The macro and meso basis of the micro social order
pp. 123-148
in: Seth Abrutyn (ed), Handbook of contemporary sociological theory, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
This chapter emphasizes the constraints that sociocultural formations in societies impose on face-to-face interaction, with the full recognition that such an emphasis is only one half of the story. Interpersonal processes are embedded in societies, institutional systems, stratification systems, corporate units revealing divisions of labor, categoric units marking differences, and finally encounters or episodes of interaction. Attached to these structures at every level are cultural systems, such as texts, technologies, values, ideologies, meta-ideologies, beliefs, norms, and expectations states. Thus, there are many layers of constraint from macro through meso to micro levels of reality by both social structures and their cultures. The goal of this chapter is to theorize the nature of these constraints. At the end of the paper, I address a more bottom up approach, emphasizing that emotional arousal in face-to-face encounters has large effects on the viability of micro, meso, and macro sociocultural formations.