming is that narratives (whatever they are) typically provide explanations, that is, describe what is responsible for phenomena and events of interest, in an overview kind of way: they so tell a story as to capture the gist of,

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the significant, salient, and essential features of, the responsible nexus of events and processes. What, accordingly, they provide their readers with is a grasp of the gist and the significant, salient, and essential features of what led to what in social affairs; this is a particular sort of explanatory understanding of the sociohistorical record. Wittgenstein (1957: para. 122) wrote that “[an overview] produces precisely that sort of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’ [‘den Zusammenhang sehen’].” In the social disciplines, overviews produce that sort of understanding which consists in seeing connections among, the overall context (Zusammenhang) formed by, the myriads of activities, events, and processes that lead to changes and phenomena of interest. I am not going to define “gist,” “essence,” and “salient” etc. more precisely. Attempting this only reveals that these terms are defined in terms of one another. It is more important to stress that the provision of overviews is an alternative to the use of generalities and the construction of models in coping with the complex nexuses of events and processes that, strictly speaking, are pertinent to any researcher’s explanatory task. It is also crucial to emphasize the role that judgment plays in the provision of overviews. Although marshaling generalizations or constructing models likewise requires judgment (for instance, about when a generalization applies or what action rules to assign to actors), these methods are not as dependent on judgment as the formulation of overviews is. For what is central, essential, salient, or significant about a field of entities is intrinsically bound to judgment. Actual features of and relations among the entities involved are certainly relevant to pronouncing on these qualities. But what about these features and relations is central and essential etc. is unavoidably subject to judgment and, thus, to divergent judgments and to disagreements that no quantity of facts can obviate. Anyone even slightly familiar with professional history writing knows how true this is. I am not saying that there is no fact of the matter about the causal nexus responsible for events in social life. Indeed, I tend to uphold the “realist” position—unfortunately scorned today in certain circles—that holds that the causal nexus is a determinate object independent of research. What I am saying is that this nexus is too complex for all its details to be grasped, that as a result researchers must construct overviews of it, and that the construction of overviews is ineluctably tied to judgments about which researchers will and do disagree. It is people’s grasp of the nexus, not the nexus itself, that is relative to judgment. I am also claiming that it is not just historians that find themselves in this situation, but all researchers of social life who seek to explain actual changes or outcomes, including sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, and educational and organizational studies scholars. Economists and political scientists, too. Notice, incidentally, that the judgments required of social researchers in this context are of the sort required of judges, lawyers, and journalists who examine the causes of some event or state of affairs (on this, see Collingwood 1938 and Hart and Honoré 1959). It is also important to emphasize that, although overviews characterize fields of elements in their entirety, in brushstroke, they often include descriptions of

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particular elements, that is, of particular actions (e.g., originary actions), action chains, events, processes, practices, and bundles. As indicated in chapter four, occasions, possibly many occasions, exist when particular actions, chains, events, processes, or bundles make an outsized contribution to the contingent parade of events leading to particular outcomes. In these cases, mention of the particular item concerned is essential to capturing what is central, salient, essential etc. to the overall nexus. An account of the coming to be of the WELL, for instance, cannot avoid mention of the lunch where Brilliant presented the idea to Brand; or more precisely stated, any account that left out this meeting and the originary activities it contained would be missing something essential. Sometimes, furthermore, particular elements can illustrate characteristics of overall fields particularly well. Whenever this is the case, descriptions of these elements can be gainfully incorporated for didactic purposes into overviews of fields. There is nothing wrong with doing this since the point of an overview is to formulate and convey a grasp of a complex field. The provision of overviews, consequently, entails a peculiar art of both zooming out (Nicolini 2013: chapt. 9) to grasp a field of entities in its entirety and zooming in to examine particular entities and sequences thereof. By the same token, overviews can include generalizations. Generalizations capture commonalities, regularities, and trends. Social life obviously exhibits these. In the previous section, for instance, I in effect suggested that an overview of the complex causal nexuses that led to a proliferation of distilleries in Kentucky in the first third of the 19th century can usefully include generalizations about the situations faced by the founders of distilleries. Whenever mention of commonalities, regularities, and trends helps convey the gist of a field of entities or reports something that is essential, salient, or significant about it, it is advantageous to include generalizations in an overview of that field. History texts are instructive in this regard since they vary among themselves in the mix of generalizations, on the one hand, and descriptions of unique, irregular, idiosyncratic, and particular phenomena on the other that they include. Two complex fields are involved when complex social changes are the object of explanation: the complexity of the changes that make up such a change and the complexity of the entire causal nexus that leads to it. Grasping hold of complex social phenomena (including important historical events) does not require the provision of overviews. It instead requires the use of concepts that denote these phenomena (and names for these events). Such concepts are ready to hand, both in common language and in social research. Examples are the concepts of government, industrial region, resurgent industry, energy provision system, virtual community, sports league, advertising campaign, international financial system, voluntary teleological organization, criminal network, and location based massive multiplayer game. Social researchers like to coin new concepts useful for this purpose. Overviews employ such concepts to identify the changes that they aim to explain, thus, changes in government, in industry, in virtual communities, in advertising campaigns, in criminal networks, in location based massive

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multiplayer games, and so on. Two prominent changes of widespread interest are the origin and demise of such entities. Overviews are required, however, to grasp the nexuses of action chains and material and other events and processes that lead to the complex or large changes to be explained. For this task, it can be useful to employ general concepts of occurrences, instances of which can embrace myriads of particular entities, events, and processes. Examples of such concepts are accumulation, convergence, bifurcation, divergence, separation, interweaving, and contagion. One advantageous feature of such concepts is that they are pretty widely used, both in common language and in social research. As a result, people intuitively understand the sorts of event and process they name and can follow their use in characterizing complex nexuses of chains, events, and processes. Using such concepts is a way to characterize these nexuses at a stroke without detailing what composes these nexuses. Their use thereby facilitates explanations. Further examples of such concepts are Shove et al.’s (2012) notions of circulations of elements and circuits of reproduction, both of which describe aspects of nexuses of chains, events, and processes. Additional examples include the concepts of dependence, codependence, coevolution, and power, all of which—I will argue in chapter eight—denote nexuses of chains, events, and processes. Other fungible concepts in this domain include those of feedback loops, cascades, exchange, and governance, all of which are forms that action chains can take. And yet another such concept is domestication, which is the confinement of chains within specific bundles, as effected by the demarcation or policing of spatial, legal, and social boundaries. All organizations and many other social formations achieve such confinement. When policing also limits the range of chains and processes that can enter a bundle, the bundle becomes an island; examples of islands are many monasteries, cults, fan groups, cabals, terrorist cells, and the like. Concepts for collective agency can also be employed in this context. As mentioned in chapter four, speaking of the activity of groups, the work of social movements, or the actions taken by an organization are ways of picking out certain nexuses of chains, events, and processes that link certain bundles to others. Finally, such concepts as those of evolution, transformation, and development are often useful for formulating very general characterizations of large numbers of changes that over time issue in notable states of affairs. Hence, part of the explanation of the transition from agrarian to industrial distilling might involve feedback loops, bifurcating practices, sudden cascades of activities, exchanges, and the actions of certain groups. And part of the explanation of the coalescence of Swedish indie music fandom might involve interweaving and converging chains, islands dedicated to particular bands, codependence between bands and fans, the coevolution of websites, and the circulation of songs, links, and new software. Sentences such as these that describe the practice plenum using words for such concepts as were just discussed may be way stations. What I mean is that such sentences are especially useful the shorter an overview is since the shorter

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the overview the greater the premium on capturing a complex state of affairs in fewer words. The longer the overview, and thus the more it is able to display nuance, capture variation, and detail complexity, the less these concepts might be needed. Overviews taking the form of narratives typically manage these latter achievements. The following two sections illustrate the idea of providing explanations through overviews by fashioning overviews of the nexuses of activity chains and material events and processes that are responsible for several complex changes. These are the transformation of the WELL into a community, the coalescence of Swedish indie fandom and as a teleological organization, the sudden popularity and subsequent decline of Pokémon Go, the transformation of the bourbon business from an agrarian to an industrial mode of production, and the resurrection of the industry in the 1990s and 2000s. My discussion of the three digitally mediated associations also addresses an issue mentioned in chapter one, namely, whether the traditional social theoretical concepts of community and group are adequate to them.

Explaining complex changes in digitally mediated associations Brilliant and Brand had different ideas of what the WELL would be when they agreed to found it. Brilliant, the Michigan entrepreneur, wanted to organize discussion groups around items sold in the Whole Earth Catalog, whereas Brand, the West Coast pioneer, wanted to bring together interesting people in the San Francisco area. The structure that resulted from their discussion (itself a nexus of action chains) involved an open-ended number of so-called “conferences,” each moderated by a host and concerned with a particular topic; members of the WELL were free to initiate whatever conferences they wanted. Neither Brand nor Brilliant envisioned a community. But it did not take long for the WELL to become one. Scientific definitions of community date back to Tönnies’ (1955) famous contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaften are communities. The phenomena Tönnies had in mind in analyzing the concept were small rural villages, and he argued that life in such communities was rooted in a natural concord of wills, reciprocal, binding sentiment, and shared practices, beliefs, and living spaces. He ignored the divisions and animosities that can rent small village life. These divisions notwithstanding, the village formations that he called communities contained qualities of closeness and support that are highly valuable to humans. Anthropologists have encountered these qualities in similar formations worldwide, and they have remained associated with the notion of community ever since Tönnies wrote. Although Tönnies’ communities have now largely disappeared (though counterparts outside the North Atlantic world persist), other social formations have appeared in the west that exhibit the valued elements of closeness and support. As a result, scholars who affirm community and wish to explore its presence in social life have forsaken Tönnies’ specific analysis of the

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phenomenon. These scholars, including those who ask whether digital media enhance or weaken community, offer divergent analyses of the concept (compare Preece and Maloney-Krichmar 2003, Parks 2010, and Baym 2015; for an earlier overview, see Willson 2006). One thing that is common, however, to their (and Tönnies’) analyses is the idea that a community is a particularly deep-seated kind of social formation, one that affects many—in Tönnies, all—facets of its members’ existence: members of communities are more immersed in them, and more closely tied to one another, than are members of groups, let alone members of associations at large. There is no correct definition of a community. Consequently, I will simply stipulate—consonant with the analyses of the aforementioned scholars—that three prominent necessary features of a community are (1) that its members not just understand themselves to be members but have a felt sense of belonging, which is often bound up with emotional attachment; (2) that they exhibit a dense array of interactions; and (3) that they participate in common practices, which implies common beliefs and common normativity. Living in the same place amid the same material arrangements is not a necessary feature of community. In a digitally interconnected world, retaining the requirement of a common material place or space would preclude examining the prima facie insightful proposition that digital environments are responsible for an evolution in forms of community. The term “community” is often applied to digitally mediated associations regardless of whether the associations in question exhibit the above properties. The WELL, however, really was a community. As noted, moreover, it became one very quickly. Members spent inordinate time posting statements, visible to all in conferences, and sending emails and instant messages of an early sort, which were private. Long interactions took place through these media. Participants divulged details of their personal lives, supported one another online in the triumphs and setbacks of life, answered one another’s questions, and provided to others valuable information of all sorts that helped in private life and at work. Members also developed online personalities, which others got to know and learned to be sensitive to. In addition, the quirks and challenges of the system’s software (PicoSpan) fostered the sort of bond that joins those who suffer an adversity in common. Members even came to each other’s assistance in person at moments of real “offline” distress (such as illness). Most important, the WELL became an important institution in their lives, which they cared a lot about. How did this happen? To say that WELL became a virtual community is a bit of a misnomer. The community existed in the material world. It was composed of various individuals who were spatially separate from one another but linked by the words and symbols that appeared on their computer screens; some of these words were available to all, others had specific recipients. What was “virtual” about the community is only that interactions among members were mediated by these words and symbols, punctuated by occasional in-person interactions at moments of distress or at “office parties.” In participating in the WELL, people

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also extended practices, especially communication practices, which they were already carrying on face-to-face and over the phone. Many rules of conversational and informational exchange that reigned in these practices—for instance, concerning turn-­taking—continued on the WELL; others had to be worked out through discussion. In addition, the actions that people performed in communicating electronically—describing, requesting, arguing, asserting etc.—were diverse, contributing to a wide array of interactions. The WELL, consequently, involved certain people (see below) in particular locations carrying on a variety of communication (and other) practices through computers, which were linked to the system’s computer backbone that was itself tied into wider communication (phone) and power (electricity) infrastructures. The activities of hosts diversified the range of practices involved and inflected interactional chains in specific ways. The interknitting of lives that took place in these communication and other practices was effected via a nexus of bifurcating chains, feedback loops, and cascades. Combinations of postings, emails, and messages brought public space and private life together through multiple interweaving chains that meandered through system spaces available to all and private interactions known only to the individuals involved (and maybe the hosts). This nexus allowed people to get to know one another, for relationships and collaborations to develop, and for people to perform and cultivate their virtual public persona and reputations (see Coate 1988). Practices with which people were already familiar were extended in being carried out through the typing and reading of texts on scattered computer monitors. The result was that the WELL became integrated into its users’ existing everyday lives, bound up with other bundles they participated in at work, at home, or in their free time. Soon after the system began, moreover, the people running it quickly realized the value of face-to-face meetings and instituted them (initially in the WELL offices in Sausalito, CA). At these meetings, chains of action begun online were rapidly extended, and personal relations deepened; the WELL bundles became further integrated and coevolved with other bundles that participants were members of. Conflicts of sorts that occur between among people who know each other well regularly emerged. As time progressed, the complex of action chains and material events and processes thickened and became a staple in people’s lives. Another factor enabling the formation of a virtual community was the general absence of governance in the system. The hosts sometimes guided and shaped conversations, but almost always did so with a light touch and without fanfare. Participants could set up pretty much any conference they wanted, and practically no one ever had their posting, email, and instant messaging privileges suspended or revoked. This freedom allowed people to explore and find one another; common interests and desires brought them together and animated and gave direction to their interactions. What’s more, a particular general understanding of responsible free activity in public space both imbued how they carried on communication and other interactional practices through computer keyboards and monitors and was explicitly formulated in sayings and

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system messages: no posts could be anonymous, all users had to keep a personal bio in the system, people could erase their postings after the fact but doing this left a blank posting in its place letting people know that something had been erased, and when users logged on they encountered the message, “You own your own words.” This understanding of responsible freedom also reflected a particular coordinating discourse: that of cybernetics, in particular, that of self-organizing systems of communication. By a “coordinating discourse” I mean a collection of sayings and texts on a given topic whose contents are sufficiently unified to form a distinct perspective or stance that can animate and link what happens in bundles. A discourse can be as thin as a single concept or expression spreading among the sayings in different bundles without the sayings forming much of a coherent perspective (e.g., obesity; Shove et al. 2012: 110–12) and as insistent as a mandatory doctrine that spreads among bundles along with the dissemination of a particular book or document. Key concepts such as sustainability or poverty can also galvanize multiple, not necessarily compatible discourses that embrace sayings and texts in diverse bundles. Coordinating discourses bear a close relation to the general understandings that organize practices and bundles (see chapter two). Not only can coordinating discourses put general understandings into words, but because they are composed of sayings they can be the site of discussions and struggles over what particular general understandings amount to. An example is the different discourses that over the years have vied to define what heritage amounts to in the bourbon industry. In any event, the nonhierarchical “social structure” of the WELL dovetailed with the cybernetic vision of self-­equilibrating systems. As described by Kevin Kelly, the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog for several years when the WELL was begun, two of the design principles for the WELL were that it would be self-governing and that it would be a self-designing experiment (quoted in Rheingold 1993: 30–1). This was not, however, the vision of the founders alone. Considerable time was spent in the WELL debating how the system should work: the organizing discourse of cybernetics, and the shared language and understandings that it brought and formulated, permeated these discussions. Another general understanding/coordinating discourse at work in the formation of this virtual community has been named the “New Communalism” (on the following, see Turner 2016). Prior to the founding of the WELL, the New Communalism permeated the dispersed interlinked bundles of a number of communal experiments in the late 1960s and 1970s. Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was imbued by this ideology, and several of the people who initially ran the WELL were veterans of one large such commune outside Chattanooga, ­Tennessee: the Farm. The New Communalism postulated that the communal use of technology and the collective transformation of consciousness were promising sources of social change in the contemporary era. This ethos, like several general understandings-discourses closely related to it, had disseminated across the San Francisco Bay Area. The people who were invited to participate in the

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WELL—patrons of the Whole Earth Catalog, members of the growing computer industry, early PC users in business and academics, and eventually a large contingent of Deadheads—were familiar with this ethos. It provided shared languages and understandings that travelled with them and was expressed in their behavior in the WELL: the WELL was seen as realizing the New Communalist ideal of shared transformative community through electronic media (see Turner 2016: 142, Rheingold 1993: 28). Indeed, the nonhierarchical social structure of the WELL created a space that was more favorable than the world at large to living out this general understanding/discourse. A final factor to mention is, in Rheingold’s (1993: 25) words, “the air of comradeship and pioneer spirit” that permeated interactions in the WELL. This spirit, and the resulting commitment and enthusiasm, was part and parcel of a wider atmosphere of intellectual and technological ferment that suffused a broad constellation of bundles in the Bay Area at that time: in living arrangements, recreational and work practices, public events, transportation networks, commercial relations, and the like. Many feedback loops, cascades, and exchanges that propagated through this constellation of bundles were shaped by this sense of ferment; this sense also led people to explore and experiment with the novel communication medium of the WELL. The consolidation of Swedish indie fandom looks very different than the development of the WELL (the following description is based on Baym’s intriguing 2007 article, “The new shape of online community”). But it is important to keep in mind that this episode took place ten to twenty years later. Hypertext and the World Wide Web had emerged in the meantime, and online sites of various sorts—discussion boards, blogs, social networks, video- and photo-sharing sites—had proliferated. Plus, mobile phones had arrived, allowing people to link to these sites and to communicate with one another multimedially while on the move, and not just when seated before a computer monitor (or attending an office party). Promoters, fans, and musicians constructed and patronized online sites of the just mentioned sorts, through both phones and computers. Fans constructed sites dedicated to particular bands, promoters built sites that covered or sold their commercial interests, and bands set up sites to promote and sell their music. The glut of sites that resulted formed a metamorphosing mosaic with no central organizing instance. This situation differed dramatically from the one that obtained on the WELL. The WELL was a single place with multiple meeting rooms where people could go to interact according to their interests and inclinations. Hypertext and the World Wide Web exploded this organizational form (1) by allowing people (including bands, fans, labels, and retailers) to create their own places and (2) by supporting links among places, thereby creating a connected mosaic of independent places across which individuals and groups could range in expression, enjoyment, and pursuit of their desires and interests. Fans did not come together at a single site but were dispersed across them. Nor did they interact much with each other; the only groups they formed centered

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on shared interests in this or that band. Instead, largely on their own, shifting combinations of fans patronized changing combinations of often multiplying (and closing) sites. The fact that indie music encompassed multiple genres only further contributed to the fragmentation. As did the fact that different Swedish cities—Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, Umeå—had their own independent music worlds (in the sense of Becker 2008). Something else that joined fans and helped them eventually coalesce into a fandom was that the practices they carried on through their cell phones and computers were extensions of fan practices that predated the widespread use of these devices. Examples of earlier fan practices include attending concerts, forming fan clubs, reading and collecting magazines, and accumulating paraphernalia, not to mention listening to recordings. When people began to increasingly access websites through computers and cell phones, these practices evolved and were supplemented by additional ones. Tips and shared opinions about songs became shared downloads and links; concert going was supplemented by the watching of videos; listening to recordings became listening to downloads; and discussions among friends morphed into discussions on bulletin-boards, postings on blogs, or messaging, liking, and interaction on social media. An infrastructure of servers, computers, and phones was decisive in enabling the fandom to coalesce. Prior to the coming together of this infrastructure, musicians and fans were somewhat isolated where they lived. Indie music got little airtime on national media, and the recordings of particular bands were sold in the towns where they were recorded. It was not until the Web appeared that people could access and listen to music that was being played elsewhere. Because, however, the relevant sites were many, people remained scattered. Islands formed online, centered on particular websites, especially those connected with particular bands; members and representatives of bands, labels, and retailers were enthusiastic participants in such islands. The nexuses of chains, events, and processes that pervaded the practices fans carried on were disassociated and separate. Their practices also did not include much communication. Chains of activity linked fans with bands and merchants but not with one another: these chains thereby contributed to the evolution of bundles but not to their convergence or merger. The situation changed when the popularity of blogs led people of all sorts who had been members of islands to begin interacting with one another. Communication chains passing through blogs linked island bundles, and these bundles began to converge and coevolve. This development quickened with the meteoric rise of social networks. Nexuses of activities, events, and processes passing through social network bundles came to link people and groups who had previously been associated with different sites, thereby further breaking down the islands. The different clusters of fans began to link, shuffle, and merge, and websites of more comprehensive scope were founded. People learned about new sites, new bands, and new music through social networks and sites of broader scope. As in the WELL, social networking also allowed relations to develop between individual

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fans; a fuller set of communication practices become part of the constellations of bundles that composed the now coalescing fandom. After 2007, the constellation further evolved with the introduction of locative software, which allowed fans to converge and meet in actual places, including venues where live music was played. This development deepened the interactive dimension of the fandom. But the fandom still did not form a community. Different combinations of people still patronized different combinations of sites, in ways still reflective of geographical location. Fans might bump into each other more often in particular cities, know of more people elsewhere who were into indie music, and know much more about the overall scene. But fans generally felt no great emotion attachment to this large complex of bundles. They might be emotionally attached to particular songs and bands, but the overall constellation simply supported and was the broader site of their interests and tastes in music. They also did not share much in the way of a common identity. In other words, their existence in the fandom constellation did not merge with the remainder of their lives in the way the WELL became part of its users’ lives. Nor did the fandom constitute a group. I follow Simmel’s (1953) lead, enshrined in much 20th-century social and philosophical thought (e.g., Gilbert 1995), and treat groups as a particular kind of association. Whereas an association is simply a collection of related individuals (regardless of how they are related or what range of practices they participate in), a group is an association whose members understand themselves to be members. Understanding oneself to be a member of a group does not require explicitly believing, knowing, or thinking something like “I am a member of the bowling team” or “Joe, Sally, Mike, and I form a group.” Beliefs, knowledge, and thoughts of this form are infrequent. Rather, understanding oneself to be a member of a group requires having what can be called “we” mental states and actions toward the group, that is, toward a particular collection of individuals (which can be specific related individuals or an indefinite collection picked out by some descriptor such as “fans of the Predators”). One believes or knows that we stand for something or want to accomplish something etc.; one wants or desires that we win the trophy or not be disadvantaged by new proposed legislation etc.; one fears or hopes that we will not have enough people to make a quorum or that our team will be challenged by the injury of its top star; or one performs actions in the hope that we win the tournament or as part of our effort to clean up after the storm. In philosophical language, a mental state is a we state when “we” or “us” is the subject of the phrase embedded in its propositional content (for a sense of the immense complications lurking beneath these seemingly straight-forward states see, e.g., Searle 1995 and Gilbert 1995). When a collection of people understand themselves in this sense as a we, they form a group; a group, to use the Hegelian concept made famous by Marx and Sartre, is (necessarily) for itself. An important type of group embraces collectives capable of collective agency, for example, clubs, social movements, and firms. Note that forming a group does not depend on carrying out certain practices or bearing certain relations to others. It rests instead solely on whether

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people understand themselves to be a group. This self-understanding, however, can arise from their practices and relations. Note, too, that in social analysis the term “group” is often used as roughly equivalent to “association” as I use the latter here. Groups in this broader sense include potential groups as Simmel conceived of them. The Swedish indie fandom did not form a group. The simple reason for this is that fans had little sense of forming a we: they did not understand themselves to be part of some one association. A sign of this is that the association had no proper name. The fandom, at best, formed a potential group. Nonetheless, it did form an association of a different kind: a teleological organization. The Gesellschaften that Tönnies opposed to Gemeinschaften were marked by choice and teleology. Example are guilds, trading companies, leagues of knights, and government departments. Whereas people were born into what he called communities, they chose (possibly under duress) to join Gesellschaften. A Gesellschaft, moreover, existed for particular purposes pertaining to specific affairs or arrangements; it had a telos. A guild, for example, existed for the purpose of organizing and promoting a line of skilled work (though this telos might have had little to do with people’s reasons for joining a guild; they might have joined it to have a job, to have something to do, or to seek refuge). A further feature of such associations, arising from the fact that they had teli and pertained to specific affairs or arrangements, is that they usually affected only certain dimensions of their members’ existences. This narrowness was an important difference between pre-20th-century Gesellschaften and Gemeinschaften. It remains an important contrast between contemporary communities and such contemporary organizations as companies, clubs, Google groups, issue- or interest-focused discussion boards, government agencies, and sports teams. It seems to me that the Swedish indie fandom was a loose kind of Gesellschaft, a loose kind of voluntary teleological association or, better, organization. To begin with, participants chose to participate in the bundles involved. Moreover, a common interest in music oriented these bundles and drove fans to take advantage of the new software-based possibilities: their contacts with particular online sites dedicated to indie music almost always served the purpose of appreciating and consuming it. The practices, in other words, that fans carried on had an overall shared telos. In addition, the confederation of sites through which fans moved looking to connect with the music scene was a kind of loose organization. And participation in the fandom affected only certain dimensions of participants’ existence. Baym (2007) calls the fandom constellation a case of “networked collectivism.” She thereby plays off Wellman’s (2001) idea of networked individualism, the idea that social structure in the digital age is increasingly a matter of individuals building overlapping personal networks. What Baym means is that the coalescence of Swedish indie fandom involved individuals, not alone, but together, building up networks of sites and fans. What she describes is the gradual coalescence of a large, loose voluntary teleological organization.

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Pokémon Go was—is—a locative augmented reality game that requires people to move around. In comprehending this phenomenon, it is important to recall that the Pokémon card game preceded the augmented reality version by some twenty years. Before Pokémon Go was released, many Pokémon creatures, their powers, and the method of doing battle were already part of a popular gaming practice that had been enacted the world over and had supported regular local, national, and international tournaments. To this card game Pokémon Go added a mobile digital stage for doing battle, a few changes to the game such as the need to join a team, and, most important, the search component—­physically moving about to capture Pokémon creatures on one’s phone in particular geographic locations. This search bundle replaced the purchase of cards, which is how players of the card game had augmented their stable of creatures (though in Pokémon Go players can also purchase resources for their team with money). More directly, consequently, than in the cases of the WELL and Swedish indie fandom, Pokémon Go disengaged pre-existing practices from the arrangements (tables, chairs, rooms) with which they had been bundled and attached them to new ones. These new arrangements—embracing cell phones and rapidly changing physical locations—were crucial to the functioning and meteoric rise of the game. The excitement associated with searching physical space was palpable. This is attested to by, among other things, (1) the mass convergence and entwinement of action chains at specific geographical locations where particular p­ ractices— above all, capturing creatures—were enacted and (2) the fact that hordes of people were willing to go places that they did not frequent and to interact with people there whom they did not know beforehand. Some of this excitement arose from the novelty of going to semi-random places in geographical space to capture fantastic creatures on one’s phone. It also reflected these locations serving as a unique kind of “third space” (Graells-Garrido et al. 2017). A third space is a location other than work or home where sociality can unfold. The idea behind coining the concept is that the richness of social life is tied to the availability of such spaces (see Oldenburg 1989). Some prominent third spaces such as cafes suffered under the advent of first the World Wide Web and then social networks since people could explore the Web and social networks without leaving home or work. Pokémon Go directly countered this evisceration, in principle turning any location into a third space and injecting digitally mediated activities and enjoyment into it: any location in the lived-through environment was potentially a component of Pokémon bundles. This situation also clearly illustrates the idea that the organization of the world into arrays of places and paths (see chapter three) is tied to social practices: playing the game transformed particular physical locales into places of a specific kind with particular meanings and affordances. These changes, brought about by augmented reality software, were joined by two new social formations: people chaotically and uncoordinatedly coming together to carry on the same practices at the same arrangements, and people joining teams as a condition of their being able, alone or together, to carry out activities that made up the practices involved (e.g., those involved in doing

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battle). Team membership also spilled outside game practices, as witnessed by the team paraphernalia that some people wore about town and by the participation of local groups of team members in other kinds of bundles, for instance, those of charity contests (see Quinn 2016: 6). Like the Swedish indie fandom, Pokémon Go harbored little in the way of communities or groups. To begin with, the immense sum of players was not anything that players have a felt sense of belonging to. Members of each team likewise had little felt sense of belonging to the team. This was due again to the sizes of the teams (there are only three for the entire world) and also to the frequent absence of focused interaction among team members. Neither the teams nor the set of all participants formed communities. Nor did they form groups. It is not obvious, for example, that players had we states regarding all players. Although, moreover, players understood that they are members of teams, the sizes of the teams made membership unsurveyable and hollowed out most “we” thoughts players had. In addition, although participants are required to join a team, they could, if they chose, fight members of other teams on their own. Only on those occasions, possibly infrequent, when they banded together to press particular battles or to capture particular Pokémon (or to pursue some activity outside the game) did participants form temporary local groups. I also hesitate to call Pokémon associations “teleological organizations.” The teleology that imbued different participants’ play varied, and the only real organizations involved (the teams) were, as noted, as nominal as they are real. As mentioned in chapter one, “smart swarms,” an expression based on Rheingold’s (2002) “smart mobs,” comes closer to capturing both the game’s disorganization and the physical-­ spatial dynamism of game play. The Pokémon Go game was (still is) a global constellation of bundles, the most significant variation among which were the particular locations where they transpire; the practices were more or less the same the world over. The material dimension of the phenomenon—the phones, software, communications networks, and actual places—made it all possible, transmitting both the endless “directions” that told people where to search and supplying the many places (the PokéGyms, PokéStops, and locations where creatures lurked) where participants carried out the game’s practices. Pokémon Go was a remarkable phenomenon. There was, of course, a certain faddishness to the game, which helped sustain it. But its rise was also due to the capture of people’s desire. The depth of people’s commitment was attested to by the fact that they did not hesitate to rearrange their lives in order to participate. It is also a stunning, and frightening, attestation of the capacity of practices to commodore the lives of large numbers of people without the slightest use or threat of force. The shape of the phenomenon is also of some interest. The shape of Pokémon Go was a global distribution of bundles, orchestrated by software that is built into them. The continuous motility of this shape—shape-shifting seems like an appropriate characterization—arose from the ongoing software-effected generation of creatures in new locales together with the mobility of the players. This

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metamorphosing shape was also tied to the material infrastructures of telecommunications companies and the game’s producer, Nintendo, which were more or less fixed in comparison, though the sizes of the game and the telecommunications networks necessarily correlated. Indeed, the possibility of true global phenomena such as this—which do not arise from the circulation of particular items or from the connecting up of pre-existing bundles in different locations— is tied to the existence of digital devices supported by global material arrangements. Few true global phenomena, however, are as protean as this one is. Such phenomena as spindly international finance markets have relatively fixed shapes. As noted, Pokémon Go broke like ghost-busters. It captured the attention of younger people attuned to digital culture, and news services and stations the world over covered the outbreak. After only one month, however, the game had lost almost one third of its players. Geraghty (2017) offers three reasons for this precipitous decline. The first is a spate of familiar software and network availability issues that can plague digital systems. These issues were worsened by poor communication between the company and players of the game (Humphery-­Jenner 2016), which turned off causal players. The game thus lost popularity when material infrastructures supporting it failed. The second reason goes back to the fact that the software did not support all the modalities of battle that the prior fixed location, nonaugmented reality version of battles included. As a result, however enthralled veteran players might be with the search dimension, they tended to be less interested in the battle part of the digitally generated game. As, accordingly, searches became familiar and even routine, these players found the game less attractive. New players, meanwhile, might have found either or both the search and battles dimensions interesting. Once again, however, as searches became familiar, less attractive battle practices were there to maintain enthusiasm (Humphery-Jenner 2016). The final reason for the demise of Pokémon Go is that an alternative way of playing the game—a practice possibility that Nintendo had not anticipated—sprung up: players used automated accounts to achieve success in the game, thereby undermining personal investment in its social dimensions, both team play and the accidental interactions that were byproducts of people finding themselves in the same locations carrying out the same practices. The excitement generated by search-and-capture and battle practices was thereby abandoned or undermined. The decline of Pokémon Go thus demonstrates (1) just how sensitive practices are to material arrangements and their proper functioning and (2) the constant danger that is posed to practices and bundles by participants who circumvent and selectively or no longer uphold practice organizations. These are two prevalent causes of the decline and demise of practices and bundles.

Explaining complex changes in the bourbon business As noted, my discussion of large-scale episodes in the history of the bourbon business focuses on two: the transformation of the business in the 19th century

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from an agrarian to an industrial mode of production and the resurgence of the industry in the 1990s and 2000s. The explanation of the 19th-century transformation is straightforward: it was part and parcel of a wider industrialization process that occurred in the American Midwest during that century (on the latter, see Page and Walker 1991). The Kentucky bourbon business industrialized because the entire economic landscape of the Midwest did so. Examining the earlier, agrarian form of the business and the early phases of industrialization in Kentucky makes this clear. A key feature of the bundles that composed agrarian bourbon distillation was the communication and exchange activity chains that closely linked them with local bundles of other economic sorts. Distilling as an industry is essentially tied to agriculture. Indeed, it depends on agriculture for its existence: without grain—including corn, which is sometimes called a “vegetable grain”—there is no whiskey (fruit whiskeys never caught on). Grain, consequently, must be available if whiskey is to be produced. In the eastern United States, transportation networks were such that distillers could purchase grain that had been grown at a distance. Distilleries, as a result, could be located at any source of power. In the “western” states, regional or larger grain markets did not exist. Distillers, consequently, had to be located close to sources of, not just power, for example, streams, but also grain, thus, farms. Not surprisingly, consequently, the first distillers in Kentucky were farmers or millers. Agriculture, in turn, benefited from distillation. As noted in passing in chapter one, distilleries fed spent mash to livestock, thereby requiting their dependence on agriculture by contributing to the expansion of farms: the slop allowed livestock holdings, and thus farms, to grow. The immediate rural locales where the distilleries existed in close symbiosis with farms also provided the market for their products, which were often bartered in exchange for farm produce, labor, tools, and other items that the distiller required or desired (see Raitz forthcoming: chapt. 3 & 11). In addition, from the time settlements were first established in Kentucky (around the time of the American Revolution), small producers made implements and tools for both farms and the enterprises organically tied to farms—not just distilling, but brewing, milling, tanning, and timbering, too. The interconnected bundles of these various businesses formed a small constellation. Their common dependence on agriculture resulted in a distribution of economic centers across the rural Kentucky landscape, each embracing diversified economies of parallel composition anchored in agriculture. The role of materiality and material space in the development of this distribution was immense. The first steamboat sailed down the Ohio River in 1811. The arrival of steamboats, a factor external to the landscape of dispersed economic centers that made up Europeanized Kentucky, led to the introduction of steam power in settlements along the river such as Louisville and Cincinnati and their rapid transformation into small cities. (For discussion of the role of the steam engine in the industrial revolution, see, e.g., Goldstone 1988 and Malm 2016.) By 1815, Louisville millers were using steam power, and by 1820 many manufacturing bundles

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there had been “industrialized” in the sense that they incorporated steam power, used the latest equipment, and had become both larger and more efficient. This development was a coevolution in the practices, arrangements, and relations that composed these businesses. An important factor in this development was the invigorated capture and creation of material processes. The improved equipment that manufacturing bundles in these vernal cities subsequently sent to farms changed farm practices, leading them to cover more acreage and to become more efficient. In addition, not just river city businesses, but “inland” farms, too, benefited from more efficient shipping via steamboat up and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, thereby expanding markets for their products. Farm operations grew, as did the businesses attendant to farming. In the case of distilling, this growth took the form of a further proliferation of small distilleries, all located near farms and sources of power (still streams or springs); this further proliferation absorbed the greater amount of surplus grain available. People other than farmers and millers began to distill whiskey. Milling, lumbering, butchering, brewing, and tanning enterprises likewise expanded. Another factor that enabled the distillation business to expand in tandem with the expansion of agriculture and in parallel to the expansion of other businesses tied to agriculture was its willingness to incorporate “scientific” advances in equipment and technique. This is evidenced by the diffusion through the distillation world of the scientific rationalization of distilling that was pioneered by James Crow in the 1820s and 1830s and exemplarily pursued by Edmund Taylor after the Civil War. This interdependent growth of multi-bundle economic centers amounted to an agriculture-rooted industrial revolution in which farming, but above all the industries dependent on farming, so altered their practices and arrangements as to become more efficient, to produce more product, to occupy more space, to employ more people, and to generate more income (Page and Walker 1991: 292). Page and Walker call this revolution “agro-industrialization”: a process of increased overall economic activity resulting from “interaction between a vibrant farm sector and rising manufactures” (ibid.: 291). This revolution, moreover, took place in the scattered rural centers where farming and the businesses dependent on it hung together. It did not occur in the more urban river cities, though an essential impulse had emanated from these cities after steam power was brought to the region there. Sufficient labor power, moreover, was available in rural settlements in the form of farm children, immigrants, and slaves. This multiple smaller center, agriculture-anchored industrial revolution had a quite different shape from that assumed by the industrial revolution in Europe, which concentrated in the biggest cities and in industrial manufacturing. Note, however, that while this agro-industrial revolution was taking place, distilleries also sprung up around Louisville, Cincinnati, and Owensboro in the vicinity of steamboat landings. The shape of the industry at this point was a scatter pattern of small production bundles, each located along a stream or spring or near a river and closely

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tied through nexuses of chains, events, and processes to other economic bundles in local constellations. The material causes of this shape are obvious: flowing streams, upsurging springs, and proximity to fertile soil were important phenomena that shaped the chains of activity through which distilleries were founded. This shape, moreover, mirrored those of other enterprises at the time, for example, milling, tanning, and brewing. And the clusters that the aligned distributions of these industries’ bundles formed were correlated with and embedded in a broader sweep of agricultural bundles across the rural landscape. This shape has left its impress on Kentucky up to the present (as have the river or riverbank features responsible for the location of river cities such as Louisville, Covington, or Owensboro). Kentucky, like the broader Middle West region, still today boasts a scatter of large towns/small cities that are to varying degrees industrialized (or not). Of course, these interconnected, densely intraconnected constellations grew differentially with the expansion and continuing diversification of industries and services later in the 19th century (see below) and then again in the 20th. Relations among these constellations, more precisely, the inflows into and outflows from them that resulted from the overall nexus of activities, events, and processes that linked them, played an important role in how they evolved. Most striking, the size and shape (though not the density) of the bourbon industry today are remarkably similar to the size and shape the business had in the 1830s. This fact reflects the just discussed alignment of this shape with the shapes of other lines of work, together with the essential intercalation of these aligned shapes in the rural agricultural constellation covering the Kentucky landscape. Of course, the reasons that the business persisted lie in subsequent history. This development of local codependent and coevolving production constellations continued in the early middle part of the century. As noted above, the efficient column still was introduced at the beginning of the 1830s and, together with the practices and auxiliary arrangements that attended it, quickly disseminated through the Kentucky whiskey distilling world. Some distilleries made handsome profits through this innovation, which led them to purchase other distilleries. The consolidation of the industry that began then was also fueled by the activities of financiers, who had sprung up in the river cities when they industrialized to supply capital to businesses and who now slowly began to appear in rural economic centers as the practices carried on in the constellations of production bundles located there intensified (see Raitz forthcoming: chapt. 5). The process of consolidation sped up in 1837 with the inevitable introduction of steam power in distilleries. The arrival of extensive railroad networks in the middle of the century gave new impetus to the accelerating overall process of industrialization and further hastened consolidation. Together with the advent of steam power, the arrival of railroads enabled distilleries to abandon the locations alongside streams, springs, and rivers that they had occupied for decades and to move to locales with access to the railroad system (though a source of water such as a well was still needed).

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A consequential bifurcation in the bourbon world occurred during this period. The people who controlled the large distilleries that had arisen through consolidation in the industry had little personal or familial relation to the business. They steadily adopted increasingly homogenous large-scale industrial and often short-cutting methods that resulted in maximal product getting to market as quickly as possible. Cheap lower-quality whiskey proliferated, unscrupulous producers diluted whisky or mixed it with sometimes dangerous additives, mendacious labels and advertising practices abounded, and consumers often had little idea of or control over what they were drinking. This situation sparked a backlash from smaller distillers, especially ones located in the rural towns and countryside of the inner Bluegrass and Eastern Pennyroyal regions. These distillers declared that the only good bourbon is bourbon produced in smaller amounts using time-honored practices that did not need to evolve or to incorporate the latest technological advances. The steam engine numbered among the advances they shunned; many of these distilleries still used water power as late as the 1870s. Led by Edmund Taylor, rural central Kentucky distillers began in the 1840s to appeal and refer to heritage and quality in magazine and newspaper advertisements and on the labels that had come to adorn the homemade glass bottles in which pricey bourbon had begun to be sold, especially after the Civil War. These appeals proved effective in the marketplace even though the heritage invoked was often invented—Kentucky distilleries have a history of telling tall tales about themselves and their products. These appeals and references also poignantly contrasted with the ceaselessly advancing industrialization that was occurring, not just in the economic centers of which these rural distilleries were part, but in both the large Kentucky river city distilleries that produced bourbon and the large industrial distilleries outside Kentucky that produced other types of whiskey (and industrial spirits). The result was the solidification of Kentucky whiskey—actually, rural Kentucky whiskey—as a concept and distinct product, and thus in some sense the birth of bourbon as such in the public sphere. After the Civil War, the central Kentucky “bourbon elite” increasingly viewed distillation as a calling (Carson 1963: 82–3) instead of as a learned profession. They celebrated venerable distillers and taste-testers who pronounced on bourbon quality and on how to achieve it (Carson 1963: 83, 86). All the while, the industrialization of the remainder of the distilling business continued apace. For the large industrialized distilleries, distilling was a business, not a calling. This dispute continued well into the 20th century, as epitomized in the declaration of one of the mid-20th-century deans of bourbon, Mr. “Pappy” Van Winkle, that “Old Fitzgerald [one of his brands] sleeps better with the windows open” than in a science-based temperature-controlled environment (Carson 1963: 223). Since the 1830s, financier-supplied capital had fueled consolidation in the business. This process intensified after the Civil War when people outside the region began to invest in distillation. Distilleries grew even larger and fewer in number, a process to which the destruction wrought by the Civil War had greatly contributed (only 150 distilleries survived this war; Mitenbuler 2015:

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102). Prevailing tax laws and investment costs also favored large distilleries (Raitz forthcoming: chapt. 5). By the 1870s, the center of the whiskey (though not the bourbon) distillation business had shifted to Peoria, Illinois, where a small number of enormous distilleries made a large proportion of the nation’s whiskey (and industrial spirits as well). Peoria remained the center of distillation until Prohibition. Some of the causes of Peoria’s rise to prominence were its large grain market, the fact that it was served by thirteen railroads and the Ohio river, and its proximity to large coal fields (Carson 1963: 131). The industrialization of the business was now complete. The industrial bourbon distilleries that existed at this time were very large complexes made up of a great variety of buildings, many made of brick and impressively large in size, housing differentiated bundles that performed specialized functions in the business. They were noisy, polluting places that consumed large amounts of coal, housed enormous configurations of heavy equipment, utilized immense fermenting and storage vats, consumed large quantities of water, erected livestock pens covering tens of acres, and stored hundreds of thousands of gallons of whiskey in multi-story warehouses. They were a far cry from the rural distilleries of sixty years earlier, which were often one room and building affairs linked by water wheel to adjacent streams with a few cows milling outside. The explanation of this transformation lies in the embeddedness of those simple early distillation bundles in the relatively small local economic constellations, spread out across the Kentucky landscape, that were anchored in agricultural bundles and located around small settlements. Such constellations produced diverse goods (produce, grain, flour, skins, timber, implements, beer, and whiskey) and existed from the time Kentucky was settled by Europeans. One reason for these two characteristics is that white Europeans came to the area with little and had to produce most of what they needed due to the dispersion of settlements and the availability of horse and wagon transportation alone. Another reason is that these settlers, unlike the slaves some of them owned, kept the fruits—sold or ­bartered—of their labor. When the introduction of steam power caused production bundles in the newborn cities located along the Ohio River to produce more and improved implements, the transportation of these items to the rural production bundles ignited the expansion of these bundles. The multiplying action chains emanating from the cities and spreading among the production centers also brought these rural constellations into greater contact with one another. News of developments that took place in particular rural (or city) constellations, or in particular enterprises that were part of these constellations, diffused along with the products of these enterprises to other rural (or city) constellations, often resulting in the appropriation of new equipment and practices and in more productive and efficient economic processes. Changes in, and the attendant relative growth of, different rural constellations were uneven (the economic centers began to specialize), but they were codependent and reciprocal. The result was at once steadily evolving and expanding enterprises and a more interknit region. This entire process was one large complex of codependent feedback loops

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leading to the expansion, acceleration, and coevolution of the constellations involved. Distilling was simply caught up in this overall development, subject to the spreading, intensifying, interweaving, and crisscrossing nexuses of chains, events, and processes. Fast forward to the 1970s and 1980s. After Prohibition ended, the bourbon industry had quickly strengthened and experienced considerable success. Beginning in the 1960s, however, bourbon sales began to steadily decrease and were surpassed by vodka sales in 1976. In a way, the practice of appealing to heritage that had been the battle cry of the rural bourbon elite in the mid-19th century, and that had remained a calling card of the industry ever since, especially intensifying at certain moments (for example, after Prohibition), had caught up with it. In an era that celebrated youth as well as cultural breaks and new beginnings, bourbon was associated with age and the establishment. Appeals to heritage had also led the industry to forget to advertise to women, whose embrace of vodka was crucial to its rise in the 1960s (Minnick 2016: 177; vodka had been available since immediately after Prohibition). The only real bright spot for bourbon was oversees sales, especially in Japan, where bourbon had been popular since the previous century (Minnick 2016: 195). The whiskey was also popular among veterans, who had learned to drink it at overseas bases. During the 1970s and 1980s, the industry had tried to counteract the rise of vodka by emulating it, making its products more like vodka (“light bourbon”) and encouraging those whose drinking practices included bourbon to diversity their activities to include mixed drinks, especially ones made with fruit juices. Both strategies failed. The first brand to break this mold was Maker’s Mark. The brand broke the mold, moreover, by resurrecting two familiar practices: the appeal to heritage and the appeal to quality (the latter goes back to James Crow in the 1830s, who argued that “scientific” methods resulted in better whiskey). Maker’s Mark advertised that it distilled bourbon according to old, venerable practices and that the reason its bourbon costs more is that these practices are expensive. The strategy worked; sales rose. Subsequent self-deprecating advertisements garnered the brand additional attention; people talked about the ads, and the national media wrote the brand up. Then it became available on airplanes. Suddenly Maker’s Mark was in. Other distillers reacted by starting their own “craft” (small batch and single barrel) bourbons such as Blanton’s and Knob Creek, some of which sold well. One might wonder why dusting off a strategy that arguably had contributed to the industry getting into the dumps was successful. It might be partly because appealing to heritage dovetailed with the renewed public conservatism in American life sparked by Ronald Reagan’s presidency. If so, Maker’s Mark serendipitously drew on an organizing discourse that garnered the brand attention, helped fuel enthusiasm, and affected people’s taste by resonating with a wider evolving front of cultural practices that accompanied a changed national mood. Another part of the story is that the appeal to quality, which included an extolment of “craft” or “artisanal” practices and products, coincided with a

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burgeoning food movement that valued careful preparation, proven methods, local ingredients, and “authenticity.” Bourbon’s comeback thus also arose from the belated arrival in the bourbon industry of changes that were occurring in food production and marketing practices more widely. In any event, successes accumulated: sales of so-called “superpremium” bourbons steeply rose. Craft and authenticity, incidentally, remain key to bourbon’s continued success today: these qualities especially appeal to Gen Xers and Millennials, who are products of the 1970s and 1980s. By the end of the 1990s, bourbon had returned. Internet forums dedicated to it had arisen, fan clubs had sprung up, master distillers had become public personalities, bourbon restaurants were opening in various cities, and the annual Bourbon festival in Nelson County, the center of the Eastern Pennyroyal distillery constellation, had become a tourist destination. This popularization of craft production reached an apogee of sorts in the “irrational exuberance” (Mitenbuler 2015: 262) that in the 2000s and still today attends the release, hoarding, grand theft, and occasional drinking of the Pappy van Winkle brand. In addition, the number of craft distilleries skyrocketed, not just in Kentucky, but nationally (Mitenbuler 2015: 266). At the same time, though, the same eight companies that owned the thirteen principal distilleries in 2000 continued in 2015 to make 95% of bourbon (Mitenbuler 2015: 46). The battle between large and small producers that emerged after the Civil War from industrialization had returned. Except that this time it was the large producers that defined Kentucky bourbon. The rhetorical appeal to heritage, timelessness, and oldness in advertisements, labels, images, and promotional material has taken more solid material form. Contemporary distillers display a strong preference for renovating old distilleries instead of building new ones (Raitz forthcoming: chapt. 18). Many, moreover, have opened their doors to visitors, thereby transforming renovated distilleries into working historical industrial sites. A good example is the Woodford Reserve distillery, which was opened in 1996 as a competitor to Maker’s Mark at the site of several past distilleries, some venerable, in the inner Bluegrass region. Several renovated distilleries have also been declared National Historical Landmarks. The State got involved just before the turn of the millennium when a state-wide council organized the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, in which most of the state’s major distilleries participate. This tourist attraction surpassed one million visits in 2016, and its popularity continues to grow today. The appeal to heritage also shows up in the use of old brand names for contemporary bourbons that bear little resemblance to their namesakes of 150 years earlier. Today, Kentucky produces 95% of the world’s bourbon. Maker’s Mark led bourbon’s return. It did so by resurrecting old coordinating discourses and retooling its advertising and production practices. It did so at a moment when these discourses dovetailed with wider changes in the country both in consumption and production practices and in political-cultural discourses, including the renewed public respect that Ronald Reagan gave conservatism.

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Maker’s Mark success also set off chains of action that led to revamped practices at other distilleries. Through personal, informational, communicational, and possibly monetary connections with national as well as regional media and telecommunications bundles, the industry was highlighted, extolled, and made once again to look like something “up with the times,” that is, fresh and worthy of a try. People apparently liked what they tried, too, though matters of taste are always complicated: some wags hold, for example, that all those appeals to heritage simply cover up lower quality product. However that might be, once bourbon was noticed and people gave it a try, a wealth of novel promotional and recreational practices and bundles was set off that intensified the hype around and people’s interest in and enjoyment of the beverage: blogs, visitor centers, tours, tastings, festivals, renovated distilleries, and “sightings” of Pappy van Winkle bourbon. The connection of place to product and past was also restored (Raitz forthcoming: chapt. 19): Kentucky could again shine as the home of bourbon. Kentucky bourbon again became a mark of quality. No one could have predicted this, except in so far as the ebb and flow of bourbon’s fortunes over its 200-year history would have made it reasonable to guess that it would, somehow, come back again. In reality, of course, the return of bourbon was a contingent matter sparked by the fortuitous timing of the resurrection of venerable strategies. It might not have occurred. Once it begun, however, it seemingly snowballed, the chains of action and feedback loops that it generated largely working to expand and proliferate distilling bundles. Like the transition of the business in the 19th century from an agrarian to an industrialized mode of production, this development shows how complex social changes arise as the accumulation of myriads of simpler, often smaller processes—happening to practices, bundles, and the people who participate in them—that converge, diverge, diffuse, interweave, coalesce, stabilize, and codependently develop and transform. Explaining complex changes such as these requires formulating and communicating overviews of the complex nexuses formed by these processes. The examples I have examined in this and the previous section also show that these simpler, often smaller processes can take a myriad of forms. Social life is extremely varied, and just what it has and will look like is highly contingent. As a result, it is hazardous for a researcher to presume before investigating what form they actually took in any given case or what form they might take in future cases. Nothing substitutes for careful, detailed investigation. This fact make the task of explanation in the social disciplines converge with the work historians do. The nonexplanatory work done in these disciplines is a different matter. Although, consequently, an overview aims by nature to provide a broad stroke view of something, accurate overviews can be attained only if the researcher carefully zooms in on the practices, bundles, and people involved, moving back and forth between investigation of details and formulations of overviews. In this way, the art of providing overviews parallels that of interpreting complex texts (the hermeneutic circle).

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Explaining persistence To conclude this chapter, I want to circle back to a point emphasized in chapter one, namely, that phenomena of the sorts that explain change also account for persistence. The form that this parallelism takes in my account is the observation that persistence, just like change, is effected through nexuses of activities, activity chains, and material and other events and processes. No systematic differences exist between the nexuses that effect change and those that effect persistence. Endless differences exist among the particular nexuses responsible for particular changes or instances of persistence, but this holds as much among nexuses that effect change as between these and the nexuses that effect maintenance. The cardinal reason for this parallelism goes back to the relationship between events, difference, and change discussed in chapter one. Events, I wrote, inherently institute differences, and significant differences constitute change. What’s more, the persistence, i.e., continuing existence, of most social phenomena over time rests on the occurrence of particular events, in particular, the occurrence of activities. This dependence exists because social phenomena consist in slices or aspects of practice-arrangement bundles, and the persistence of practices is effected through the performance of actions. At the same time, because activities and other events automatically institute differences, a persisting social phenomenon exhibits accumulating differences over time. Another way of putting this is that persisting social phenomena invariably evolve. But the evolution—and p­ ersistence—of the phenomenon embraces change only if the differences, in which the evolution consists, are significant. Finally, the same sorts of event (and process) are involved regardless of whether the differences do or do not amount to change. Consequently, persistence is explained by events and processes of the sorts that explain change. The persistence of the WELL and the changes it has undergone over the years have been effected through events and processes of the same sorts; ditto for the persistence of the shape of the bourbon industry and the transformation of the business from an agrarian to an industrial mode of production. Notice that persistence can encompass change: persistence and change are not mutually exclusive affairs. Although the persistence of a social phenomenon is, by definition, its continued existence over time, its continued existence over time does not imply that it remains the same. Indeed, change and persistence are conjoined, often coincident matters. Both, consequently, are more or less ineliminable from social existence. What is opposed to change is not persistence, but stasis. Social life, however, is not static: accompanying whatever ways a given sequence of events and processes leaves the entities that it befalls the same are ways in which the same sequence institutes differences in these entities. What can be static are at best certain features or aspects of entities; the entities in their entirety never stay the same. We see this in all the examples discussed in the previous two sections. The WELL existed for many years; indeed, it still exists, diminished and largely unnoticed. It persisted over the years while experiencing considerable changes, for

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example, changes in membership and in conferences. Some of the interactions, practices, and arrangements that effected its persistence were also responsible for these changes. Other features of the system persisted without changing. An example is the principle that participants must take responsibility for their posts (i.e., no anonymous posts). The persistence of this principle likewise depended on bundles, in particular, on interactions in which the principle was affirmed or upheld and on certain material processes, for example, the logon screen that greeted users with the reminder, “You own your own words” (for discussion of this sort of persistence, see Schatzki 2010: 212–13). The persistence of other things worked differently. For instance, the persistence of the communications equipment that supported the WELL did not rest on activities, interactions, and practices, except on those occasions that repairs, upgrades, and replacements were required. All the sorts of persistence just discussed were also exhibited in Swedish indie music fandom and in Pokémon Go. The history of bourbon makes the general point even more vivid. The bourbon business has persisted since its origins in the late 18th (or mid-19th) century up until the present. At the same time, it has undergone significant changes more numerous than the ones bound up with the two large episodes I considered. Both the persistence of the business and changes to it are explained by the nexuses of chains, events, and processes that originated in, passed through, circulated within, and exited it. Certain features or aspects of the business persisted differently. For instance, the use of stills has never ceased. The persistence of stills is explained by the fact that they are essential to distilling. They will remain essential, moreover, until a better process of removing alcohol from fermented grain is invented. Aging bourbon in charred barrels stored in warehouses and using corn in the mash are even more essential to the process (Shove (2017) would say that stills, charred barrels, and corn are part of the “infrastructure” of the industry). At the same time, the just mentioned practices persist only if people continue to enact them. And stills are used only if people continue distilling. So persistence depends on activity and materiality just as change does. The notion of reproduction is widely used in social thought. My discussion, like those of others (e.g., Bourdieu), suggests that the notion must accommodate the coexistence and even coincidence of persistence and change. A still pervasive understanding of reproduction in social theory conceptualizes it as the return of the same. This notion emphasizes the “re” component of reproduction: the sameness of what is produced on each further occasion of production. My account, by contrast, stresses the “production” component. All persistence must come about, that is, be produced, through the performance of activities, the carrying out of practices, the extension of chains of action, and the occurrence of material and other events and processes. Persistence transpires as yet more production of the phenomenon that persists. The phenomenon, however, becomes different with each production. Continual further production results in that much more different a phenomenon. The “re,” consequently, means again and again, not the return of the same.

8 Challenging social theoretical stalwarts

My discussion to this point has developed an account of social change and its explanation on the basis of elaborated notions of change, event, and process and a conception of social phenomena as consisting in slices and aspects of the practice plenum. I have located my ideas among those of other theories of practice but only occasionally engaged the broader landscape of social theory. This concluding chapter offers a series of forays into that landscape. It critiques the significance of several prominent phenomena that social theories have claimed determine or explain social changes. The causal/explanatory scopes of these phenomena differ, as do the contexts in which they are cited. Accordingly, the arguments against their significance vary. In the opening section I discuss how the causal/explanatory work done by such phenomena as dependence, coevolution, and power is in fact achieved by nexuses of activity chains and material events/processes. These concepts, as a result, can be useful in formulating overviews of causally efficacious nexuses. But it is these nexuses, and not these phenomena, that are responsible for and that fill out how and why social changes occur. The following section turns to the notion of relations. It begins by criticizing a practice theoretical account of social change that attributes changes to relations among practices. I then explicate why the prima facie plausible claim that my own account attributes most social changes to relations is misleading. This explication, in turn, serves as a springboard for a critique of recent calls for “relational thinking.” The third section examines a prominent alternative to the idea of achieving explanatory understanding of complex changes through overviews, namely, the thesis that explanatory understanding is achieved by applying generalizations to changes. I focus on one prominent form that generalizations marshaled for this

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purpose have been recently theorized to assume: mechanisms. I argue that mechanisms cannot underwrite explanations of social changes and that explanatory understanding need not rest on generalities at all. The book’s concluding section takes up an idea that began attracting adherents in the 1980s: that comprehending certain changes in the contemporary world requires the postulation of new sorts of space. The two most prominent sorts involved are digital/virtual space and topological space. I argue that explaining changes in contemporary life does not require postulating spaces of these sorts and also identify conceptual issues with the types of space involved.

Dependence, coevolution, and power Dependence, coevolution, and power feature widely in contemporary theories of social change. The present section holds that the causal and explanatory work done by these phenomena is in fact achieved by nexuses of activity chains and material (and other) events/processes that transpire in, across, and in between bundles and constellations. I defend this claim by showing that these phenomena can be analyzed in terms of such nexuses. The below considerations thereby point toward a broader thesis, namely, that the dynamic, i.e., causal/explanatory significance of a wide variety of general factors invoked in theories of change— for instance, politics—can be ultimately elucidated in terms of nexuses of chains, events, and processes. In chapter two I examined Shove, Pantzar, and Watson’s claim that practices form complexes through relations of dependence. I suggested that dependence relations obtain among two practices when the chains of actions through which the one practice can feasibly obtain something it needs all pass through the other practice. Of course, not just chains of action, but material events and processes as well, help constitute states of dependence: one bundle depends on another when it can feasibly obtain something it needs only through chains of action and material events and processes that characterize the other bundle or that connect the two. In this sense, bundles of many different sorts depend on power generation plants: they can obtain power only through chains of action and material events and processes that characterize power plants or connect these plants to them. Keep in mind that the chains and material phenomena by virtue of which bundles depend on one another might themselves occur in, across, or in between further bundles; when this is the case, the state of dependence is mediated by these further bundles. Families and businesses, for example, depend on power generation plants. Whenever the grid works through unmanned substations, these substations—and their maintenance—mediate the dependence of families and businesses on the plant. I believe that analyses of this general sort apply to all states of dependence in social life: such states invariably arise from the feasibility of certain chains of action and material events/processes that characterize the independent phenomenon or connect this phenomenon to others.

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Elias’ analysis of society illustrates this claim. As noted in chapter two, Elias conceptualized society as a network of interdependent functions (jobs, tasks) that people perform. By virtue of performing functions in such networks, individuals are caught up in systems of interdependence relations and form figurations (Elias 1978). The difference between sets of individuals as figurations and sets of individuals as mere sets lies in the presence or absence of a web of interdependencies. Interdependencies, in turn, consist in a wide variety of specific ties between individuals. Prominent among these, emphasized by Elias, are chains of action: By virtue of this ineradicable interdependence of individual functions, the actions of many separate individuals … must incessantly link together to form long chains of action if the actions of each individual are to fulfill their purposes. And in this way each individual person is really bound; he is bound by living in permanent functional dependence on other people; he is a link in the chains binding other people, just as all the others, directly or indirectly, are links in the chains which bind him. (2010: 20) For Elias, the states of interdependence among individuals by virtue of which a society exists consist chiefly in chains of action among them. It is by virtue of these chains that the individuals involved can fulfill their functions, jobs, or tasks. Indeed, this is why interdependence manifests as chains of action. This fact also provides the sense in which people are locked into these chains: in order to carry out their functions, they must participate in these chains. At a distillery, for example, the interdependence between a distillery owner and the master distiller encompasses a variety of actions chains that their activities are part of. Individuals other than the owner and distiller are also caught up in these chains, for example, mashers, bottlers, those who store barrels or subsequently ship them, accountants, and so on. Elias’ scheme, of course, needs to be supplemented by the work done by material things, events, and processes in mediating action chains and otherwise connecting the situations and actions of individuals. Similar comments apply to coevolution. By the “coevolution” of two phenomena, I mean changes in one over a certain period of time connecting to changes in the other over the same period. It is due to this connection that the two phenomena evolve together. This is the informal use made of the concept of coevolution in a variety of social theories. It is also, incidentally, the more formal use made of it in those “evolutionary” accounts of cultural (sometimes also social) phenomena that envision reciprocal linkages between changes in biological phenomena (e.g., genes) and changes in cultural phenomena (e.g., memes). Note that this parallel between social theories and evolutionary theories concerns the “co” component of “coevolution” alone. The “evolution” component of coevolutionary evolutionary accounts embraces selectionist models that conceptualize change as resulting from the conjoined processes of variation, selection, and replication (e.g., Durham 1991). I do not believe that this is a propitious explanatory schema to apply to social life (see Schatzki 2001).

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In what does the connectedness of changes in two phenomena consist? For instance, in what does the coevolution of new locative software such as Dodgeball or Foursquare—more specifically, the appropriation of this software—and of changes in interpersonal relations consist? It consists, for example, in (1) people responding to PR campaigns or word-of-mouth dissemination of information about the new software by downloading and installing it, (2) people calling up the software on their devices and using it to play a game or to check whether members of their social networks are nearby, adjusting their activity if this proves to be the case, (3) others reacting to these people’s plays in the game or changed activity, (4) these people responding to the reactions of others—and voilà, people’s relations to others have evolved. The coevolution of new software and of changes in interpersonal relations consists in a nexus of activities, chains of activity, and material events and processes. Or, consider the coevolution of forms of bourbon and consumer tastes. Tastes evolve in response to offerings (including offerings of sorts of liquor other than bourbon), just as offerings evolve in response to tastes. This interconnection involves distillers copying successful brands of other distillers, distillers launching new brands with great fanfare to capture the attention of particular segments of consumers, reviews on popular online sites or publication, dissemination of word-of-mouth evaluations of brands fed partly by distillers’ attempts to manipulate opinion, genuine innovations in the production of bourbon resulting in new tastes, the production of bourbon drinks and even bourbons that are intended to be analogous to popular cocktails and other liquors (e.g. vodka), and so on. Through links such as these, consumer tastes and bourbon offerings coevolve. Each of these links, however, consists in activity, chains of activity, and material events and processes. These examples can be generalized. The coevolution of social phenomena is a connectedness between them, more specifically, the connection over a period of time of changes in them. This connection, in turn, consists in nexuses of activities, activity chains, material connections, and material events and processes that characterize or join the coevolving phenomena; the “co” component of coevolution works through such matters. As a result, whatever work coevolution does in explaining social change is in fact achieved by these nexuses. This conclusion is only to be expected. Social phenomena are slices or aspects of the plenum of practices, of the bundles and constellations of practices and material arrangements that compose the plenum. Changes in social phenomena comprise changes in bundles, and changes in two or more social phenomena comprise changes in two or more sets of bundles. Because the changes involved are all features of the plenum, the connection between these two sets of changes is a connection between two sets of features of it. As a result, this interconnection plays out in the plenum, through events and process that befall the bundles involved and/or bundles intermediate between them. Activities, chains of activities, and material events and processes are the pertinent events and processes. Power, too, sometimes works through these matters. Consider, for instance, two prominent understandings of power: Foucault’s upstart interpretation and

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what is colloquially known as domination (see also the analysis of Allen’s power typologies in the concluding section of this chapter). In a previous book (2010), I argued that power conceptualized à la Foucault as actions structuring—­ constraining and enabling—other people’s possible actions is a configuring of possible timespaces: a configuring of possible coordinated states of the temporality of people’s activities and the arrays of places and paths through which they proceed. Timespace is a feature of individual lives. Power à la Foucault, consequently, is people’s actions structuring possible features of other people’s lives, indeed, people’s actions coordinately structuring possible features of multiple other people’s lives. Power so conceived is also the root notion of power that Bourdieu used, above all in his later work, in analyzing social fields as sites of struggles over what is at stake in them. To analyze struggle, Bourdieu conceptualized a social field as a space of “objective forces” or “relations of force,” that is, as a space of power relations. Power relations, he claimed, constrain and enable possible actions, thereby helping—along with habitus—to define people’s situations of action, the strategies they pursue, and how they proceed in struggling (see the exceptionally clear exposition at Bourdieu 2005). These power relations are also tied to the positions that those struggling occupy in the distributions of capital that characterize the fields in which the struggles transpire. Although Bourdieu drew on Foucault’s conception of power, he made two changes to it: (1) he held that power relations obtain, not between actors as in Foucault, but between positions that actors occupy and (2) he believed that organizations and groups, not just individual people, can qualify as actors. Foucault (1982) called the phenomenon of actions structuring others’ possible actions “government.” Government, power à la Foucault, is not necessarily deployed through chains of action and material events and processes. If I make you an offer face-to-face and thereby put you in the position of needing to reply in some way or other, no chain of action or material setup mediates this structuring of your possible actions (even though the making of the offer and your response, whatever it is, form a chain). To the extent, however, that individuals do not directly interact, one person’s actions structure others’ possible actions through chains and materiality. Power works this way because the structuring connection must be forged, and in the absence of chains and material entities, events, and processes no connection can exist between an action, on the one hand, and the lives and situations—including possible actions—of those who are physically distant or separated from it, on the other. No action at a distance except as materially mediated. (Note that physical distance or separation does not preclude direct interaction, for example, on the phone or over Skype.) Suppose the distillery owner terminates an employee who is home sick without telling him. This action alters the employee’s possible actions. He no longer, for instance, has access to the still room where spirits are distilled. The latter difference, however, amounts to such states of affairs as someone asking him for his keys when he returns to his former workplace; and this request in turn is a reaction to the instructions that

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were given to employees about the situation, the distribution of which resulted from a chain of actions originating in or passing through the owner’s declaration that the employee is terminated. The structuring of the employee’s possible actions also embraces, say, his no longer drawing a paycheck from the distillery. This state of affairs likewise results from a chain of actions that originates in or passes through the owner’s declaration, from there passing through the actions of an employee in the accounting office eventually to embrace the activities of an employee of the local bank and any material processes that befall the computer connections at and between the distillery and the bank. And so on. The structuring of the employee’s possible actions works through chains and material events and processes. Accordingly, whatever differences power à la Foucault makes to social affairs is effected through such matters. Much the same story applies to domination. Contemporary conceptions of domination are often traced back to Max Weber. Weber (1962) defined power as the chance of realizing one’s will in the face of resistance, and he defined domination, or rather rule (Herrschaft), as the chance of one’s commands being obeyed by those to whom they are given. Over time, however, domination has come to mean something like imposing one’s will on others. The existence of this phenomenon converges with chances being good that one’s commands will be obeyed by others. But domination is now more like doing things to people, and forcing them to do things, regardless of whether they want these things done to them or want to do these things (alternatively, whether it is in their interests to have these things done to them or to do these things; cf. Lukes 1974). Domination can be carried out or effected directly, that is, without mediation. If one person pulls a gun on another and demands her money, and the victim complies, domination is directly effected. So, too, if one person says to another that he won’t speak to her again if she does not complete his assignment for him, or if the distillery owner orders the reluctant accountant sitting next to her to terminate and remove a certain employee from the payroll. Although these cases of direct domination evince chains of action, the chains involved do not mediate the power relation. Rather, the chains—together with other states of the world such as someone being emotionally dependent on someone else or the owner refusing to meet with the employee—fill out what there is in the world to a particular occurrence of domination. These three cases also exemplify what can be called “immediate domination,” that is, domination among people who are in the same setting of action and can see or hear each other. Domination over greater distances or across large settings (such as a sports arena) can likewise be directly exerted, through a direct interaction between the people involved. When this occurs, domination is materially mediated in familiar ways, as when the owner, who is in Japan, over Skype orders the accountant back home in Kentucky to fire the employee, or when one person threatens to blackmail someone else over the phone. Domination, however, also works indirectly. Governments, for instance, get citizens to pay taxes even though people, in paying their taxes, do not directly

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respond to government orders or directives. Governments achieve this instead through the activities, chains, and material things, events, and processes involved in audits, reminders of filing deadlines, and automatic payroll deductions, as well as arrests, trials, and convictions of tax evaders. As discussed in chapters four and five, finally, action chains and material events and processes depend on the bundles in and across which they transpire. For example, the material events and processes that help effectuate government or domination befall the arrangements that compose or connect the bundles as part of which governor and governed or dominator and dominated act. Moreover, each activity in a chain thereof is at once the carrying out of some practice, and thus beholden to the normative organization of that practice. The owner could not order the accountant to fire an employee, for instance, absent practices that empower those who are owners (or senior executives or managers) to fire people and that enjoin others to execute their decisions and commands. Similarly, the government could not get people to pay taxes absent the bundles as part of which audits are conducted, through which announcements are circulated or payroll deductions are processed, or as part of which arrests are made or trials conducted. It follows that understanding power relations that transpire over space and time requires (1) grasping how bundles that are separate in space and time are linked via both chains and events and processes and (2) apprehending any intermediate bundles that these chains, events, and processes are part of. As Watson (2017: 181) puts it, the key to understanding power relations involving powerful agents, agencies, and institutions is “understanding how practices [read: bundles] are related to each other across different sites”— through actions chains and material events/processes that might be part of further bundles. Dependence, coevolution, and power relations are states of the world that consist in features of the practice plenum. They themselves are not responsible for what happens in social life but instead comprise configurations of the matters that are so responsible: activities, chains of activity, and material as well as other events and processes. Because of this, the concepts of dependence, coevolution, and power are eminently suited for use in providing overviews of the causal nexuses that are responsible for social affairs and social changes. But the contribution of these concepts to explanatory understanding lies, not in identifying or picking out the many phenomena responsible for change, but in characterizing in broad stroke the large numbers of chains and processes that dynamize social affairs on particular occasions.

What about relations? Mine is a story in which events and processes generate difference and change. The events and processes involved befall the practices, arrangements, and bundles that constitute the practice plenum. More precisely, the events and processes involved befall the phenomena that compose these practices, material

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arrangements, and bundles, namely, activities, practice organizations, material entities, and relations. It is possible to argue, alternatively, that at least some of the events and processes that generate difference and change in the practice plenum befall practices or bundles as such and not their components. Individualists of all stripes espouse yet a further alternative, to wit, that difference-generating events and processes in social life befall individuals and objects (and possibly also relations between individuals). A propitious version of the first alternative is found in Stanley Blue’s (2017) appropriation of Lefebvre’s (2004) rhythmanalysis to explain how connections among practices emerge. Blue’s idea is to conceptualize practices as rhythms, as Lefebvre understood the latter. Lefebvre analyzed rhythms as open-ended entities, repeated in space and time, each repetition of which differs from previous repetitions. One reason that each repetition of a rhythm differs from predecessors is that the rhythm is shaped by the repetitions of other rhythms to which it is connected. In turn, it itself, in returning different, shapes how these other rhythms repeat. Blue applies this idea to practices: a practice is an open-ended entity repeated in space and time, each occurrence of which, different from its predecessors, (1) is shaped by how other practices to which the practice is connected repeat and (2) itself shapes how these other practices repeat. In this way, relations among practices shape the rhythms of the practices involved. This shaping, Blue writes, also “ripples through” the “polyrhythmic ensembles” of practices that compose the plenum of practice, transforming connections among practices; connections become thinner in certain ensembles and denser in others, more flexible in certain ensembles and more fixed in others. The practice plenum is filled with the rippling effects of connected practices that shape one another’s repetitions. It is a plenitude of linked movements resulting in the evolution, persistence, dissolution, and emergence of bundles, complexes, and ensembles of practices in varied and changing combinations. In this maelstrom, “eurhythmic” complexes can form whose component practices are in sync and that as wholes resist changes from without. Such complexes are institutions. Also possible are “arrhythmic” complexes that are subject to centrifugal forces and prone to fragmentation and dissolution. Blue (2017: 11) opposes accounts such as mine that “focus on isolating [actions], objects, relations, [and] chains of causality …” His alternative highlights practices as such and the mutual “entrainment” of the repetitions of different practices whereby they connect and form metamorphosing complexes and ensembles. This is an innovative picture. I am skeptical, however, that the movement and energy that infuse the practice plenum are located in bundles as such as opposed to the activities and chains, material events and processes that run through and link bundles. It is more plausible to claim, as Blue does in other articles (Blue and Spurling 2017, Blue 2018) that the organization—as opposed to the dynamism—of institutional complexes of practices (such as a hospital) lies in interconnected relations among the disciplinary, temporal, and material dimensions of practices as such.

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Another concern I have with Blue’s picture is that practices, as I understand them, do not repeat; practices as Bourdieu or as Shove, Pantzar, and Watson conceive of them repeat, but Blue does not explicitly draw on their ideas. According to my account, when someone performs an action as part of a given practice, the practice is extended. A new moment of a practice is not a repetition or return of the practice but an extension or expansion of it: the practice becomes different not because a different version of itself returns but because it becomes more than it was before. What can, on the other hand, repeat are the activities that compose practices. Heating a soup base, for example, is something repeatedly done in cooking practices; each repetition of this activity is also different. But practices such as cooking are more complex entities than individual activities are, and even when their constituent activities repeat it does not follow that practices do. Activities, chains of activity, and material events and processes befall people, practices, arrangements, and bundles and are responsible for difference and change. Relations are hardly absent. Chains of action, for example, form a kind of relation between bundles. So, too, do many material processes. One could, consequently, aver that on my account relations generate most differences and changes in the practice plenum. This claim, however, would carry no implications beyond my own analysis. All social theories are relational in the sense of recognizing relations in social life (see below). Which relations, moreover, a given social theory recognizes depends on its ontology. My account, for example, envisions a practice plenum composed of nexuses of bundles, thereby treating bundles as related. It so happens, moreover, that many of the phenomena that according to this account generate difference and change qualify as relations among bundles. As a result, the observation that the account holds that relations generate difference and change reflects peculiarities of the account and carries no implications for any other. The situation would be different if my account averred that relations of some widely recognized sort generate difference and change, say, relations among individuals (or among positions occupied by individuals). Then, the meta-observation that the account claims that relations generate change would have wider significance and not be otiose. The observation is also misleading. For a chain of activities generates change— if it does—as a series of events (an Abbott-like process) and not as a relation between bundles. That is, chains dynamize the practice plenum qua event series and not qua relations. Some action chains that generate change are also relations among bundles, but chains generate change independently of this status. Chains of actions and material events and processes themselves embrace relations. Chains comprise responses to prior actions and to states of the world, and the fact that an activity is a response implies that it has a relation—that of responding to, or being induced by—to something that precedes it. Changing the world through an intervention into it is likewise a relation, between actions, alternatively, people, and states of the world. Material events and processes, too, can encompass relations. When, for instance, a landslide buries an exposed part of a town, the landslide and the town are related. Chemical reactions in a

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lab, moreover, relate molecules and catalysts. And so on and so on indefinitely. Thinking this way, however, quickly requires social thought to acknowledge far more relations and types of relations than it can perspicuously work with. Relations may be everywhere in the practice plenum, but no social theory can make this idea productive. This comment points toward broader concerns with the notion of relation. Contemporary social theory is replete with calls for, invocations of, and homages to relations and relational turns. I can only partly endorse this chorus: although relations help compose the practice plenum and, thereby, social life, they are not qua relations crucial to the happening and progress of social affairs. The entire topic of relations and social life is vexed by the vagueness of the notion of a relation. This vagueness is reflected in the familiar platitude that everything is related to everything else. This platitude is obviously true if relations are conceptualized so broadly that, for instance, if A is related to B, and B is related to C, A is ipso facto related to C, or if A and B are not related, that is the relation between them. Abetting the vagueness of the notion of a relation is the fact that no noncircular definition of the notion exists: any definition calls on some such notion as connection, tie, or link, which seems to be roughly equivalent to relation. One reaction to this situation is the philosophical doctrine that “relation” is a primitive term. A primitive term denotes a fundamental constituent of reality that cannot be reduced to or analyzed in terms of more fundamental constituents. According to this reaction, relations are part of the basic furniture of the universe. Another reaction to the indefinability of relations is to look to mathematics. In that discipline, a relation between two sets is a collection of ordered pairs, each of which contains one element from each set. When the two sets each contain just one element, the relation between them is simply the juxtaposition of the two elements. This analysis is general enough to cover every imaginable relation (more content-fully specified), but it also leads to the conclusion that everything is related to everything else. Like the idea that relations are everywhere, social analysis cannot be based on this “insight.” Social theories, moreover, recognize a large variety of relations. The diversity is large because theories pick out and name relations that pertain to whatever they view as the central constituents of social reality, and theories recognize different basic constituents. Practice theories display some of the glut. As mentioned in chapter two, for instance, Bourdieu argued that objective relations among positions in a social space structure the interpersonal relations and practices that transpire in that space. Stephen Kemmis (e.g., Kemmis and Grootenboer 2008, Kemmis et al. 2014) argues that practices are composed, not of organized doings and sayings alone, but of organized doings, sayings, and relatings, where the latter category denotes relations to one another and to things in the world that people assume in participating in particular practices. He thereby counts relations between and among individuals as a fundamental component of practices. My own account, meanwhile, speaks of relations

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between practices and arrangements and among bundles. And Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012) discuss three sorts of relation: (1) relations between individuals, which the authors collect under the rubric of networks; (2) ties between the specific elements—the particular meanings, competences, and materials—that, in being brought together in performances, compose a practice; and (3) connections between practices, including dependence, co-location, competition, sequencing, and synchronization. Since the range of social ontologies extends well beyond practice approaches, the profusion of relations ascribed to social life is much larger. Thus, there are relations between individuals, between groups, between structures, between structures and actions, between interactions and situations, between situations or sites, between society’s subsystems, between systems and their environments, among the components of networks or assemblages, between networks or assemblages, and between processes, not to mention relations between economy and politics, between the American economy and the world economy, between universities in the same city, and between universities in the same league, as well as relations between subject and object, between people and objects, between the organism and the environment, between mind and body, between knowledge and social context, between knowledge and truth, between and among bodies, between humanity and nature, between society and nature, and on and on. This abundance reflects not just the multiplicity of social ontologies, but also the indefiniteness of the notion of relation, which enables any juxtaposition of entities to qualify as a “relation.” Accordingly, it behooves social theorists not to overemphasize relations and relationality in developing and labeling accounts of the social. As noted, social theorists are of late deluged by acclamations of a “relational turn” that allegedly began in social theory either in the 1930s or in recent decades (compare Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 16 and Anderson 2012). But social theory, and intellectual work generally, has always or long been “relational” if this means acknowledging and theorizing relations that help make up reality. What is true is that in the modern era until the early-mid 1800s social thought was almost entirely individualist in character. Thinkers did not call attention to the notion of relations and often treated individuals and the social phenomena such as markets, governments, and families built out of them as if they were things. Beginning with Fichte, Hegel, and Marx, thinkers increasingly emphasized relations and gave relational analyses of key properties of things which had been thought of as holding of these entities independent of their relations with other entities (e.g., the consciousnesses, minds, or identities of individual people). Since then, furthermore, more theorists have taken “relational turns,” proclaiming relations the primary social ontological category and seeking to analyze all manner of social phenomena, and the people who populate them, in terms of relations. Elias (2010) and Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) are two paradigmatic thinkers of this sort, as are prominent process or pragmatist thinkers such as John Dewey, Andrew Abbott, and Tim Ingold.

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Such theorists are rarely thorough-going relationists. For example, annunciations of the primacy of relations are usually theses about the centrality of this or that type of relation, whose importance previous social theorists have overlooked. A good example is Elias’ (2010) claim that prior ontological contrasts between individualism and holism had overlooked the possibility that, because society is an invisible order of interdependent functions occupied by individuals, people are always caught up in “networks [of relations] of dependence” with one another, through which they become the individuals they are. For Elias, the importance of such networks of relations is that they help account for how society works and also for how individuals come to be. What’s more, advocates of “relational” thought do not always analyze certain key social phenomena, for example, individuals, purely relationally or even deny that these phenomena are things or substances. Elias, for example, can be easily read as simply insisting (1) that relations are distinct from things (i.e., individuals) and (2) that individuals form societies by virtue of the relations of dependence among them. On this point, his position should be contrasted with that, say, of Abbott, who contends (2007: 7), against all forms of methodological individualism, that “selves” are “continuously recreated in the flow of interactions.” But even when theorists such as Abbott include individuals (selves) and other social entities (e.g., Abbott 1995b) among the entities denied thing-hood, they acknowledge, perhaps less spectacularly, the presence of all sorts of other substantial objects and things in social life such as bodies and artifacts. They also accord these substances great significance in social life. Those selves that are built up through interactions, Abbott writes, inescapably “inhabit” biological bodies. Similar remarks apply to Bourdieu. Blanket claims such as that everything is relational (e.g., Holland and Lave 2009: 2) are metaphysical theses that, when annunciated by social theorists, amount to articles of faith that lie in the background of their thoughts. What’s more, every theory recognizes relations that it deems of importance, and the idea that key properties of things depend on other things has become commonplace today, including among methodological individualists. So, calls for relational thinking have value as pleas that such and such important types of relation be recognized (as in Elias or in Bourdieu 1985) or as reminders that key properties of people or social phenomena derive from these entities’ relations to others. Instead, however, of hailing relational turns and calling for relational thinking, social theorists should determine which rationally sensible theories and ontologies are most useful for their purposes and work with whatever sorts of relations are recognized in these theories and ontologies, thereby letting the relational chips fall where they may. In addition, as stated in chapter one, attempts to analyze everything relationally should be dropped and replaced by a more ecumenical approach that recognizes a plurality of categories of entity—substances, events, structures, and processes—in addition to relations. Calls for relational thinking are dangerous if they are taken to suggest that relations, alone or ultimately, compose social life.

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Against social mechanisms The explanations offered in chapter seven (and six) were descriptions of the causes of particular social changes or transformative episodes in social life. These descriptions took the form of overviews of what was responsible for these changes or episodes. These descriptions were overviews because the causes of any complex social change or transformative episode, and many large as well as smaller or simpler ones, too, are many. Any attempt to enumerate them all will fail to yield causal comprehension. I also pointed out that the course and upshot of large nexuses of causes are highly contingent (they are, in addition, path-dependent and irreversible, though I did not discuss this). The art of the overview is well on display in the discipline of history and in the historical corners of the other social disciplines. Most social researchers, however, who have considered the matter claim that social affairs are explained in ways other than through the provision of overviews (or enumerations). As indicated in chapter six, the most common approach is to claim that social researchers draw up or marshal generalities and construct explanations by applying these generalizations to the change or changes to be explained. Some thinkers have even opined that explanatory comprehension requires recourse to, the backing of, generalities. I will argue below that this conviction can be opposed by a Wittgensteinian sensibility that holds that explanatory comprehension rests, not on generalities, but on familiarity with the diversity of human lives. I will first discuss why generalizations do not underwrite explanations and then sketch the alternative. Those who think that explanations require generalities have tended to hold that pertinent generalities come in two basic forms: laws and generalizations. As theorists over the past thirty years steadily abandoned the idea that social laws exist, they increasingly turned to the idea that the generalities that back explanations of social changes are generalizations. Often, moreover, they have called these generalities “mechanisms” instead of “generalizations”; ideal types (and typologization theory) form a second class of generalities, which bear a contentious relationship to explanation. For many theorists, to explain a social phenomenon is to identify the mechanism(s) that gives rise to it. There is no one shared understanding of what a mechanism is (see Mahoney 2001 and Hedström and Ylikoski 2010). One item that all theorists of mechanisms agree on is that the practice of explaining social changes by identifying mechanisms lies somewhere between explaining them by citing laws and doing so by telling simple stories (simple narratives). A simple story recounts the unique set of events that lead from one situation or event to another (cf. Hedström and Swedberg 1998: 2). Note that researchers who affirm mechanisms also write narratives. Their “theoretical” narratives, however, contrast with simple ones in incorporating theory-based mechanisms into descriptions of the histories that lead up to social changes and phenomena of interest. Perhaps the most general characterization of a mechanism that most researchers would agree with is that a

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mechanism is what links cause to effect: a mechanism is either (a) the particular connection that obtains between the event or state of affairs that is a cause and the event or state of affairs that is the effect or (b) the sequence of events or processes that leads from the first to the second (see Gross 2009: 362, Little 2016: 190–2, and the references at Mahoney 2000, footnote 91). Another widely shared idea is that, in order to be a mechanism, the link between the cause and the effect, or the sequence of events or processes that leads from the former to the latter, must be general. A mechanism is a way that things can come to be, not the particular connection between or particular series of events that leads from one thing to another on a particular occasion. Generally speaking, the generality of a mechanism lies in its recurrence, more precisely, in its actual or possible recurrence. When a mechanism is construed as a particular connection between cause and effect, its generality lies, not in its connecting a particular event (or state) to the particular event (or state) that is its effect, but in its actually or possibly recurrently connecting events of some type that the first event instantiates to events of a type that the second instantiates. When mechanisms are construed as sequences of events or processes that connect cause and effect, the generality of mechanisms lies in such sequences instantiating a type of sequence that does or can recur. More fully stated: a sequence is a mechanism if (1) it instantiates a type of sequence, instances of which occur when events of a certain sort take place and (2) the sequences of this type that occur when events of that sort take place lead to events of another particular type. This expanded formulation reveals why the generality of a mechanism lies in its actual or possible recurrence. The actual recurrence of a sequence that is a mechanism depends on the recurrence of events of the first sort. But the sequence does not cease being a mechanism if events of this sort never take place or occur once (on mechanisms not being empirical regularities, see Hedström and Ylikoski 2010). The generality of a connection or sequence cannot, therefore, lie in its actual recurrence alone. The first form that the generality of a mechanism can assume is illustrated by the wealth of psychological mechanisms that some social researchers, especially individualists, reach for to explain social changes via explanations of the behavior of individuals and aggregates thereof. These mechanisms are often formulated in sentences of the form, “If A, then usually B.” An example is the so-called spillover mechanism, according to which someone who acts a certain way in one domain will usually act that way in another. For instance, if a person envies her enemies, she will also usually envy her friends. Other examples of psychological mechanisms are the so-called endowment, contrastive, and compensation effects (see Elster 1998). A more social example of this first form of mechanisms—if A, then usually B—is Charles Tilly’s claim that the “dissolution of coercive controls supporting current relations of exploitation and opportunity hoarding” is a mechanism promoting democracy (Tilly 2001: 34). In all cases, the presumption is not that whenever A occurs B will too (the mechanism might then be a law), but, rather, that A is usually or typically accompanied or followed by B, that is,

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that A tends to lead to B. This tendency, not the universal association, is also the actual pattern that researchers observe in social life. To call this tendency a mechanism is to indicate that the sequence, A, B, actually or possibly recurs in human life and, as a result, can be called on to back explanations of how people act in specific situations or why certain events take place; it can also be called on to back explanations of certain generalizations about behavior and events. An example of the second form that the generality of mechanisms can take is the following: the introduction of a technological innovation in an industry being followed by the diffusion of the innovation in the industry, eventually resulting in the existence of the innovation throughout the industry. Here, an event of a particular sort, the introduction of technological innovation, triggers—­ alternatively, is followed by—a series of events, diffusion, that leads to an outcome of a particular sort, namely, the presence of the innovation throughout the industry. Such mechanisms are formulated in sentences of the form, “Usually, if C, M leads to E,” where C is the cause, M the mechanism, and E the effect. A slightly different analysis of a mechanism is given by Machamer, Darden, and Craver (2000). Their formulations are particularly clairvoyant. The authors hold that mechanisms explain how something comes about (or how a significant process, for example, the copying of DNA, works). This is because a mechanism is the process that brings things of that sort about. On this analysis, the mechanism itself is the cause; it is not what leads from the cause to the effect but itself produces the effect. As a result, the phenomena that are treated as “causes” on the second analysis of mechanisms discussed in the previous paragraph (the C’s in “Usually, if C, M leads to E”) are, according to Machamer et al., part of the conditions under which the cause, i.e., the mechanism-process M, transpires. Tilly’s example illustrates the basic thrust of their analysis. Tilly claimed that the “dissolution of coercive controls supporting current relations of exploitation and opportunity hoarding” tends to promote democracy. Dissolution is a process (even if not a continuous one), and the claim is that this process tends to lead to democracy. Notice that this process can explain the emergence of democracy only if it is supplemented by the specification of additional mechanisms through which democracy builds up once coercion is undermined and exploitation weakened. Indeed, those who construct theoretical narratives of the event nexuses that lead to particular changes and phenomena (or types thereof ) often claim that multiple mechanisms must figure in such narratives. Machamer et al.’s version of the idea that mechanisms are general maintains that “[m]echanisms are regular in that they work always or for the most part in the same way under the same conditions” (2000: 3). When mechanisms do not work in the same way, something presumably has gone wrong or interfered with their operation. The just cited formulation introduces two further important considerations. The first is that mechanisms can be invariant (cf. Woodward 2002, Little 2016). The second is that the invariant, or universal, relation between a process and an outcome holds under certain conditions, not no matter what. Accordingly, mechanisms as Machamer et al. analyze them can be

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formulated in sentences of the form, “Under conditions X, process M always (or nearly always) leads to outcome E.” The above discussed second form that the generality of mechanisms can ­a ssume—usually, if C, M → E—likewise relates sequences of events or processes to particular conditions under which they occur. If it is usually true that, when a C event occurs, an M sequence of events leads to an E event, then the occurrence of a C event is the condition under which M sequences tend to lead to E events. As noted, one difference between this analysis and the one offered by Machamer at al. is that the former treats C events as the causes of E events while Machamer and his colleagues make C events part of the conditions under which M processes cause E events. A second, much more consequential difference is that, whereas Machamer et al. claim that the M → E relation can be invariant, few social researchers believe that relations between a process and an outcome are ever this tight. Social researchers invariably treat the M → E and if C, M → E relations, like the relation between A and B in if A, then B mechanisms, as tendencies or patterns. Social reality is just too complex, interconnected, and contingent to bear relations of invariance. I suspect, for instance, that it is due to his knowledge of the variability of social affairs that Tilly called the connection between the dissolution of coercive controls and the rise of democracy a “tendency.” Students of social life refuse to treat relations of the types under discussion as invariant even when consideration is limited to cases in which certain conditions obtain, for example, an event of type C occurs. For it is not just as a matter of actual empirical fact that the connection between the obtaining of the conditions and the occurrence of the relation is less than iron clad. Rather, no specifiable conditions exist under which it is a sure empirical bet. No specifiable conditions exist under which processes of given type always lead to events of a particular type or occurrences of events of a given type are always followed by a processes of a given type giving rise to events of another type. This conclusion also holds of the if A, then B mechanisms that researchers apply to the behavior of individuals. Here arises an important question about the looser type of mechanism widely recognized in social research—the “more or less general” (Gross 2009: 364) event sequences that give rise to outcomes of particular types. The sentences that describe such mechanisms are generalizations that take such forms as that “If A, then usually (or quite often or in most cases) B” or “Usually, if C, M leads to E.” Many philosophers will hold that sentences of these forms cannot provide the explanatory power that descriptions of particular events or states of affairs are supposed to gain from generalities. For these sentences do not support robust counterfactuals. The reason that a sentence of these forms fails to support counterfactuals is that, in leaving substantial room for exceptions, it cannot specify what would have happened if conditions or events had been different. It follows, however, that the generalization cannot explanatorily illuminate what happens in any actual case of A being followed by B or C being followed by M leading to E—for the fact that there is a reasonable chance that things could have gone otherwise in that case (i.e., that something other than B followed A

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or something other than M → E followed C) implies there might be something else that explains things actually going this way. One has to look and see. This issue, however, does not seem to deter social researchers from calling on mechanisms to explain particular events or affairs. It probably explains, moreover, why most philosophers who analyze mechanisms claim that mechanisms hold “invariantly” or “always.” It is important to emphasize that the idea of a mechanism does not make substantive assumptions about the types of events or processes that can lead from cause to effect. This openness partly reflects the applicability of the idea to many, if not all realms where causality exists and the fact that the causalities at work in, say, galaxies, cells, and social life have little of substance in common. Even when social life alone is at issue, the notion of a mechanism does not, or rather, should not include substantive assumptions about the types of event series or processes that compose mechanisms. Hedström and Swedberg (1998: 10) join Elster (1989, 1998; see also Little 2016: 190) in asserting that mechanisms concern the actions of individuals, that is, that the events and processes involved in explanations of social phenomena are psychological or behavioral in character. This position resembles the “microfoundations” thesis of Coleman (1990) and Little (1998), according to which any process at the “macro” level must be carried out through actions of individuals at the “micro” level. The example from Tilly shows, however, that other social researchers disagree with them; it also suggests that Hedström, Swedberg, and Elster smuggle a methodological individualist agenda into their analysis (even if Abbott (2007: 5, 6) probably goes too far in accusing them of promoting ontological individualism, that is, the reduction of social phenomena to the actions and psychological states of individuals). One reason that I am discussing mechanisms is that nexuses of chains, events, and processes obviously bear some resemblance to mechanisms as just analyzed. Such nexuses lead to, or produce, social changes. These nexuses, however, cannot be easily assimilated to mechanisms. This is because they are not general. More precisely formulated: descriptions of such nexuses under which they (1) actually or possibly recur in social life or (2) actually or possibly regularly lead from events or states of affairs of a particular sort to events or states of affairs of a different specific sort do not have explanatory value. Consider, first, larger or more complex social changes. The actual nexuses that lead to larger or more complex changes contain numerous, sometimes multitudinous, chains, events, and processes. Because the chains, events, and processes involved connect in all sorts of ways, and because matters external to complex unfolding nexuses invariably bear (have effects) on these nexuses, the changes and states of affair that these nexuses lead to depend on hosts of particular matters, which could have easily not taken place or been otherwise. The changes or phenomena that result are multiply contingent products of contingent connections among the multitudinous event/process series involved. Any true claim that instances of a type of nexus that such a complex nexus instantiates regularly lead to outcomes of one particular sort is bound to

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be too general to bestow explanatory power on a more detailed description of a particular complex nexus of this type leading to a particular outcome of this one sort. The profound contingency of this complex nexus implies that a researcher who seeks to explain the outcome that it leads to must examine the particulars of the nexus. But this is precisely what the generalization, that is, the mechanism, leaves out: the generalization brackets the particulars and treats the nexus and the outcome as things that recur. If, furthermore, mechanisms are analyzed, not as tendencies, but more philosophically as conditionalized invariants, the fact that no specifiable conditions exist under which nexuses of the sort involved invariably lead to outcomes of the sort involved contradicts the idea these nexuses are mechanisms. A good example of this is a putative mechanism that Little (2016: 192) offers, to wit, that changes in “transportation systems cause shifts of social activity and habitation.” This statement is obviously a true generalization. But the explanatory power of a more detailed description of the particular nexus that leads from a particular change in transportation systems to particular changes in activity and habitation does not depend on this generalization. The description of the particular nexus provides comprehension of what the particular changes in activity and habitation depend on independent of the generalization. Particulars of the nexus illuminate the connection between the two sets of changes at issue, and the generalization just sits inertly in the background reporting on a pattern that emerges from multiple cases. The same argument applies both to simpler and smaller changes and to changes in simpler or smaller phenomena. The nexuses that lead to changes of these sorts are not as complex as those that lead to more complex or larger changes. But the strands composing any of these nexuses are equally connected, contingent, and subject to external intervention. The interconnection, contingency, and external vulnerability of the chains and processes that, together, lead to smaller and simpler changes requires the social researcher who wishes to understand what such changes depend on to examine the particular nexuses involved. Generalizations might be formulable about ranges of cases. But these generalizations do not bestow explanatory power on descriptions of particular nexuses. The fact that the argument applies to simpler or smaller changes entails that the argument as applied to complex or large changes cannot be countered by the claim that complex nexuses evince multiple smaller-scale mechanisms. Again, generalizations might be formulable about the smaller or simpler nexuses that lead to the simpler or smaller changes that make up more complex or larger ones. Such generalizations, however, will tend to be of a list-like sort. Charles Tilly wrote (1995: 1601) that: regularities in political life are very broad … but do not operate in the form of recurrent structures and processes at a large scale. They consist of recurrent causes which in different circumstances and sequences compound into highly variable but nonetheless explicable effects.

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Similarly, generalizations about the nexuses that lead to the simpler changes that make up more complex changes of a particular sort will be lists of the most prevalent sorts of nexus, combinations of which lead to more complex changes of that sort. Because they are lists, however, such generalizations cannot bestow explanatory power on descriptions of particular combinations. Statistical generalizations can also be drawn up about the incidence of different causes across populations of cases (though the implications of interaction effects and path-­ dependence for statistical analysis is a complicating issue, e.g., Hall 2003). But statistical generalizations, too, cannot bestow explanatory power on descriptions of particular cases. Explanatory illumination instead requires gaining some sort of grasp of the particular nexuses involved in particular cases; it requires a grasp of complex entities in their complexity. My suggestion in this book is that achieving and communicating explanatory understanding of social changes of any appreciable complexity whatsoever requires fashioning overviews of the nexuses of chains and processes that are responsible for them. Mechanisms do not contribute much to this task. Psychological mechanisms might help a researcher understand what is responsible for people acting and extending chains as they do when large numbers of people act in the same way “for the same reasons.” But large numbers of people do not act the same for the same reasons all that often. What’s more, mechanisms (such as Tilly’s) that allegedly apply to nexuses as such—as opposed to their components—are so loose that they cry out for researchers to delve into the particulars of cases in order to ascertain the essential, significant, and salient features of the causal nexuses at work in those cases. In short, mechanism thinking—of empiricist and, though I have not discussed this, structuralist (e.g., Bhaskar 1979) sorts—does a poor job handling cases in which what happens in social life has multiple interconnected causes subject to external redirection. Theorists of mechanisms regularly note that multiple mechanisms can operate on or be relevant to human activity or social events on particular occasions, that is, that multiple mechanisms can be triggered or operate simultaneously. (They also claim that it can be uncertain, even indeterminate, which mechanism(s) are actually triggered in given situations.) This way of thinking feeds off a Newtonian conception of multiplicity. In Newtonian physics, what results in a situation where multiple forces act is the outcome of adding the different forces. Similarly, friends of mechanisms conceive of mechanisms as specific (types of ) event sequences (if A, then B; if C, then M → E), and they conceptualize the effect of the simultaneous triggering or operation of multiple mechanisms as the outcome of some sort of synthesis of these sequences. But with what strange calculus can any given synthesis, let alone syntheses of this sort more generally, be calculated when the events concern human activity or social states of affair? Addition is clearly not what occurs. A better way of grasping multiplicity starts from the idea that what results from the unfolding of multiple linked chains, events, and processes depends on how, circumstantially, the chains are extended and how, circumstantially, the

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chains, events, and processes intersect and connect, these circumstantial extensions and connections leading, over time, to a particular outcome. It is not that each chain is headed in a particular direction (this is more likely true of material processes) and that the “system” ends up somewhere that is a synthesis of these. Chains do not head anywhere; each new link in a chain is indeterminate until it happens. People proceed in situations that embrace multiple events and states of affair, each of which arises from particular nexuses of chains and processes, and what they do in these situations, like which components of the situations they react to, is fundamentally open. What, consequently, happens in social life when more or less everyone is in this condition, and where what people do is part of or leads to aspects of the situations of others, cannot be reconstructed from tendencies or from conditionalized invariants. The details of events alone reveal just why what happened did happen. There are no regularities that support counterfactuals. Only porous generalizations exist. Of course, the more cases a researcher is familiar with, the better he can formulate generalizations. It is because, for instance, Warde was familiar with a variety of cases (and also with theoretical ideas) that he (2016: 138) could construct lists such as the one mentioned in chapter six of the sources of internal change in a practice (controversy, competition, pursuit of excellence, the development of proceedings, and changes in environment, affordances, and adjacent practices). This list, however, is a Tilly-like generalization (see the chart at Tilly 2001: 34). As a result, it cannot back up explanations of particular changes. As, furthermore, researchers become more deeply familiar with a wider variety of cases, more cases might be fitted to existing or new generalizations, and broader generalizations might be formulated. All this applies to nexuses of chains, events, and processes. As the bourbon industry industrialized, for example, distilleries continually appropriated innovations and installed better equipment that had been produced locally or in the river cities. A researcher can report that distillers regularly adopted technology that improved their operations. But this generalization cannot be used to explain, or to back the explanation of, any particular case of a distiller adopting better technology (unless the distiller knew about the regularity and acted on it). For the generalization simply reports on a population of cases, and each particular case is determined by its particulars. Nor can particular cases of distillers adopting better technology to improve their operations be explained by a broader generalization to the effect that people adopt technologies, or simply do things, that improve their practices. For the exceptions are too numerous. None of this, however, implies that these generalizations are false. If someone—say, an alien anthropologist—who is unfamiliar with human practices were handed such generalizations and beamed back to a rural distillery in the 1830s, she would probably rely on them to explanatorily understand the behavior she observes. I suspect, however, that just about any competent adult today who knows nothing about the development of the Kentucky bourbon industry would not have to rely on these generalizations were she beamed back to this distillery. The experience that she has “accumulated” of human activities

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and practices in becoming and proceeding as a competent adult would enable her to grasp what they are doing and what is responsible for it. To have a good grasp of what is going on, she would only need to learn about the constellations of practices and arrangements that their actions are part of. What’s more, her understanding of generalizations such as those mentioned in the previous paragraph would, if they were handed to her, rest on her experience. Similarly, researchers sometimes lean on generalizations appropriated from articles, books, lectures, and classes (etc.) when, for example, formulating hypotheses or explaining material unfamiliar to them. They also have to rely on generalizations when they have insufficient access to the practices and bundles in which their subject matter consists. If, however, they enjoy access to material familiar to them in a general way, they will in principle be able to forego generalizations and to grasp what is responsible for people’s actions on particular occasions on the basis of their familiarity with human activities and practices. I am not saying that generalizations have no place in social research. On the contrary, generalizations are crucial. As I have been suggesting, they importantly summarize how things are, for example, what is responsible for what. Such information can be invaluable for a variety of purposes. For example, because generalizations summarize, they have a place in overviews, where they report regularities and patterns pertinent to conveying the gist of causal nexuses. Generalizations can also be profitably formulated about causal nexuses themselves, though the complexity and heterogeneity of these nexuses (cf. Ragin 2000) makes it likely that the only feasible generalizations, apart from statistical generalizations, will be very general (such as Tilly’s lists of causes). What I am saying is that explanations have no inherent connection to generalizations and that generalizations provide or support explanatory comprehension only when the formulators or recipients of explanations are ignorant in this or that regard about the subject matter concerned. As stated, for example, social researchers who lack sufficient access to the nexuses responsible for the social affairs they study have no choice but to rely on generalizations to explain these affairs. It might be, moreover, that every investigation of the practice plenum is unable to access, or otherwise remains ignorant of, relevant details of its subject matter. But historical research and journalism show that this ignorance can be steadily and methodically diminished. And every research project, in any social discipline, that aims to explain specific social changes can offer overviews of the causal nexuses that lead to the changes in question, capturing the gist and significant, salient, and essential features of the responsible nexuses. My comments about mechanisms in this section bear uncertain implications for the use social researchers make of such explanatory frameworks of wide scope as systems theory, evolutionary (selection) theory, and field theory. Systems theory can be understood as analyzing a variety of mechanisms that bear on systems or on relations either among systems (and subsystems) or between systems and environments. The variation—selection—replication schema of evolutionary theory can likewise be characterized as a general mechanism. I do think that

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the points I raised about multiplicity, interconnectedness, and contingency tell against such frameworks. But I will not pursue the matter here (for critical comments of a different sort about the selection schema, see Schatzki 2001). As noted, I chose to discuss mechanisms partly because of their prima facie resemblance to the nexuses that bear responsibility for social changes.

New types of space? The book’s concluding section exams whether the world has so changed in recent decades that it is necessary to postulate the existence of new sorts of space in order to comprehend what goes on there. I pose this question partly as one about explanation, to wit: has the world so changed in recent decades that understanding how certain phenomena work or explicating what is responsible for certain phenomena requires describing spaces of sorts that have not existed before (or that earlier existed considerably less often or in attenuated form). In recent years, two types of space have been widely mentioned in this context: digital/virtual space and topological space. The idea of digital/virtual space was launched by William Gibson (1984) in his visionary novel, Neuromancer. In that book, Gibson describes what he calls “cyber” space, a kind of notional space populated by information that is an actual place that a person can enter—“jack into”—and move around in. Movement in cyberspace is not the same as movement in physical space. The two, however, are highly parallel: cyber space seems to be a version of physical space that is populated by—or devolves from—information packets instead of physical entities. The idea of a digital alternative or pendent to physical space subsequently took wing with the development of digital interaction forums such as the WELL and then the World Wide Web. Using these technologies was widely likened to going somewhere or entering a space, where one interacted with other people (on conferences, chat sites, discussion boards, and hangouts), visited websites, acquired information, made purchases, listened to, watched, or downloaded music and videos, and so forth. It was envisioned as a single world or as congeries of worlds to which people had access through their computers (or cell phones or tablets). The existence of Tor, the “dark web,” only enhanced the sense that there is a somewhere to digital worlds—the idea of a hidden space where, among other things, information can be obtained, exchanges transacted, and people and goods trafficked enhanced the sense that the “visible” web, too, must be a space. People even began to fear that splits could develop between people’s digital and real lives and between digital worlds and spaces and their real counterparts. Topological space, by contrast, is a theoretical construction, largely but not only of geographers, that aims to capture particular features of certain possibly new or changed ways in which people and groups today act and interact over space and time. The sorts of phenomena involved are varied, for example, Skype conferences, government administrative reorderings of people’s space-times, and the imbrication of different insides and outsides across borders. Digital devices

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are usually crucial to the existence of these phenomena. Whereas, however, the notion of digital or virtual space denotes an alleged place, accessible from indefinitely many points in the world, that comes into being through digital technology, the notion of topological space captures key features of—that are usually alleged changes in—how and where practices and interactions take place and link. Cyber/digital/virtual space is a vastness or complex archipelago of realms that people can enter through certain bundles, whereas topological space is something that opens up among and encompasses or holds multiple lives and practices. I am not going to say much about cyber/digital/virtual space. The idea that such spaces are worlds apart from the real world is falling on hard times. Although many people still think this way, and although the literal and metaphorical use of expressions such as “digital space” continues apace, increasing numbers of theorists are questioning the virtue of thinking that there is any such thing (e.g., Lehdonvirta 2010). I agree with these theorists. In order to explain the evolution of the WELL, the consolidation of Swedish indie music fandom, or the sudden popularity and subsequent decline of Pokémon Go, it is not necessary to invoke spaces of any sort other than material, existential, and represented (on this trio, see chapter two). At least, these are the only kinds of space that appear in my accounts of these phenomena in chapter seven. What might fuel the impression that these phenomena involve digital spaces is the fact that texts, images, and graphics on computer and cell phone screens were essential to them. Combinations of words, images, and graphics constituted postings and email messages; download sites, discussion boards, and band, fan, and promoter sites; and places of battle, cartoon-like battles, information displays, and simplified geometric representations of real spaces with Pokémon appearing on them. It is in reaction to or in the light of these phenomena, moreover, that people performed particular actions, carried out certain interactions, and carried on certain practices. But it is possible to describe what people encountered on their screens, and the differences what they encountered made to social life, without mentioning or referring to spaces, places, abstract worlds, and the like. For example, the virtual community of the WELL formed through computers, mediated by the words that appeared on monitors. It did not slowly come to be somewhere apart, in a space or place that existed in or behind these devices. Same for the coalescence of the splotchy voluntary teleological organization of indie fandom and for the magma of Pokémon Go. In each case, the associations that formed were composed of real flesh and blood human beings who proceeded through (see chapter three) physical and existential spaces carrying on digitally mediated practices and interactions. What is different about these phenomena was simply that new material entities, and the software that ran on them, supported and were essential to the practices involved, opening up new or altered activities, interactions, practices, and bundles. Of course, computers, cell phones, and the software they run are of immense importance more broadly: they have instigated parallel changes to bundles in almost all domains of social life in the developed world and beyond, including family, work, government, business, religion, and recreation and leisure. These changes,

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however, are evolutions of existing bundles, or appearances of new ones, in material and existential spaces. None involves something worthy of the name “cyber,” “digital,” or “virtual” space. Various conceptions of topological space exist. This variety reflects the ambivalence of theorists, taken collectively, about the relation of what socio-cultural theory calls “topological” to what mathematicians mean by the term. The resulting variation ranges from attempts to develop “postmathematical conceptions” (e.g., Martin and Secor 2014) to attempts to alter mathematical notions as little as possible (e.g., Rotman 2012). At the same time, social and cultural theorists who write about topology or topological space too often fall back simply on calling interesting types of relations or relational spaces “topological” (e.g., Shields 2012, Harvey 2012, Bryant 2014; cf. Barad’s 2007 more complex conception, which supplements connectivity as a topological phenomenon with inside/outside and important differences such as that between human and nonhuman). This practice betrays a poverty of categories: conceptions of relational space well pre-exist the first stirrings of topology as a branch of mathematics in the 19th century and its subsequent emergence in the 20th. This practice also empties the term “topology” of its specificity. Topology does, in fact, emphasize relations, but these are relations of a particular type, namely, relations among features of surfaces that are preserved through continuous transformations of those surfaces. This characteristic of topology does not justify calling any relational space of interest “topological” (see below for an example). Understanding and explaining social life do not require supplementing physical, existential, and represented spaces with topological spaces. To show this, I will focus on a sophisticated and thought-provoking widely cited account of such spaces: John Allen’s notion of power topologies. Allen’s overall topic (see Allen 2011b) is how power should be conceptualized in a world in which new modes of communication have altered how individuals and groups can connect to and intervene in the lives of others. Because this is his topic, a side result of my discussion is a further illustration of the idea, discussed in the opening section of this chapter, that nexuses of activity chains and material events and processes do the causal-explanatory work attributed to power. Allen (2003) distinguishes several forms of power such as domination, authority, seduction, coercion, and manipulation. All of these are types of relation among individuals or groups (including institutional agents and agencies). An important spatial feature of relations of these sorts is that they can just as easily link people who are metrically far apart from one another as people who are physically copresent or metrically near. A prominent feature of the contemporary world is the expansion of power relations that directly link people and groups who are metrically far apart. Allen (2003: 135) claims that in order for a power relation to be exerted “at a distance” it is necessary that the distance be bridged either (1) through a series of mediated relations such as action chains that traverses the gap (these chains might, among other things, effect the transmission of artifacts from near to distant place; cf. Latour’s 1987 concept of immobile mobiles) or (2) by dissolving the

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gap, for instance, through channels of near instantaneous communication such as email and Skype. Bridging the gap in either way involves practices and powers of reach (practices and powers of connection also exist, but I will set these aside in the following). Consequently, an outstanding feature of the contemporary world is the expansion and celerity of practices and powers of reach. Note that Allen upholds the important principle that all action at a distance is materially mediated (cf. Latour 2005, Bryant 2014). New practices of reach reconfigure matters of near and far. This is because exerting a form of power through practices of reach involves a making near of what is far. Two examples are a congressperson bringing near a group of constituents in a bingo hall back home through teleconferencing or the congressperson’s representative bringing the congressperson near to the city council members whom he addresses in her name about a new federal program. Another example of bringing near is the circulation of government edicts, commands, and suggestions bringing government near to constituents (on these examples see Allen 2016: 49–53). Practices of reach can also result in making far what is near as when the person sitting next to you on a train is texting with a friend on another continent. The nearness and farness that practices of reach reconfigure are not matters of metric distance. They are, instead, nonphysical matters concerning presence/absence or availability/unavailability. Reconfigured nearnesses and farnesses are changed constellations of presence and absence (Allen 2011b; Allen and Cochrane 2010; Allen 2016: chapt. 3 passim; cf. Flusser 2006, Sheller 2004): power relations exerted via practices of reach reconfigure the gap between “here” and “there.” Note, although Allen does not acknowledge this, that the presence and absence and nearness and farness involved are features of people’s lives, that is, of their being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1978). Accordingly, what the contemporary world is experiencing is new constellations of near and far, presence and absence. The power of the contemporary state, for instance, lies partly in its presence—direct or indirect—here and there in most people’s lives (see Allen and Cochrane 2010); this includes its bringing people near through websites, faxes, phone calls, social media, and electronic tracking and surveillance. As indicated, these altered configurations are mediated through relations and forms of communication, or in my language, through chains of action and the material components of and material events and processes that befall communication networks. As Allen (2016: 48) writes, “intensive relations of power and authority are co-extensive with the mediated exchanges that compose the spaces of interaction.” Not just power relations evince changed constellations of near and far, presence and absence. Such constellations characterize all the digital examples discussed in this book. Revealing analyses can be made of changed constellations of presence and absence on the WELL, among participants in the Swedish indie fandom, and in the playing of Pokémon Go (for analyses of digital phenomena in terms of presence and absence see, for example, Flusser 2006, Ling 2008: chapt. 7 and 9, Rainie and Wellman 2012: 101–3, and Chayko 2017: 53ff ). Pokémon

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Go evinces an especially dense overlaying and penetration of multiple form of presence and absence. New constellations of this sort likewise characterize the resurgent contemporary bourbon industry due to its growing digital presence. Even the industrialization of the business in the 19th century exhibited evolving presences and absences—for instance, as transportation networks improved— though ones of a simpler order. Allen believes that power relations that reconfigure near and far constitute a type of space that is different from the geometric material space that exhibits metric distances. When the exercise of power involves drawing someone who is metrically distant near, reaching into and becoming present in that person’s life, the power relation should not be understood as extending from the person (or agency) exerting power to the person who is its object. Reaching into another’s life, correlatively, being drawn into the orbit of someone powerful, is not something that extends over the metric distance between them. Indeed, Allen (2016: 51) claims that the relation of reaching into someone’s life, bringing them near, lacks physical presence. Reaching into someone’s life and bringing them near is a relation in another dimension: it embraces presence, not distance. When, consequently, a person or group is said to have greater reach, this does not mean that their power extends over a greater distance or larger area. Rather, it signifies either that they are able to draw more people near, to be present in more people’s lives, or that they—more than others—can effectively exert power through practices of reach. Perhaps reflective of the reconfigurations of near/far and presence/absence involved, Allen holds that power relations compose a topological space. This topological space is distinct from the geometrical space of the mediations through which power relations can link people at a distance: “power relations are not so much positioned in space or extended across it as compose the spaces of which they are part” (2011b: 284; cf. 2016: chapt. 3 passim). The motivations Allen offers for writing of topological space in this context have evolved. At first such talk rested partly on (1) the usefulness of terms such as “folds,” “twists,” “stretch,” and “reach” in capturing the difference between, on the one hand, the reconfigurations of near/far bound up with the exercise of power at a distance through new forms of communication and, on the other, the geometric character of the distances involved and (2) an alleged connection of these terms to topology. Allen (2011b: 295, 2016: 6) admits, however, that the metaphorical quality of these terms makes the latter connection intellectually weak. He also marshals a powerful image that social theoretical friends of topology repeatedly invoke to motivate calling the states of affairs they discuss “topological”: the way that two points on a flattened cloth can be brought nearer by folding the cloth. In Allen’s case, the folding of the cloth makes vivid how two points at a large geometric distance from one another can be brought close in a space different from the one in which they are distant. The problem with this image is that it works exclusively with a metric conception of near/far, comparing the distances between two points as measured along two different paths between them in three-dimensional space, one along the folded surface of the napkin and

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one across the empty space separating parts of this surface. As a result, the image says or implies nothing about topological space. It is not even a legitimate graphical representation of topological space. It only materializes metaphoric terms such as “folding” and “reach” in a geometric spatial context and does not justify reifying power relations as composing a distinct space. Allen has since conceded the point just made about the folded cloth e­ xample (2016: 32). He offers a new justification for using topological concepts to describe social life, namely, that there is “stuff” common to the social sciences and mathematical topology (2016: 5). The first alleged commonality is a “shared concern for relationships that remain the same under transformation.” As noted, mathematical topology does concern such relationships; the idea that certain relations among specific properties of mathematical surfaces remain the same over a set of mathematical surfaces formed through continuous transformation defines topology as a field. But the idea of a relation in social life remaining the same as the phenomena to which it is applied “are transformed,” that is, vary, is so broad as to vitiate the parallel. Just about any social relation holds between multiple pairs of entities. As a result, what holds of these pairs, namely, the relation, remains the same under “transformation,” that is, vis-à-vis the different pairs of entities it connects. Allen, however, is not arguing that most relations in social life are topological. The parallel between the analysis of power and mathematical topology would be stronger if, say, the different pairs of entities between which power relations hold bore “transformations” among themselves that resembled the transformations in mathematical surfaces in which topology is interested. But what would these be? The closest Allen comes to answering this question involves falling back on the metaphors of stretching or folding (see 2016: 36). The second alleged commonality between power relations and the relations that topology is concerned with is that “the relations under continuous transformation compose the space of which they are part” (2016: 6). This claim simply repeats the idea I am challenging. It does not help matters, furthermore, that the only space mentioned in the exposition that immediately follows this statement is geometric space. Allen’s justification for incorporating topological concepts into social analysis goes in circles. The power relations Allen has in mind are, in reality, relations between people and groups who are physically distant from one another that necessarily work through the material connections and chains of action that bridge this distance (cf. 2016: 39). These relations do, indeed, involve the presence and copresence of people and things that are spatially distant; that is, they involve a reconfiguration of people’s existence such that, not just people and things that are physically near, but some that are physically distant as well, are present to them. This presence/ copresence involves new qualities of nearness, farness, and “distance.” This aspect of Allen’s position is extremely fruitful. Stretched power relations of the above sort hold great significance for contemporary social life. But understanding and explaining social affairs by reference to them, grasping the differences that they make to social life, does not require reifying them as (constituting) a

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topological space over and beyond the geometric space that devolves from the persons, groups, material arrangements, and action chains involved. Nor does understanding the configurations of near/far and presence/absence involved in the development of virtual community on the WELL, the coalescence of indie music fandom, the rise and fall of Pokémon Go, and the comeback of the Kentucky bourbon industry require reifying any relations as spaces over and beyond material ones. What explaining social affairs by reference to stretched power relations, like understanding their stretched nature, instead requires is twofold: (1) the realization that presence and absence are general features of human life (being-in-theworld) that many things, not just power relations, can configure, and (2) a grasp of how the evolving nexuses of action chains and material events and processes through which power is exerted involve reconfigured presences and absences in particular lives. The power relations involved are no different from the ones involved in face-to-face interactions in single settings; what differs between cases of the two sorts is simply the existence or nonexistence of mediating connections and chains. Indeed, if power relations existed only in face-to-face interactions in single settings no one would think of them as constituting a distinct topological space—even though power relations in such interactions involve the configuring of presence and absence. More generally, since absence and presence are features of human life generally, reconfigurations of them do not justify talk of a new type of space. Such reconfigurations are simply changes in one dimension of existential space. As I indicated in the opening section when discussing Foucault’s notion of power, power relations work through nexuses of chains, events, and processes that connect people’s lives and that involve reconfigurations of these lives’ existential spaces. What is social theoretically noteworthy about this entire situation is simply that material setups have so evolved that relations that once were restricted to face-to-face interactions in single settings or to uncertain circuits of transportation have now been extended to face-to-face interactions that bridge settings at an indefinite range of physical distances from one another. One result, naturally, is that what is present or absent to whom changes. But this is an alternation in the topography of power with corresponding changes in the lives of the people involved, not the institution of topology. The only spaces involved here are material space, existential space, and represented space. The moral of this extended discussion is that understanding the contemporary world does not require calling on new notions of space that would be inapplicable, or rather, less applicable to earlier eras. At the same time, new technologies and arrangements are significantly altering people’s existence in the world today and changing the configurations of near and far in their lives. Analyzing the contemporary world does not require introducing notions of topological or cyber/ digital/virtual space. But careful attention must be paid to presence and absence in people’s lives, the differences that changed configurations of existential presence and absence make to practices and chains of action, and the ways that these

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presences and absences are shaped and altered by developments in communication and other bundles. Human life does not embrace only what is physically present: people’s bodies, the entities amid which they act, the earth upon which they proceed, the air they breathe (cf. Ingold 2015), the atmosphere through which they move, and the sky and heavens toward which they look. Human life also embraces entities that are present despite being absent. It might seem that digital devices are responsible for this phenomenon, but they only make it more evident. Human life has always embraced what is present in its absence. Recollection, for example, interweaves presence and absence: the presence of what no longer exists. So, too, does homesickness. Homesickness is sometimes described as a relation between a person and a distant place. But this specification leaves out the felt presence of that absent place; indeed, it is the presence of the cherished absent place that makes the experience so heartfelt. Homesickness is a feature of a person’s existence, and only secondarily a relation to a distant place. Skype conversations likewise reconfigure existence, in a materially mediated way. Through such conversations, what is metrically far away and thus absent is made experientially present, and in an overt way. In ways such as these and endless more, human existence blends presence and absence. Digital technology simply alters the blend. Power relations, not surprisingly, have taken advantage of the new possibilities. Like nature, domination, authority, and seduction etc. abhor a vacuum.

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Index

Abbott, A. 49, 117, 174, 175, 180; on processes 8, 9, 12, 48, 100, 117 action at a distance 114, 168, 187–90 activities (human) 2, 28, 41–4; as adjustments 81–2; and change 77, 79, 87, 96–9, 180; compose lives and practices simultaneously 66, 96; compose practices 28, 59, 60, 65, 66, 83, 170; are events 28, 31, 32, 80, 82; and expectations 101, 102; indeterminacy of 101, 104, 183; intervene in world 62, 80–1, 118, 172; joint (Blumer) 59; as reactions 82, 95–7, 132, 167, 172; are teleological 31; see also basic actions; bodily actions; doings; emotions; ends; explanation (of actions); inflection; material world; motivations; originary activity; performings; sayings; situations agency 57, 87 agro-industrialization 155 aliens 36, 40, 58 Allen, J. 72, 187–91 Althusser, L. 32 animals 39 Aristotle xi, 12, 80, 82, 118; see also causality arrangements (of material entities) 35–40, 62, 79, 80, 98, 100, 114, 115, 191; connect to wider ecology 63, 107; help compose social phenomena 27; and practices x, 38, 44, 59; relations among components of 37, 38; see also relations artifacts x, 37, 38, 41, 42, 63–4, 69, 106; decayed or forsaken 64, 65, 106 associations (social) 144, 149; see also digital associations

basic actions see bodily actions Baym, N. 147, 150 Bennett, J. 54 Bergson, H. 5, 10, 12–14, 105 Blue, S. 171–2 bodies (human) 30, 39, 41, 42, 58, 59, 61, 66, 68, 75, 99, 107–8, 113, 175, 192; and alcohol 107, 123 bodily action 30, 59, 60; see also bodies bourbon business 18, 162, 163; agrarian beginnings in Kentucky 18, 108; associated with Kentucky 112, 161; bourbon elite versus industrialists 157, 159; connection to science 98, 122–3, 155, 159; decline in 1960s-1980s 130, 159; emergence of bourbon as such 18, 107, 113, 157; industrialization of 18, 108, 111, 136, 138, 139, 142, 153–9, 161, 162, 183, 189; organizing discourses of quality and of heritage 19, 30, 113, 146, 157, 159–60; resurgence in 1990s-2000s 19, 130, 159–61, 189, 191; rural versus urban 18–19, 112, 163; significance of space for markets of 111; symbiosis with agriculture 18, 154–6; use of charred barrels 18, 107, 112, 163; use of corn 18, 111, 112, 163; and water 18, 58, 73, 76, 108, 112, 131, 154–6, 158; see also Maker’s Mark; railroads; river cities; steam power; Taylor E.; vodka; Whiskey Rebellion bourbon distillation (as process) 12, 14–15, 57, 58, 109, 122–3, 157, 159; see also Crow, J.; stills

210 Index

bourbon distilleries 46–7, 56, 73, 95, 96, 103, 106, 108, 109, 111, 135, 156, 160, 166, 183; and agriculture 154–6, 158; early 19th-century Kentucky landscape of 18, 135–6, 154; founding of agrarian 18, 108, 131, 135–6; industrial 19, 108, 157–8; and rural constellations 154–6, 158–9; see also railroads; river cities; steam power; stills Bourdieu, P. 163, 172–4; on drift 126; on field dynamics 27; on habitus 4, 24, 27, 33, 51, 126–7; on hysteresis 127; on materiality 36, 51–2; on power 168; on practices 30; on rules 30–1; on social change 4, 126–7; on social space 27, 30; on structures 33; as theorist of practice 3, 4; on theory 24 Brand, S. 128–9, 141, 143 Brilliant, L. 128–9, 141, 143 Bryant, L. 67 bundles (of practices and arrangements) 27, 36, 41, 47; as central unit of conceptuality 27, 36, 44, 48; see also chains of action; constellations; life trajectories; material world; practices; relations Butler, J. 87 cascades (of action chains) 88, 142, 145, 147 categories 10–11; advisability of multiple 12–13, 58, 175 causality 44, 80–1, 83, 85–7, 118; Aristotle on xi, 80, 118; Heidegger on xi, 80, 118; inducing activity as 42, 62, 82, 100, 118; intervention as 80, 82, 100, 118; material forms of 105–16; and mechanisms 177–9, 180, 182–3; see also chains of activity; material causality; material world; mechanisms; social changes chains of activity xi, 46, 50, 78–104, 129, 134, 142, 148, 154, 158, 161, 166, 168–9, 172, 191; amount to causal threads 100, 110; as beholden to bundles ix, 95–6, 130, 170; bring about social changes xi, 78–104, 106, 114, 116, 122, 129, 132; can be haphazard 94–5; features of 88–90; form spirals and nexuses 66, 88–91; mediated by material world 62, 93, 99, 106, 109, 122, 128, 131; as relations among bundles 46, 62, 84, 95, 114; temporal gaps in 95; trajectories of 97–9, 123, 183; types of xi, 91–4; see also cascades; feedback loops; knowledge; inflection; interactions; relations among bundles

channeling 41, 42, 62, 95, 105, 116 change 6–7, 10, 13–17, 117; and difference x, 14–15; instituted by events and processes x, 7, 14, 79, 117, 162; as significant difference x, 15, 16, 79, 162; see also significance (judgements of); social change clinamen (Lucretius) 97 coevolution xii, 133, 134, 155, 156, 163, 166–7 Coleman, J. 180 collective action 90–1, 99, 111, 142 Collins, R. 87 communication 1, 9, 20, 21, 29, 31, 32, 41, 42, 46, 56, 57, 61, 62, 92, 95, 145, 149, 154, 187, 188, 192 communities 19–22, 30, 111, 143–4, 149, 152; are material 144–5; virtual 20, 30, 129, 144–7 complexity xi, 115, 135, 141; dealing with 135, 137–43, 181 constellations (of bundles) 3, 44–7, 63, 154; see also relations contingency (of social life) 104, 124, 129–30, 161, 176, 180–3, 185 coordinating discourse 146–7 Crow, J. 98, 109, 110, 155, 159 cyberspace 20, 185, 186, 191; see also digital space; virtual space Deleuze, G. 5, 14, 66, 97; and F. Guattari 36, 69, 70 density (of social phenomena) 47, 72, 73, 75–6, 116, 156 dependence/codependence xii, 45, 47, 133, 134, 156, 158–9, 163, 165–6, 175 Dewey, J. 127, 174 dialogue 33–4, 81, 92, 100, 146 difference 15, 82; instituted by events and processes 6–7, 14–16, 79, 114, 162; see also change digital associations x, xi, xii, 19–22, 73, 110–11, 144; see also Pokémon Go; Swedish indie music fandom; the WELL digital environment defined 20 digital information and communications technologies 19, 20, 95, 107, 108, 110, 186, 191, 192 digital space xii, 20, 75, 165, 185, 186, 191; see also cyberspace; virtual space Dilthey, W. 5 directedness toward 41, 46, 50, 81 disunity (of social investigation) 11, 23, 121, 124

Index  211

doings 28, 32, 59, 65, 66, 84, 98, 114 dolphins 39, 40, 58 Dreyfus, H. 4, 33, 127 drift 98, 103, 104; see also Bourdieu, P. Durkheim, E. 72, 115, 116; see also morphological properties dynamics 5–6 earth 40, 65, 67, 68, 72, 192 ecology (of social phenomena) x, 37, 63–70, 77; see also artifacts; material world Elden, S. 72 Elias, N. 48, 84, 174, 175; concept of figuration 48; conception of society 166 Elster, J. 180 emergence 114–15 Emirbayer, M. 49 emotions 31, 33, 34, 46, 61, 80, 81, 107, 111, 124–7, 135, 144, 149 ends 100, 107, 125, 127, 135 event ontology 13 events 7–13, 15; see also activities (human) event series 8, 9, 11 exchange 91–2 existential space 75, 116, 191; and digital phenomena 186; life trajectories go through 68; and near/far 68, 75, 188, 191, 192; power relations configure 188, 190, 191; places and paths 68, 75, 151; restructured by digital devices 188, 191; see also material world; presence and absence explanations 117; are causal explanations xi, 117, 118; and intervention 121–2; pragmatic dimension of 120–1; and questions 118–20; see also explanations of activity; explanations of social changes explanations of activity xi, 118, 123–7; see also emotions; ends; explanations of social changes; motivations; situations explanations of social changes x, 16–17, 117–34, 135–63; explaining complex changes 135–63, 181; explaining simpler changes 127–34, 181; and explanations of particular actions x, 123–4, 131; and generalizations xii, 165, 176, 179–81, 184; grounded in familiarity xii, 176, 183–4; historical nature of xi, 122; and the natural sciences 122; require grasp of complexity 129, 137–8, 181–3; require grasp of particulars 181–2; richer explanations draw in context xi, 124, 129–32, 135–6, 170, 184; see also complexity; explanation of persistence; mechanisms; overviews; relations

feedback loops 89–90, 133–4, 144, 147, 158, 161 Fichte, J.G. 174 flat ontology 69–74; and horizontality xi, 70, 71–4; and levels 70–1, 115; see also material world Flusser,V. 72 Foucault, M. 32, 36, 69, 70, 130 generalizations 76, 101, 124, 140, 163–4, 176, 183; allegedly underlie explanations 176, 178, 179–81; and coping with complexity xi, 138, 183; and counterfactuals 179–80, 183; as lists 181–4; overcome ignorance 184; statistical 118, 182, 184; use in overviews 141; see also explanations of social changes; mechanisms Gibson, W. 185 Giddens, A. 3, 33, 36 gift giving 91–2 Gherardi, S. 3 Goffman, E. 49 governance 93–4, 145; see also power groups 19, 21, 22, 144, 149–50, 152, 187, 190, 191 Hägerstrand, T. 60, 67, 68 Halbwachs, M. 72, 115–16 Hedström, P and R. Swedberg 180 Hegel, G.W.F. 12, 88, 98, 174 Heidegger, M. xi, 4, 5, 13, 75, 80, 118, 127; see also causality Hernes, T. 9, 12 history (discipline of) 22, 122, 139, 161, 176, 184; and explanatory social science 161 Husserl, E. 5 hybrids 63, 64, 69, 70 individualism 48, 150, 171, 175, 180 individuals x, xi, 3, 8, 20, 31, 35, 48, 70–2, 82, 90–3, 99, 115, 126, 149, 150, 166, 180, 187, 190, 191; see also Bourdieu, P.; explanations of social changes; inflection (of chains of action); originary activity; relations; social changes; world-historical individuals inflection (of chains of action) xi, 96–9, 126; see also individuals infrastructures 38, 62, 153, 163 Ingold, T. 174; on lives 66 inscriptions 61; see also texts interactions 48, 50, 91–4, 107, 110–11, 175, 191; see also Emirbayer, M.; relations; transactions (Dewey)

212 Index

international finance markets 92–3 inventions (or innovations) 81–2, 84, 97, 98, 101–2, 136 James, W. 5 Jansen, L. 10–12 Kelly, K. 146 Kemmis, S. 3, 4, 173 Knorr Cetina, K. 92–3 knowledge 34, 43, 57, 61, 82, 122, 125, 126; and chains of action 62, 82, 103; of practice organization 34 Latour, B. xi, 36, 69, 70, 73, 79, 84, 88, 114, 187; on activity chains 86–7; and M. Callon 36; on circulation 114 Lave, J. 3; and S. Wenger 49 laws (of social life) xi, 24, 138, 176, 177 learning 57, 68 Lefebvre, H. 75, 171 Leibniz, G.W. 12 Lévi-Strauss, C. 32 life (human): conception of 65–6; embraces absences 192; movement and 5, 66; near and far as features of 188, 189, 191; see also activities (human); life trajectories; mind life trajectories 50, 60, 65–9, 96; and bundles 67–9, 99, 134; changes in 99; and ecology of social phenomena 65–6, 69, 116; and explanations of action 99 Little, D. 180 locational software 21, 108, 111, 149 Machamer, P. et al. 178–9 Madison, J. 113 Mahoney, J. 85; and G. Goertz 117 Maker’s Mark 130, 159, 160; see also bourbon business Marston, S. et al. 71 Marx, K. 149, 174 material causality ix, 108–10, 116, 156; see also causality; material world material entities 35–40, 46, 51–77, 105–16, 113–15, 186; see also arrangements; material space; material world; relations materialism (in philosophy) 55 materiality x, 52–6 material processes: captured in arrangements 106–7, 109, 155; help determine social changes 105–16, 117–34, 135–63 material space 60, 68, 74, 108, 144, 186, 191; is relational 74; and social life xi, 108, 110–13, 128

material world x, 51–77, 105–16, 144; anchor existential spaces 68, 105, 116; as a substratum 115, 116; changed by activities and practices 53, 62, 80–1, 99, 110; composes ecology of social phenomena x, 37, 63–5, 106, 107; connects bundles 46, 62, 106, 108, 114; defines size, shape, and density of social phenomena 72–3, 76; definition of 53, 56; and digital associations 22; directed toward in activity and practices 41, 58; directly causes changes in bundles 106, 128; effect on social life usually mediated by social life 106, 123; given meaning in practices 41–2; grasped by science 37, 53, 54, 122; and horizontality 71–3; induces activities 42–3, 62, 95, 105, 106, 110; localizes activities, practices, and bundles 30, 59–60, 72, 105, 116; multisided relation to social life xi, 58, 61, 63, 105, 115–16; prefigures activities and changes 43, 62, 95–6, 105, 110; set up and coped with in activity and practice 37, 57, 58, 62, 105, 115; and social theory 51, 74, 105; not a substratum 115–16; suffuses and passes through bundles 58, 105, 109, 115; see also action at a distance; causality; chains of action; channeling; ecology (of social phenomena); flat ontology; inscription, material entities; material processes; material space; materiality; shape (of social phenomena); size (of social phenomena); social changes matter 53–5 Mead, G.H. 5, 9, 12, 87 meaning 41 mechanisms xii, 164, 176–85; and causality 177–9, 182; as conditional invariants 178–9, 181, 183; do not bring about social changes 180–1; generality of 177–81; as tendencies 179, 181, 183 micro-macro distinction xi, 70–4, 93, 180; see also flat ontology mind 55, 66, 68; see also directedness toward; we conditions mobility 46, 113 morphological properties xi, 72, 74, 76, 115; see also Durkheim, E. mother-daughter relationship 49–50 motivations (or motives) 96, 125–7, 131, 135 nature 63, 64, 69; things of xi, 37, 38, 41–2, 63–5 networked collectivism and individualism 150 New Communalism 146–7

Index  213

normativity 84, 114, 144; and activity 126; and biological evolution 35; of teleoaffective structure 31, 34–5 occurrent (entity) 7, 10 online and offline 22 organisms 37, 38, 41–2, 54, 55, 57, 115 organization (of practices) see practices; teleoaffective structure originary activity xi, 79, 97, 101–3, 123–4, 129, 131 overviews xi, 139–43, 161, 163, 170, 176, 182, 184 Pantzar, M. see Shove, E. participant (in practices) 36, 57, 133 Pepper, J. 122 performings (of actions) 28, 59, 65, 80 persistence (of social phenomena) 2, 16, 79, 114, 117, 156, 162–3; explanation of 16, 162–3; of language 61; see also practices Piaget, J. 32 Plotinus 12 Pokémon Go 21, 136–7, 139, 143, 151–3, 163, 186, 188, 191; see also digital associations; smart swarms positions 30, 35, 48, 50, 84, 94, 168, 172; see also Bourdieu on social space power xii, 50, 114, 163, 167–70, 187–92; as domination 169–70; as governance (Foucault) 168; as relations (Allen) 188–9; as relations (Bourdieu) 168; stretched in the modern world 187, 190, 191; structures near/far (Allen) 188, 189, 191 practices: analysis of 3, 4, 28–35; compose social life 3, 16; do not repeat 172; extensions of in contemporary digital life 145, 148, 151; help compose social phenomena 27, 56; openness of 28–9; organization of 30–5, 60–1, 66, 79, 84, 96, 98, 100, 106, 114, 126, 171; persistence of 28–9, 35; of reach (Allen) 188, 189; are spatial-temporal 29–30; see also activities (human); arrangements; bundles; knowledge; material world; normativity; participant; relations; rules; social changes; teleoaffective structure practice plenum x, 27, 50, 63, 71, 72, 77, 100, 116, 117, 129, 167, 172; see also flat ontology; social phenomena (composition of) pragmatism 9 Pred, A. 67

prefiguration 41, 42, 44, 46–7, 62, 95–6, 105, 116; see also material world presence and absence 187–91; see also existential space; life (human) processes 7, 10–13, 15; conceptions of (in social theory) 8–11; and flow 11, 12, 15; and social life passim process ontology 13 railroads 18, 73, 76, 108, 156 Ratzel, F. 75 Reckwitz, A. 3, 27, 36, 70 relational thinking xii, 163, 172–5 relations: among arrangements 38; among bundles x, 27, 44–7, 62, 79, 84, 100, 114, 128, 172; among individuals x, 27, 48–50, 91, 144–5, 148, 171, 172, 175; among practices as such 133, 163, 171–2; between practices and arrangements x, 41–4, 79, 81, 100, 114; density of marks bundles and constellations 47; mathematical conception of 173; as processes 48–50; and social change 172, 173; surfeit of 47, 172; vagueness of notion of 173; see also chains of action; material world; relational thinking represented space 75, 186, 187, 191 Rescher, N.: on process 8, 9, 12, 14, 105 Rheingold, H. 20, 22, 147, 152 rhythms 89, 171 river cities 18, 155, 156, 158, 183 robots 36, 40, 58 Rouse, J. 3 rules 30, 33, 34, 46, 50, 60–1, 80, 81, 84, 126, 127 Ryle, G. 4, 77 Sartre, J.-P. 149 Saussure, F. 32 sayings 28, 32, 59, 65, 66, 81, 84, 98, 114 Schmidt, R. 3 Schutz, A. 5, 126 Seibt, J. Serres, M. 97 shape (of social phenomena) 72, 73, 75–6, 116, 156 Shove, E. 3, 142, 165, 172, 174; on forms of social change 4, 132–4; on materials 28, 36, 52; on practices 27–8, 30 significance (judgements of) 15, 102 Simmel, G. 149, 150 simpler (versus more complex) 127–8, 135 simulations xi, 138–9, 140 sites (of the social) 26–7 situations 124–6, 131

214 Index

size (of social phenomena) 45, 72–3, 75–6, 116, 128, 156 smart swarms 22, 152 social (definition of) 26 social changes: brought about by nexuses of events and processes ix, x, xi, 16, 77, 79, 100, 103, 114, 117, 122, 128, 130, 131, 137, 138, 142, 143, 161, 162, 163; composition of x, xi, 16, 50, 77, 79, 114, 167, 182; composition of complex 136, 137, 161; contribution by individuals to 96–7, 101–4, 123, 124, 129; depends on people’s reactions 97, 101–4, 123; determination of complex 137, 176; origin and causes of 16, 17, 132; temporal features of 17, 77; uneven front of 79, 101–4; see also chains of action; explanations of social change; material processes; mechanisms; relations social phenomena (composition of) x, 27, 47, 56, 69, 71, 79, 117, 136, 162, 167 social physics 75–7 speculative realism 37, 54 steam power 108, 109, 154–8 Steinberg P. and K. Peters 72 stills 42, 57, 58, 98, 109, 156, 163 structure (conceptions of) 32–4 Swedish indie music fandom 21, 22, 136, 139, 142, 143, 147–52, 163, 186, 188, 191; see also digital associations; teleological organizations Tarde, G. xi, 79, 84–7 taste 4, 15, 55, 89, 107, 113, 130, 136, 149, 157, 159, 161, 167 Taylor, C. 3, 4 Taylor, E. 155, 157 teleoaffective structure 31, 33, 34, 46, 50, 60–1, 80; see also normativity teleological organizations 21, 111, 150, 152 teleology 34, 67, 124–7, 135, 152; see also activities (human); ends; explanations of activity

texts 28, 146, 186; see also inscriptions third space 151 Tilly, C. 177, 178, 179, 181, 182 theories (or theorists) of practice ix, 2–5, 33, 36, 53, 56; see also Bourdieu, P.; Kemmis, S.; Reckwitz, A.; Shove E. theory (in social inquiry) ix, 18–25, 121; criterion of good 11, 18, 23; development of 18, 23–4; multiplicity of 23 time 6, 7, 9, 23, 80, 103, 114 Tönnies, F. 73, 143–4, 150 topological space xii, 75, 165, 185–6; mathematical conception of 187, 190; and near/far 189; not needed to understand social life xii, 75, 165, 190–1; and power 187–90; relational space as 187 transactions (Dewey) 49 triple revolution (Rainie and Wellman) 20 understandings: general 30, 33, 146; practical 30, 33, 34, 61 virtual space xii, 20, 75, 165, 185, 186, 191; see also cyberspace; digital space vodka 19, 130, 159 Warde, A. 132 Washington, G. 113 Watson, M. see Shove, E. weather 65, 106 Weber, M. 169 we conditions 107, 149 WELL, the 20, 128–9, 131, 141, 148, 149, 151, 162, 186, 188, 191; development into a community 144–7; origin of 128–9; see also communities; digital associations Whiskey Rebellion 113 Whitehead, A.N. 12 Wittgenstein, L. xi, 4, 140 Woodward, J. 119, 121 world-historical individuals (Hegel) 98