CH2. Microfoundations 34

MEANING AND MEMBERSHIP: ON THE ORIGIN OF THE EXISTENTIAL FUNCTION OF THE SOCIAL 35
THE COLLECTIVE AS EXISTENTIAL REFUGE 40
SOCIAL SKILL 45
SOCIAL SKILL IN ACTION 50
CONCLUSION 53



Rational choice theory has achieved widespread influence in a number of social science disciplines, most notably economics and political science. The perspective; however, has failed to gain much more than a toehold in sociology. Indeed, most sociologists are downright hostile to the theory. When pressed to explain why those in the discipline are very likely to complain that the per­spective is "asociological”—that the theory posits an atomized conception of the individual that does not accord with the "sociological perspective” But when it comes to the individual, what exactly is the "sociological perspective?” Beyond the rather facile assertion that humans are profoundly "social crea­tures,” sociologists have done little to fashion a distinctive account of what that actually means. After all, lots of species are intensely social, perhaps none more so than ants (Gordon 1999). Surely we are not social in the same sense that ants are. Our closest evolutionary relatives—chimpanzees and gorillas—are also very social species, and social in many ways that mirror human sociability. But there are also myriad ways in which human social life is qualitatively dif­ferent from that of even these closest evolutionary cousins. Bottom line: to dis­miss rational choice theory for its failure to honor the extent to which we are "social creatures” is to evade the real question: what is the distinctive essence of human sociability?
We will not pretend to offer anything like a complete answer to that question here, but believing that any serious theory of human collective behavior must rest on a credible microfoundation, we use the first half of this chapter to sketch a bare-bones perspective on what we see as the distinctive essence of human sociability. We review the current literature on the emergence of modern humans to argue that language, culture, and the problem of meaning are at the center of what it means to be human. Then, we link this to sociological conceptions of sociability, making brief forays into the classical theories of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead. In the second half of the chapter, we explicate how what we term the "existential function of the social” enables the "social skills” that undergird the forms of strategic action that are central to the theory on offer here.

Meaning and Membership: On the Origin of the Existential Function of the Social

We begin by considering accepted knowledge about social organization and the evolution of primates. Modern humans belong to the general biological order of primates that may have emerged as long as 85 million years ago and includes a dizzying variety of extinct and contemporary species. This variety is nicely reflected in the smallest and largest of contemporary primates. The smallest is the Madame Berthe s mouse lemur, which weighs little more than an ounce; the largest the mountain gorilla, which can tip the scale at up to 450 pounds. So not discounting some common physical characteristics, it is clear that the order is not primarily defined by its shared anatomy. "Unspecified anatomically, pri­mates are distinguished by social organization and evolutionary trends within the order tending toward increased dexterity and intelligence” (The Concise Colum­bia Encyclopedia 1983: 689; emphasis added).
Not surprisingly, hominids are the most social of all of the primate species. Split off from common primate ancestors about 15-20 million years ago, the hominid family is composed of four extant genera—chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans. All of the species that today comprise these different groupings are highly social. Based on the archaeological record, however, it seems clear that for virtually the entirety of their presence on earth, the func­tions of hominid sociability were essentially materialist in nature. That is, hom­inids lived together for the material or survival advantages that group life conferred. This claim would seem to apply as much to our immediate human ancestors—the genus Homo, signaled by the appearance of Homo habilis roughly 2.4 million years ago—as to the other hominid genera. Indeed, and here is where it gets really interesting, for most of our own scant time on earth, the so­ciability of anatomically modern humans—that is Homo sapiens—appears to have been qualitatively materialist as well. That is, for roughly 150,000 years after the appearance of the species, Homo sapiens did not exhibit the capacity for collaborative, symbolic activity that we associate with modern humans. The emergence of culture in this more restrictive, existential sense only appears to have occurred somewhere around 45,000-50,000 years ago. It is to this puzzle that we now turn.
The consensus is that modern humans emerged in Africa around 200,000 years ago. These new arrivals would seem to be anatomically indistinct from us. Most important, their brain size was indistinguishable from ours. Yet, this clear anatomical break with the past does not appear to have been accompanied by a comparable change in behavior. In point of fact, we will need to fast forward roughly 150,000 years before we encounter clear evidence of the emergence of
modem human behavior. The evidence is overwhelming, appearing as a veri­table explosion in the archaeological record of elaborate ritual burial and routine production of art and ornamentation, among other indicators that we are clearly in the presence of our existential, as opposed to materialist, kin.
What is the nature of this explosion and what are its implications for an under­standing of the social? One common rendering of this evolutionary “moment” is that it marks the emergence of “culture,” in the human experience. But even if we adopt a fairly narrow definition of culture, this account is demonstrably false. Tools are typically regarded as a rudimentary element of culture and certainly all of the prior species in the Homo line have been shown to produce and use tools. Indeed, depending on how broadly one defines the term, there is evidence for tool usage among our closest contemporary nonhuman relatives. For example, West African chimpanzees have been shown to use stone hammers and anvils to crack nuts (Boesch and Boesch 1993). Other species of chimpanzees have deployed other tools—including termite fishing probes, pestles, and various levers—in foraging for food (McGrew 1994). But even if we want to set the bar a bit higher in our requirements for culture, it would be impossible to deny, say, Neanderthal that level of evolutionary development. Beyond an effective and highly adaptable—if static— tool assemblage, there are at least scattered claims made for rudimentary Neander­thal burial and perhaps even representational art. These include an incised piece of bone from a 350,000-year-old site at Bilzingsleben in Germany and an alleged outline of a female engraved on a pebble from the 230,000-year-old pre-Mousterian site of Berekat Ram in Israel (Tattersall 1998).
If the “explosion” of 45,000-50,000 years ago does not represent the onset of culture in the human—or even hominid—experience, how are we to understand the breathtaking leap that seems to have taken place? While others have stressed the emergence of symbolic thinking or high culture, we, as sociologists, are inclined to underscore the collective aspect of the breakthrough. The sudden proliferation of art, elaborate grave goods, and distinctive local tool assemblages speaks to an unprece­dented capacity for coordinated symbolic activity and collaborative meaning making. We refer to this in shorthand as the onset of the existential function of the social. While hominids had heretofore banded together almost entirely for the survival benefits afforded by group life, the collective now served another separable function: the provision of group members with distinctive collective identities and shared un­derstandings of the world.[1] This represents a qualitative break with the entire 15 million-year sweep of the hominid experience on earth. We are finally in the pres­ence of a form of sociability that we would recognize as broadly akin to our own.
We cannot overstress the significance of the coordinated collaborative and in- tersubjective nature of the activities reflected in the archaeological record from this period and beyond. A single example will suffice to make the point. It comes from an extraordinary burial at the 28,000-year-old site of Sungir in Russia. Ian Tattersall describes what the excavation of the site revealed:

... two young individuals and a sixty-year-old male (no previous kind of human had ever survived to such an age) were interred with an aston­ishing material richness. Each of the deceased was dressed in clothing onto which more than three thousand ivory beads had been sewn; and experiments have shown that each bead had taken an hour to make. They also wore carved pendants, bracelets, and shell necklaces. The juveniles, buried head to head, were flanked by two mammoth tusks over two yards long. What’s more, these tusks had been straightened, something that... could only have been achieved by boiling them. But how? The imagination boggles, for this was clearly not a matter of drop­ping hot stones into a small skin-lined pit. (1998:10)

Tattersall goes on to intuit what the burial tells us about the people who car­ried it out, arguing for such things as a belief in an afterlife, the presence of ma­terial surplus, and the like. But, to us as sociologists, what the author does not mention is at least as significant as what he does. Above all else the site, to us, speaks of an extraordinary capacity for coordinated, meaningful, symbolic, collab­orative activity. We use the term “meaningful” to underscore the fact that the ritual act encoded in the interment was clearly full of shared meaning for those involved. How many people did it take to boil and straighten the mammoth tusks? Who contributed the 3,000 hours required to make and then sew the ivory beads on to the burial clothes? What did the various grave goods and the rituals involved in their production mean to the mourners? We will never know, but one can be assured that the members of the group shared an acute and elab­orate sense of the event’s significance. In sharp contrast to the earlier Homo sapi­ens, whose archaeological traces remain strangely mute, we are finally in the presence of voracious symbolists, people like us who possess both a clear ca­pacity and an apparent need to fashion shared identities and meanings as a cen­tral component of social life.
Before we move on and discuss the implications — negative as well as positive — of the newfound existential function of the social, we cannot resist taking up the puzzling gap between the development of anatomically modern humans roughly 200,000 years ago and the onset of the social behavioral revolu­tion of 45,000-50,000 years ago. How are we to account for this delay? We see three possible answers to the question. The first possibility is that the earliest “moderns” were, in fact, engaged in symbolic, collaborative activity, but we have not yet found the corroborating physical evidence to support the claim. Given the European bias in the record, this view is at least possible. We would do well to remember that modem humans only made it to Europe around 40,000 years ago. That means that the new species was confined to Africa and the Middle East for the first 125,000-150,000 or so years of its existence. Perhaps we simply have not searched long and hard enough in those locales to produce the requisite ev­idence of ritual burial and decorative art.
While possible, we think the first answer strains credulity. After all, while Europe has seen intensive archaeological investigation, so too has Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, Europe’s fascination with Egypt and the Holy Lands made Northern Africa and the Middle East a central focus of archaeological activity from early on. Since Leakey’s extraordinary finds in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley in the early 1950s, East Africa has been the center of archaeological research regarding the origins of man. Given the research attention lavished on these areas, it seems highly unlikely that we have simply missed the evidence of the “explosion,” especially given how extensive the evidence has been at the later sites. In short, we suspect that the paucity of evidence of symbolic, collab­orative activity in these areas is real, reflecting its general absence in the lives of the earlier Homo sapiens.
How do we explain this? We see language, or the lack thereof, as the key to the gap. The second answer goes like this. While anatomically adapted to speech, perhaps early humans lacked the precise neural circuitry needed for fully elabo­rated language. So deprived, earlier Homo sapiens may still have possessed a mar­ginally greater capacity for interspecies communication than Neanderthals, but nothing compared to what they would develop in time. While not identical, our view bears a strong family resemblance to the account of anthropologist Richard Klein (2002), who has long held that the symbolic revolution of 45,000 years ago must have been triggered by a random genetic mutation that improved the organization of the brain, affording humans the capacity for language and enhanced symbolic activity.
The third answer is really a variant of the second. While fully adapted to speech and language, it may be that the actual behavioral innovation lagged behind the anatomical emergence of Homo sapiens. This may not be quite as crazy as it sounds. Think of written language. Clearly humans had both the phys­iological and mental capacity for written language long before those capacities were translated into behavior. We do not think it is so farfetched to imagine that something similar could have happened with speech.
Whichever version of the latter two answers one favors, both accord well with the physical evidence and help explain some otherwise puzzling features of the archaeological record. The absence of significant ritual activity prior to
50.0          years ago becomes less puzzling if we assume that a fully realized ca­pacity for human speech did not accompany the rise of Homo sapiens but only developed later. This might also explain a second intriguing anomaly in the ar­chaeological record. While Neanderthals disappear from Western Europe barely
12.0        years after modern humans arrive on the scene, the two species appear to have coexisted in the Middle East for nearly 60,000 years, from 100,000 to
40.0        years ago. How can we account for these very different fates? Quite easily if we imagine that only the European Homo sapiens possessed a fully realized capacity for human speech and language. Without such a capacity, perhaps their Middle Eastern predecessors lacked the key evolutionary advantage needed to displace their Neanderthal rivals.
Whatever the case, the extraordinary evolutionary advantages conferred on modem humans by the acquisition of language and the related capacity for col­laborative, symbolic activity are affirmed by the archaeological record before and after the creative explosion of 50,000 years ago. Consider the following stark contrast. Over roughly the first 150,000 years of the Homo sapien presence on this planet, the species was pretty much confined to Africa and the Middle East. The physical traces of their presence suggest an undifferentiated, fairly continuous way of life. Nor do their numbers appear to increase much during their long tenure in Africa. And as noted above, where they overlap with earlier human ancestors—for example, Neanderthal—they coexist with, rather than displace, them.
After the “great leap” of 50,000 years ago, the story could not be more dif­ferent. Within at most 35,000 years—and possibly less—modern humans suc­ceeded in peopling the globe. Within a scant 12,000 years of arriving in Europe, they—make that “we”—displaced the venerable Neanderthal who had lived
continuously in the region for at least 350,000 years. Our numbers expanded in fits and starts before mushrooming explosively over the past three to four cen­turies. Finally, the "undifferentiated, fairly continuous” way of life of our earlier Homo sapien ancestors quickly give way to the dizzying variety of cultures and lifeworlds reflected in the archaeological record of the last fifty millennia. Over this span, "humanity,” to quote Klein, "was transformed from a relatively rare and insignificant large mammal to something like a geologic force” (quoted in Leslie 2002: 58). None of this is really all that surprising when you consider the extraordinary evolutionary advantages conveyed by the acquisition of language and the expanded capacity for communication and social coordination that fol­lowed from that endowment.

The Collective as Existential Refuge

One of the most interesting aspects of these discoveries is the way that they dovetail with thinking in sociology, from Weber and Durkheim to Mead, Goff- man, Berger and Luckmann, and Bourdieu. We note that no archaeologist or anthropologist we are aware of directly views the sociological tradition as rele­vant to understanding the evolution of Homo sapiens. Yet their rich, speculative accounts of those who carried out the burial at Sungir and those who executed the extraordinary cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet are fully consistent with collaborative meaning making as the defining quality assigned to modern humans by a long line of sociologists.
Weber viewed humans as voracious meaning makers and collaborative sym­bolists. The ability of one person to understand another was the source of all of social life for Weber (1978) and indeed provided the justification for the various forms of organization that people fashioned. For Weber, meanings were of three sorts: purposive/rational, traditional, and value oriented. The people who made up a given society used these shared meanings to justify their actions in all social circumstances. Durkheim (1995) noted that religion provided people with an explanation of their place in the world and a set of understandings that helped them cope with the uncertainties of life. In this sense, religion provided a sancti­fied affirmation and expression of the collective. Mead (1934), whose theory we draw on substantively for our conception of social skill, saw language and social­ization as the mechanisms that provided each of us with a sense of self and the ability to take the role of the "other.” He saw the essence of human sociability as bound up with the capacity for empathy and the ability to use this capacity to get others to cooperate on the basis of shared understandings. Later theorists, in­cluding such important figures for us as Berger and Luckmann (1967) and Bourdieu (1977,1984), have built on these insights and expanded their usage in
different contexts. It is useful for us to be explicit about the link we see between these foundational sociological ideas and our emerging understanding of the rise of truly modem humans. We pick up our evolutionary tale at the “moment” of language acquisition.
For all the obvious benefits that flowed from the language/consciousness “package,” however, our evolutionary inheritance came with a cost. In liberating us from a primarily materialist existence, language/consciousness endowed humans with art, symbolic thought, and expanded reason but also new fears and threatening forms of awareness. These were two sides of the same coin. We regard existential fear and uncertainty as an unintended evolutionary by-product of whatever mix of genetic and/or anatomical changes triggered the cultural ex­plosion of 50,000 years ago. What do we mean by “existential fear and uncer­tainty?” We refer to the proverbial “meaning of life” questions that only modern humans seem capable of asking. Only the most stubbornly nonreflective person can, from time to time, avoid the nagging, if generally inchoate, sense that his or her life is accidental, without inherent purpose, and destined to end in death. The philosopher Thomas Nagel (1986) terms these fears the “outer perspective,” that state of detached reflection on what would appear at times to be the de- pressingly obvious “truths” about the human condition. According to Nagel, the capacity to stand outside and reflect on our situation is the basis for the “outer perspective” and the threatening mix of vertigo and fear that accompanies it.
Where exactly does this capacity come from? It is impossible to say for sure. Perhaps it is simply our greater capacity for abstract thought that allows us to formulate these questions. We are more inclined, however, to stress a strong link between language and these new fears. Language grants us the linguistic tools to make of ourselves an object. Instead of being the “I,” the unconscious subject, the spontaneous actor, we can now step outside of ourselves and become “me,” the object of our own reflection (Mead 1934). This is heady stuff and, if we can trust Mead and a host of others, the foundation for all role taking and thus the key to all those social skills that rest on our ability to “take the role of the other.” We will have more to say about this later in the chapter. But this ability to stand outside of ourselves may well also be the source of our existential fears.
Our existential fears are thus rooted in the intimations of aloneness and meaninglessness made possible by our newfound capacity for expanded self-consciousness. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that our attempts to escape from these fears typically involve efforts to overcome or lose self-consciousness. Nietzsche (1988: 52-53), for instance, described the Christian desire for “re­demption” as “the essence of all Christian needs ... it is the most persuaded, most painful affirmation of it in sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wants to get rid of himself.” Similarly, the timeless appeal of a love relationship would seem to rest on the desire to lose oneself in another. In general, the effectiveness of any collaborative existential project rests in its ability to inhibit self-consciousness by embedding the individual in a system of socially con­structed meanings that substitutes the reassuring subjectivity of the “inner view” for the alienating effects of the “outer perspective.” It is the meaningful worlds we fashion in concert with others that insulate us from the threat of the “outer per­spective” and confirm our own significance.
This is what we mean by the “existential function” of the social. For most of us, most of the time, the latent threat of the outer perspective is held in check by the lived experience of the “inner perspective.” Our daily lives are typically grounded in the unshakable conviction that no one’s life is more important than our own and that the world is an inherently meaningful place. But one does not will this inner view into existence of his or her own accord. It is instead a collab­orative product, bom of the everyday reciprocal meaning making, identity con­ferring efforts we engage in with those around us. In this we function as existential “coconspirators,” relentlessly—if generally unconsciously—exchanging affirma­tions that sustain our sense of our own significance and the world s inherent meaningfulness.
It would be hard not to see the elaborate burials that suddenly appear in the archaeological record at the time of the “explosion” as the quintessence of this kind of collective existential project. Consider again the interment at Sungir that we described above. Tattersall (1998:11) describes sites like Sungir as “the most ancient incontrovertible evidence for the existence of religious experience.” What are religions, at root, but elaborated worldviews and belief systems that offer reassuring answers to all those threatening questions. Are we alone? No, we are part of a special community of the faithful, a “chosen people,” if you will. Is life meaningless? No, through our community we have privileged access to knowledge that renders the world a profoundly meaningful place. What of death? Do we cease to exist when we die? No, provided the community offers the appropriate ritual response, the deceased is assured of life after death. If death represents the most threatening embodiment of the “outer perspective,” then a shared belief in an afterlife and collaborative practices designed to ensure its realization represent a powerful collective refutation of the threat. The elabo­rate and extraordinarily labor-intensive behaviors reflected in the Sungir inter­ment speak eloquendy to the emergence of the existential in the human experience. There is simply no narrow instrumental survival function served by such rituals. The thousands of hours devoted to straightening tusks and making and sewing beads could, after all, have gone into hunting, food preparation, shel­ter construction, or countless other activities directly linked to group survival. And why bury valuable goods and foodstuffs with the deceased when they could be used or consumed by the living? They did so because the binding, existential beliefs of the collective required it.
Let us be clear. We are not for a minute suggesting that all of the new behav­iors that followed from the cultural explosion of 50,000 years ago speak to the existential motivations touched on here. Endowed with language and expanded consciousness, modem humans behaved the way they did primarily because they could not do otherwise. That is, they were now adapted to meaning making, communication, coordination, symbolic activity, and so on. This is simply what modem humans do. They also engaged in these new activities because they were instrumentally very effective. As noted above, there were great material advan­tages to be gained from their newfound capacity to communicate with each other and plan and carry out increasingly complex collaborative activities. Hunting or foraging expeditions could range over broader areas and involve more people. Productive roles within the group could (and, judging from the archaeological evidence, did) become more specialized, yielding survival gains for the collective. We could add other examples, but the point should be clear. Many of the new behaviors should be seen as trial and error efforts to devise more effective solutions to practical problems confronting the group. While Neanderthals survived by adapting the same general tool kit to a broad range of environments and climactic conditions, modem humans—by virtue of their new evolutionary endowments—became (and remain) relentless innovators.
In short, the materialist essence of human life was no less compelling after the cultural leap than it had been before. It is just that a second, quite different, social function/activity was now evident in the archaeological record. It would be a mistake, however, to see the material and existential functions of the social as separate from each other or to attribute preeminence to one or the other. Marx famously characterized religion “as the opiate of the masses,” insisting that beliefs and ideologies (read: the existential aspects of the social) were dependent upon and indeed an expression of the underlying material logic of society. We dis­agree. In our view, the human capacity and need for meaning and identity is as much a structuring force in social life as the material demands on the collective. It is precisely because modern humans need and are relendess in their efforts to fashion shared meanings (like Christianity) and identities (like being a Chris­tian) to restrain existential doubt that these constructions are available to those (like capitalists) who would appropriate and exploit them for their own pur­poses. In short, the material/instrumental and the existential are inextricably linked. Even as strategic actors are working to advance their interests, they are simultaneously exercising the distinctive human capacity for meaning making and the construction of collective identities. People do what they do both to achieve instrumental advantage and to fashion meaningful worlds for them­selves and others. This, we will argue, is as true today as ever. Any adequate theory of human strategic action must take this mix of instrumental and existential motives into account.
There is, however, an interesting and important difference between instru­mental and existential motives in our comparative awareness of the two. That is, in representing modern humans as “voracious meaning makers,” as relentless existential actors, we are not claiming that we behave in this way with all that much conscious awareness of our “true” motives. How can we explain this gen­eral lack of awareness of our need and proclivity for existential projects? Indeed, there would almost seem to be a contradiction inherent in asserting that exis­tential doubt/fear is a central motivating force in social life and yet produces little conscious awareness on the part of the individual actor. How can we be motivated to act on the basis of motives of which we are only dimly aware? One need not be a Freudian to believe such a thing possible. Two factors help resolve this apparent contradiction. The first is simply our typically inchoate experi­ence of existential doubt. If the devout generally sense the divine via litde more than “rumors of angels” (Berger 1990), then most of us only apprehend the threat of aloneness and meaninglessness in fleeting moments of dread and despair for which we have few words and fewer explanations. Lacking structure and coherence, these moments are not quite real and therefore generally elude full consciousness.
Just as important, the fears sensed in these moments are sufficiently threat­ening as to encourage their suppression. As Nyberg (1993: 83), writes, people seem to “know very well that we need hope to survive, that there are things we must strive not to know, even if that attitude looks to others like denial or self- deception.” Since our basic existential fears threaten hope, most of us “strive not to know them.” We do this, not only through individual denial, but by “investing” in collaborative existential projects that assert the orderly, purposive nature of the world. Indeed, the viability of these projects is directly related to our capacity for denial. Nothing poses a greater threat to our beliefs than a conscious awareness of the existential motives underlying them. How much more meaningful to marry for love than for existential assurance How much more satisfying to find religion through the redeeming grace of Christ than as a conscious hedge against the abyss. With all due respect to Pascal, it is not simply unseemly to profess a belief in God as a kind of existential side bet but patently ineffective as well. To do so is to acknowledge the self-interested, constructed nature of “faith,” thereby leaving the issue of existential doubt unresolved and denying oneself the comfort that “true faith” affords. Faith as a cognitive and emotional commitment to the demands of any existential project would appear to rest on precisely this combi­nation of self-interest and social construction, but to be effective these motiva­tional and sociological dynamics must remain opaque. The effectiveness of any meaning project, then, rests on a kind of existential sleight of hand. Even as people are working purposefully to fashion and sustain meaningful social orders, they must simultaneously experience this as something other than their handiwork.
We close this section with an important aside. After rereading what we wrote, we were struck by the generally “upbeat” tone of this section. To be sure, we acknowledged that the language/consciousness "package” that serves as the physiological basis for the existential function of the social was a two-edged sword, conferring great evolutionary advantages while simultaneously bur­dening the species with new fears and threatening forms of awareness. But in emphasizing our voracious capacity for meaning making, we could be read as arguing that existential despair is really no match for the cultural creativity of the species, that our worst fears and doubts inevitably succumb to the collective un­derstandings and identities that sustain us. In point of fact, the existential "under toad” is a formidable opponent, inflicting despair, loneliness, anomie on all of us at one time or another, sometimes with tragic consequences.
But this admission constitutes only one aspect of the "darker” side of the per­spective on offer here. Indeed, there are several other sobering implications of the argument. We will confine ourselves to just one other. Even when the forces of collective meaning and identity triumph over existential doubt and despair, they often do so by investing deeply in conflict with other groups and their asso­ciated meaning projects. Beginning with Simmel (1955), sociologists have long recognized the "functions of social conflict” (Coser 1956). Mead (1934) was quite aware that the valorizing existential projects of groups could contain an element of "us” versus "them” where "they” were defined as "heathens,” "sav­ages,” "infidels,” or some other evil or dangerous collective requiring eradication.
Answers to the most basic existential questions often seem clearest during wartime or at other times of savage social conflict. Who am I? I am a holy warrior doing battle with an evil enemy. What does it all mean? It is a cosmic battle between good (us) and evil (them). However we might recoil in value terms from Nazism, it is critically important to our perspective that we recognize just how profoundly meaningful the movement was to its adherents. Hitler was nothing if not a supremely skilled social actor adept at fashioning unambiguous "truths” that valorized the lives of believers and sanctified their presence in the world. In doing so, his is only an extreme example of the opposition between the existential and material functions of the social that is unique to our species. That is, conflict is sufficiently attractive as a source of meaning and identity that we appear willing to destroy each other to achieve its existential benefits.

Social Skill

If the genetic and/or anatomical changes that occurred 45,000-50,000 years ago were responsible for burdening modern humans with new existential fears and challenges, they also afforded us the mental, linguistic, and social skills needed
to respond to these threats. Central to our perspective is the concept of “social skill ,” that complex mix of cognitive, affective, and linguistic facilities that render individuals more or less effective as skilled strategic actors supremely well adapted to the demands of collective action. Drawing on the distinctive micro­foundations sketched above, we want to use the balance of the chapter to expli­cate the concept of social skill as a necessary prerequisite for what is to follow in later chapters.
Our goal is to provide a distinctly sociological understanding that uses the existential capacity and need for meaning and membership as the core for un­derstanding how people create and sustain mesolevel social worlds. We argue that the need for meaning is at the basis of peoples efforts to get and sustain collective action. But in order to have meaning function in this way, it is necessary to have a model of what people do in their everyday interactions in strategic ac­tion fields to produce collective action and create such meaning. Such a model must posit a Homo sociologicus, who requires meaning as the ground of his or her being and achieves that meaning by engaging in collaborative action with others. At the risk of redundancy, we reiterate a crucially important point made above. In stressing the central importance of meaning making in group life, we are not for a minute suggesting that issues of power, interests, and status are somehow marginal to our perspective. They are anything but. But seeking out instrumental gain, social status, and power are inherently linked to the problem of meaning. We seek out these things because we want to prove to ourselves and others that we are worthy as people. In doing so, they provide us with meaning and the sense that our lives have purpose. By “winning,” we confirm to ourselves and others that life is not meaningless (or at least we manage to keep that doubt at bay). Meaning making is inextricably bound up with the contests for power, status, and other interests.
In order to make sense of what people actually do to attain collective action, we introduce the notion of social skill. Social skill can be defined as the ability to induce cooperation by appealing to and helping to create shared meanings and collective identities. Skilled social actors empathetically relate to the situations of other people and, in doing so, are able to provide those people with reasons to cooperate (Goffman 1959,1974; Mead 1934). Skilled social actors must under­stand how the sets of actors in their group view their multiple conceptions of interest and identity and how those in external groups do as well. They use these understandings to provide an interpretation of a given situation and to frame courses of action that appeal to existing interests and identities. Their appeals elicit cooperation from members of their group and produce generally negative accounts of the identity of those with whom the group is competing.
Part of what creates and sustains fields is the ongoing use of social skill by actors. Ad fields require the active participation of individuals and groups to continue to function. This raises the question of how groups are held together and how action in a strategic action field is structured. Everyone who is a mem­ber of a social group derives existential benefits from being in the group. It is on the basis, and very often in defense, of these benefits that group members collab­orate with one another and compete with those with alternative views of the strategic action field.
People routinely deploy social skill as part of a meaning making project. They do so with a mix of motives. Of course, they might gain materially from their actions and this might be one of their core motives. But people engage in collective action for less clearly instrumental reasons as well. Creating or affirm­ing shared meanings and identities through collaborative action is among the most satisfying and affirming of human activities. Being part of a group and reveling in the lived experience of “we-ness” is one of the most important ways that individuals come to have a positive view of themselves and hold their exis­tential fears at bay. Having a successful marriage or relationship, raising chil­dren, cooperating with others at work, all provide us with the sense that life is meaningful and we play an important part in it. From this perspective, there is a false distinction between instrumental and altruistic action. Collaborative meaning making sounds very altruistic, but it is also the ground of all collective instrumental action.
The concept of social skill is rooted for us in symbolic interactionism (Goff- man 1959,1974; Joas 1996; Mead 1934). Actors’ conceptions of themselves are powerfully shaped by their interactions with others. When interacting, actors try to create a positive sense of self by fashioning shared meanings and identities for themselves and others. Identities refer to sets of meanings that actors have that define who they are and what they want in a particular situation. Actors in dominant positions who are efficacious and successful may have high self­esteem. Actors in dominated positions maybe stigmatized and forced to engage in coping strategies to contest their stigmatization (Goffman 1963).
Mead (1934) argues that some social actors are better than others at inducing cooperation. This is because they are able to create a positive sense of self that resonates with others. We say that these actors are more socially skilled. Skilled social actors produce meaning for others, because by doing so, they produce meaning for themselves. Their sense of efficacy comes, not from some narrow conception of self-interest (although skilled actors tend to benefit materially from their skill) but from the act of inducing cooperation and helping others attain ends. They will do whatever it takes to induce cooperation and if one path is closed off, they will explore others. This means that skilled social actors are neither narrowly self-interested nor motivated by fixed goals. They generally do not have individual fixed interests but instead focus on evolving collective ends. They keep their goals somewhat open-ended and are prepared to take what the system will give. This more open stance toward the world and their own aims means that skilled strategic actors often behave very differently than ideal type rational actors, who are narrowly pursuing their own fixed interests and goals in some contest with others.
As Giddens (1984) has pointed out, all human beings are capable of skilled social performances. They need to be somewhat socially skilled in order to sur­vive. But we all know people who are more socially skilled than others, that is, have the ability to get others to cooperate. They appear in universities, politics, and the world of business. Sometimes they are leaders or managers in that they hold formal positions of power, but sometimes they do not. The assertion, here, is only that some people are more capable at taking the role of the other and using this intersubjective understanding of others to fashion shared meanings and identities to mobilize collective strategic action.
Skilled strategic actors mostly find themselves in fields that are already struc­tured. As a result they often do not have much choice as to their position in the field, the resources available to them, or the opportunities they might have to either reproduce or change their situation. Still, even within these constraints, skilled actors have considerable latitude for action. If they are in incumbent groups, they will use their skill to maintain group solidarity, to sustain and affirm the shared identities and meanings that undergird the collective, and, in general, to maintain the status and material advantages enjoyed by group members. If they are in challenger groups, their social skills may be sorely tested but still po­tentially very consequential. In such situations skilled actors seek to maintain solidarity and a positive collective identity in the face of lots of challenges. From a more narrowly strategic perspective, they must continue to fashion lines of action that maintain what opportunities they have while searching to exploit any emerging vulnerabilities they discern in their opponents. Social skill may be a property of individuals, but the use of social skill is heavily constrained by the individuals position within the field in question. That is, successful deployment of social skill will depend on the actor recognizing her or his social position, being able to take the perspective of other actors (both those with whom they are trying to cooperate and those with whom they are competing), and finding a set of actions that “make sense” given their position. One way of thinking about this is that one needs to separate out the role a person occupies in a particular strategic action field from the ability of the person to enact that role and effect an outcome.
Much of sociology wants either to reduce people to positions in social struc­ture (thereby denying them the ability to be self-aware actors) or alternatively to view them as highly agentic, at every moment creating and re-creating society whether they know it or not. The theory of social skill and its relationship to the theory of fields implies that both the individual skills actors have and the positions they occupy in social space affect their ability to engage in coopera­tion, competition, and collective action. Action depends on both the structural position and opportunities actors have and their ability to recognize how they can mobilize others in order to maximize their chances for both narrowly instru­mental and broader existential gain. In any given situation, actors’ ability to improve their group’s situation may be highly or minimally constrained by their position in the structure. Either way, the challenge will be to use their social skill to exploit whatever opportunities maybe available to them. They must also con­tinue to motivate others and provide meaning and identity to sustain group sol­idarity and morale.
It is useful to elaborate more clearly how we deploy the idea of social skill in our argument and how it differs from more rationalist arguments. The concept of social skill helps solve three important problems in our theory of fields. First, it provides a microfoundation for the theory as a whole. For all our objections to rational choice theory, we have long admired the stark set of behavioral assump­tions on which the perspective rests. The essence of human social life, according to proponents of the theory, is rational calculus and action in pursuit of narrowly instrumental ends.
In contrast, for us, the essence of human sociability is collaborative meaning making. This is not to deny the more narrowly instrumental/material ground of human existence. It’s just that, for us, the material and the existential cannot be disentangled. For starters, material ends are always conceived by, and enacted through, groups. Without participating in groups, there would be no material rewards. The meaning projects of fields are what allow groups to function and pursue and distribute rewards. This is because the act of creating material objects requires collective action. And collective action requires identity and meaning in order to convince individuals that they are part of something real, important, and tied to their “interests.” The existential projects of groups help explain a number of key features of social life that rational accounts take for granted. For all its heuristic appeal, individuals are rarely, if ever, calculating outsiders. Even the most selfish of “loners” is motivated by ends that are, at root, collective con­structions. They seek out affirmation of their worth by striving to get what others have. They seek out the admiration of those whose respect they crave and seek to punish those who are their enemies. Further, these individuals are generally obliged to pursue these aims within collectives in consort with others.
This brings us to our second point. In rational actor models, individual partic­ipation in collective action can never be taken for granted. Indeed, the default option for rational actors is to refrain from collective action and resist collective commitments that might impede their ability to realize their ends. This tendency to “free ride” can only be overcome, we are told, when organizers provide selec­tive incentives that make it rational for individuals to affiliate with the group or
action in question. In short, collective entanglements only make sense if they aid the individual in realizing narrow instrumental aims. Our stress on the existen­tial functions of the social leads us to embrace a starkly opposing view. For us, affiliation with groups and other collectives is a highly desired end in and of itself. Ultimately the central sources of meaning and identity in our lives can only be conferred by collectives. Accordingly much of our social skill is deployed in the service of fashioning and safeguarding these collective existential projects.
This leads us to our third and final point. By focusing on social skill, our theory shifts the emphasis from motives to action and the contributions that skilled actors make to the emergence, maintenance, and transformation of social orders. This runs counter to almost all social theorizing that begins with individ­uals reacting, in a self-interested way, to their positions in social structure. So, for example, in Bourdieu s theory of the habitus, the most sophisticated current the­oretical view of the link between individuals and social structure, individuals’ reaction to a particular situation depends upon their position in a particular field, the resources available to them, and their perception of strategic options based on socialization and lived experience.
In our theory, however, actors are never simply self-interested. Most of us, most of the time, are motivated to affirm our membership in this or that group— for example, family member, employee, congregant—by helping to reproduce the order in question. Admittedly sometimes we do so with an eye to preserving the narrow instrumental goods conferred by these collectives, but most of the time we are simply expressing our affiliation with the group, preserving and extending its identity, and generally honoring its existential hold on us.

Social Skill in Action

Having gone to pains to show how our foundational sense of human sociability informs our conception of social skill, we want to turn in this section to a much more focused discussion of some of the forms of socially skilled action that we see routinely deployed in fields. We see all of these forms of action as reflecting not only the deployment of social skill but also, at a deeper level, the motivating force of the existential function of the social.
The literature has identified a number of important tactics that socially skilled actors use to engage in cooperative and competitive behavior in groups (Bourdieu 1977; Coleman 1986; DiMaggio 1988; Fligstein 1996, 2001a; Goff- man 1959,1974; Leifer 1988; Nee and Ingram 1998; Padgett and Ansell 1993; White 1992). The basic problem for skilled social actors is to frame "stories” that help induce cooperation from people by appealing to their identity, belief, and interests, while at the same time using those same stories to frame actions against
various opponents. This is the general problem of framing that Goffman (1974) identifies. These stories are sometimes about meaning and membership, that is, existential issues and questions of group identity, and sometimes about “what’s in it for me.”
One of the most important vehicles for framing is the direct authority to tell someone what to do. Long ago Weber (1978) noted that authority was the prob­ability that a direct command was obeyed based on the position of legitimacy of the person giving the command. By holding a position in a particular social group, actors will find it easier to attain cooperation from others. But even if one has a formal position in a group, one must still induce cooperation in subordi­nates (Barnard 1938). This means there has to be a broader repertoire of other tactics that skilled actors use in order to structure interactions with those within and across groups.
Agenda setting is the ability to set the parameters of the discussion for others (Kingdon 1995; Lukes 1974). If a skilled actor can get others to accept what the terms of discussion are, much of the batde has been won. Agenda setting is usu­ally attained by behind-the-scenes action to convince multiple actors and groups that a particular agenda is in their interests. When the groups meet, the agenda is set, the terms of discussion are set, and the identity and interests of actors are framed. This ensures that actors have to come to understand their interests within certain bounds, thus closing off many other courses of possible action.
Skilled actors understand the ambiguities and uncertainties of the field and work off of them. They have a sense of what is possible and impossible. If the situation provides opportunities that are unplanned but might result in some gain, skilled actors will grab them, even if they are not certain as to the usefulness or the gain. This is a pragmatic, open-ended approach to strategic action that is akin to what Levi-Strauss calls “bricolage” (1966). It follows that skilled actors will take what the system will give at any moment, even if it is not exactly what they or others might ideally want.
Indeed, skilled social actors often end up convincing others that what they can get is what they want. In order to do this, skilled actors have to convince others who do not necessarily share interests that what will occur is consistent with their identity and interest. This can be done by selling groups on some over­riding values that all accept or convincing them that what will happen will serve their narrow interest, at least to a degree. Since interests and preferences can be formed as fields form, it is necessary to link broader frames to groups’ existing conceptions of interest.
The skilled social actor will engage in brokering more than blustering (Gould 1993). This works in two ways. First, strategic actors present themselves as neu­tral in a situation, acting as if they are simply trying to mediate the interests of others. Second, strategic actors present themselves as more active in selling the group collective identity and appealing to others to find a way to get people to go along. Their solution is sold either to help keep the peace or to ensure that the field does not collapse. To be a broker, skilled actors have to convince others that they are not motivated by narrow self-interest and will gain personally from finding a negotiated solution.
Since the goal of skilled action is to attain cooperation from others, socially skilled actors often appear hard to read and devoid of interests of their own (this is what Leifer 1988 and Padgett and Ansell 1993 have called “robust action”). Opposition can quickly mobilize against someone who appears to want some­thing for narrow individual gain. On the other hand, if someone appears open to others’ needs and not wedded to any particular course of action, others will very likely find the situation more conducive to negotiation or other forms of cooper­ative action.
One main problem for socially skilled actors is to find a way to link actors or groups with widely different preferences and help reorder those preferences. This aggregation process, once it gets going, can take on a life of its own. Once a number of actors come on board, others will likely follow. The trick is to bring enough on board to set in motion the proverbial bandwagon effect. This is most frequendy done by fashioning a resonant collective identity (Ansell 2001). Such an identity allows groups to attach their divergent interests to a common project.
Skilled actors will be pursuing a number of lines of action going simulta­neously. Many of these—perhaps most of them—will peter out or fail to mate­rialize. But as long as these aborted lines of action are not viewed as serious failures, all one needs is a few successful lines of action, or victories, to convince others to come along. After the fact, other actors or groups will likely only remember the successes even if one had to try various lines of action to get a few to work. Part of this illusion of action is to try and convince others that their vi­sion contains more reality than they might think. If you can convince others that they have more power or control to get others to go along, then once something gets set in motion, others will fall in line.
Another common ploy of strategic actors is getting others to believe that some line of action was actually their idea. If the ploy works, the payoff is tre­mendous commitment to the initiative by the nominal architect of the plan. A related tactic has the skilled actor setting up situations in which others are subdy encouraged to take the lead and buy into what they have come to believe was their idea. By getting actors who are relatively isolated to cooperate and con­vincing them that their cooperation was their idea, the strategic actor gets others to cooperate without appearing Machiavellian.
Padgett and Ansell (1993) have argued that a good way to secure coopera­tion with disparate groups is to make alliances with people with few other choices or isolate particularly difficult outliers. The preferable action is to
include as many outliers as possible into the field and gain agreement on an overarching worldview and collective identity. One good way to do this is to be the node that connects these outliers to the network. Then, the skilled actor is the source of information and coalition building. Occasionally, certain actors or groups are so disruptive that the best tactic is to isolate them. Even if there are a number of upset but isolated actors, they generally remain disorganized. Since these types of actors are usually incapable of strategic action themselves, they remain isolates.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have parsed the rich literature on human evolution to offer a highly speculative, sensitizing perspective on the origins of what we have termed the "existential function of the social”; that "moment” when collaborative sym­bolic activity assumed central importance in social life. The intent was to pro­vide at least the bare bones of a microfoundation for the theory being developed here. We have linked this underlying microfoundation to strategic action in fields via the concept of social skill; that is, the ways in which skilled actors use empathy and the capacity to fashion and strategically deploy shared meanings and identities in the service of institutional projects within fields.
The theory of social skill and fields is applicable to a range of sociological phenomena that share common characteristics. The subfields in sociology that are best analyzed from this perspective are concerned with organized groups that have a reason to set up rules for a particular social space. The social phe­nomena in which self-conscious actors strive to organize groups toward collec­tive ends include institutional politics, religion, social movements, the economy in which firms and governments create markets, and the nonprofit sector of cap­italist economies. All of these arenas of action contain actors who seek to con­struct institutions to guide their interactions in order that they might forward their existential and material interests. They want to create new social spaces where their groups can dominate or prosper. In all of these empirical terrains, we observe formal organizational rules, laws, and informal practices being used to guide interaction. Now, of course, the goals of actors are very different across states, markets, religion, the nonprofit sector, and social movements. But in all of these arenas, we see actors striving to attain cooperation within their groups and to stabilize interactions across groups.
Our claim that the framework on offer here applies to most public arenas or institutional spheres in modern society is intended to be quite provocative. While some scholars have gestured toward a more general theory of institu­tional action, few have tried to broaden the scope of their own theorizing to
accommodate phenomena as diverse as those touched on above (for an at­tempt, see Powell 1991). Our stress on the centrality of meaning making and its expression in the form of social skill implies that in both settled and unset­tled fields, the competing meaning projects of groups will structure the inter­actions both within and across groups. Since even in settled strategic action fields there will be contestation, we expect that some group of individuals will always be trying to change the definition of the situation and the meanings that inform action in the field. This will result in ongoing change to the nature of group interaction, the meanings for actors, and the positions of groups and individuals. In less settled times, we expect that the possibilities for innovative action will increase. New identities, new political coalitions, and even new strategic action fields can emerge. Social skill in both cases is what bridges the gap between what individuals are doing and the structures and logics that result from their efforts.
With these foundational underpinnings in hand, we would like to close the chapter by offering some additional clarifying comments on the concept of social skill before briefly revisiting the metaperspective on human sociability with which we opened the chapter. We begin with a conundrum related to the distribution of social skill across social space.
Our perspective rests on the assumption that socially skilled actors exist in every field. They are equally likely to populate incumbent and challenger groups. If socially skilled actors exist both in incumbent and challenger groups, one could argue that whatever advantage skill might convey, it would be offset by the presence of equally skilled actors in the other group—leaving the incumbent in a dominant position. Indeed, this is frequently the case and we have no problem acknowledging that very often the social skill of challengers and incumbents is roughly equal, allowing the contest to be decided on the basis of the superior resources and/or political endowments of the latter. But even if the overall struc­ture of the field remains largely unchanged, skill may still make a difference. Even in the most stable of fields, we can expect to see constant jockeying for advantage and efforts to marginally improve ones position in the strategic action field. Social skill will be important to these as well as to major convulsive moments in the life of a field.
Then again, there are those “convulsive moments.” At such times, strategic action fields are unstable and present new opportunities for challengers to better their positions. It is at these moments that the ability of socially skilled actors to mobilize resources and to frame innovative lines of action to secure cooperation may prove decisive. Challengers who are more attuned to moments when their position might be significantly improved will work diligently to locate and exploit such opportunities. Quite simply, we expect the role of social skill to be more decisive in situations of greater field flux than in relatively stable times.
Still, the role of social skill and the ultimate outcome of field contention in such moments remain unpredictable and depend not just on the distribution of social skill across groups but also on resource endowments, political allies, and events in other proximate fields. We could imagine a situation in which similarly sized and resourced groups face off and the superior social skills of one of the combatants lead to the defeat of the other. But we can also imagine cases in which the resource endowments of the groups are really not so equal and the more advantaged group prevails independent of differences in social skill. Lots of other outcomes are possible as well, depending on the mix of fac­tors noted above.
The problem of determining when social skill is decisive in the way that a field becomes organized or in the ability of challenger groups to improve their posi­tions is mostly a question of empirical analysis. But what our perspective does say is that it is always important for actors to be mobilized, even strong incum­bent actors. Thus, the problem of using social skill and using it effectively is always an issue in strategic action fields. The constant jockeying for position and the piecemeal changes in strategic action fields very much reflect skilled social actors looking for an edge, any edge, and occasionally changing the nature of their position in the fields.
Even small changes can sometimes be turned into larger changes if multiple groups align with an innovative new collective identity or collective action frame. Social skill depends on the ability of actors to transcend their narrow worldview, take the position of the “other,” and figure out how either to get the “other” to cooperate or to effectively blunt or counter the “other s” advantages. This dynamic within strategic action fields is on ongoing part of the game. It only makes sense that most of the time in setded strategic action fields, incumbents can reproduce their advantage primarily through superior resources or the actions of internal governance units or other political allies. Even settled strate­gic action fields have moments of turbulence, however, presenting socially skilled actors with opportunities to successfully challenge even the most entrenched incumbents.
We would like to close the chapter where we began, by underscoring the dis­tinctive microfoundation on which our general perspective rests. In truth, most sociologists have little or nothing to say about the fundamental behavioral as­sumptions that ground their work. Implicitly, however, we think we discern two very different metatheoretical perspectives lurking behind most sociological scholarship. In the distinct minority are rationalists who see calculus and indi­vidual/collective interests as the driving force in social life. Juxtaposed to the rationalists are most sociologists who embrace one or another version of what Dennis Wrong (1961) long ago termed the “oversocialized conception of man.” The actual microfoundations of this view have never really been articulated, but that has not stopped the perspective from being broadly modal within the disci­pline. What do we mean by the “oversocialized conception of man?” We simply mean that most sociologists stress the critical importance of various forms of social influence—norms, socialization, collective identity, social scripts, “taken for granted” organizational routines—in shaping human social life.
As card-carrying sociologists, we would never deny the power of such influ­ences in social life. But in asserting the distinctive microfoundations spelled out earlier, we part company from most of our disciplinary brethren in two signifi­cant ways. First, we seek not to simply assert the power of social influence but to account for it. We maintain that the tendency of humans to hew to social norms, to conform to group pressures, reflects nothing so much as the existential func­tions of the social. That is, our desire to belong and to believe that the world is an ordered, meaningful reality renders us susceptible to social influence. By con­forming to group norms we affirm membership and meaning and, in turn, restrain existential doubt.
This latter account differs from most generic sociological perspectives in a second sense. By seeing humans as possessing both the capacity and the need to engage in collective meaning making, we are asserting a much more active, agen- tic view of social life than would appear common in sociology. The image im­plicit in most sociological work is that of unconscious conformity to norms or adherence to “taken for granted” routines. If humans are inclined to accommo­date various forms of social influence—and we certainly think they are—we see them doing so much more thoughtfully and with conscious regard for the mate­rial and existential stakes involved in their actions. This more active, purposive view of the species is consistent with our stress on social skill and the active fash­ioning, stabilization, and transformation of strategic action fields.
From the micro we now turn to the other extreme. Having explicated a micro­foundation to help account for the capacities and motivations that shape strate­gic action within fields, we now seek to place those fields in the broadest possible macrocontext. For if certain species capacities shape contention in strategic action fields, they do so in response to constraints and opportunities that arise outside of the field as much as dynamics internal to it.

[1] We need to make two clarifying points here. First, we are not suggesting that prior to the ex­plosion of 45,000-50,000 years ago our human ancestors lacked any conception of group identify or shared understandings of the world. They dearly did not. Groups that were fashioning tools and hunting collaboratively clearly had to share both an inchoate sense of “groupness” and enough collective knowledge—of tool making techniques, differentiated roles during a hunt, and so on—to survive in often harsh environments. It is just that all of these shared understandings seem to have derived from, and been overwhelmingly deployed in the service of, the material functions of the social. The capacity for meaning making as an end in itself appears to be only lightly developed prior to the explosion. Second, we are certainly aware that the greatly expanded capacity for collaboration and meaning making carried with it extraordinary evolutionary advantages that enhanced the survival chances of modern humans—at least in the short run. That said, it seems just as clear that many of the new ritual and artistic behaviors that followed in the wake of the explosion conferred no direct survival advantage on the group. Among the earliest known examples of jewelry is a collection of delicate beads made from ostrich eggs, taken from a Kenyan site—Enkapune Ya Muto—that dates to 40,000 years ago. “Their maker shaped the crude, circular pieces from fragments of ostrich eggshells, thinning each one and drilling a hole through the center. Many of them broke before they were fin­ished. An unknown Stone Age artisan spent hours crafting these decorations rather than searchingforfood, tending children, or making tools” (Leslie 2002:57; emphasis added).

CH1. The Gist of It

The Gist of It

Accounting for social change and social order is one of the enduring problems of social science. The central goal of this book is to explicate an integrated theory that explains how stability and change are achieved by social actors in circum­scribed social arenas. In constructing this perspective we draw upon the rich body of integrative scholarship produced in recent years by economic sociolo­gists, institutional theorists in both sociology and political science, and social movement scholars. To this foundational corpus we add several distinctive ele­ments of our own. Later in the chapter we sketch the basic features of the per­spective in some detail, differentiating the new elements from the old. Here, however, we begin by highlighting three main components of the theory. First, the theory rests on a view that sees strategic action fields, which can be defined as mesolevel social orders, as the basic structural building block of modern polit­ical/ organizational life in the economy, civil society, and the state. A concern with stability and change in field-level dynamics is central to the work of a number of theorists including Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), DiMaggio and Powell (1983), Fligstein (1996, 2001b), Martin (2003), and Scott and Meyer (1983).

Second, we see any given field as embedded in a broader environment consist­ing of countless proximate or distal fields as well as states, which are themselves orga­nized as intricate systems of strategic action fields. The source of many of the opportunities and challenges a given field faces stems from its relations with this broader environment. Crises and opportunities for the construction of new fields or the transformation of existing strategic action fields normally arise as a result of destabilizing change processes that develop within proximate state or nonstate fields. Finally, at the core of the theory is an account of how embedded social actors seek to fashion and maintain order in a given field. While most such theories stress the central importance of interests and power, we insist that strategic action in fields turns on a complicated blend of material and “existential” considerations. We posit an underlying microfoundation—rooted in an understanding of what we term the “existential functions of the social”—that helps account for the essence of human sociability and a related capacity for strategic action. In turn, this microfoundation informs our conception of “social skill,” which we define as the capacity for inter- subjective thought and action that shapes the provision of meaning, interests, and identity in the service of collective ends.

In fashioning this perspective we draw heavily on research and theory generated by scholars in the fields of social movement studies, organizational theory, economic sociology, and historical institutionalism in political science. The volume of work at the intersection of organizational theory and social movement studies has grown especially rapidly in the past decade and a half (for some examples, see Armstrong 2002; Binder 2002; Brown and Fox 1998; Campbell 2005; Clemens 1997; Clemens and Minkoff 2004; Creed 2003; Cress 1997; Davis et al. 2005; Davis and McAdam 2000; Davis and Thompson 1994; Dobbin and Sutton 1998; Fligstein 1990, 1996; Haveman and Rao 1997; Jenkins and Ekert 1986; Kurzman 1998; Lounsbury, Ven- tresca, and Hirsch 2003; McAdam and Scott 2005; McCammon 2001; Minkoff 1995; Moore and Hala 2002; Morrill, Zald, and Rao 2003; Rao 2009; Rao, Morrill, and Zald 2000; Schneiberg and Soule 2005; Smith 2002; Strang and Soule 1998; Stryker 1994; Swaminathan and Wade 2001; Weber, Rao, and Thomas 2009). Social movement scholars, organizational theorists, economic sociologists, and institution­alists in political science are all concerned with how organizations can control and effect change in their environments. All are interested in how “the rules of the game” are set up and how this creates winners and losers. At the core of these concerns is the foundational problem of collective strategic action. All of these scholars are inter­ested in how it is that actors cooperate with one another, even when there is conflict and competition and how this cooperation can work to create larger arenas of action. All have discovered that in times of dramatic change, new ways of organizing “cul­tural frames” or “logics of action” come into existence. These are wielded by skilled social actors, sometimes called “institutional entrepreneurs,” who come to innovate, propagate, and organize strategic action fields.

In spite of the attention to, and cross-referencing of, different literatures, the in­creasing tendency toward disciplinary and even subfield specialization acts to bal- kanize thought and discourage synthesis and broader integrative theorizing. Speaking only of sociology, the subfield division of labor within the discipline has tended to make empirical specialists of most of us and for the most part the vocabu­laries, ideas, and even methods of the various subfields constrain broader, integra­tive discourse. This empirical specialization has proven fruitful to a certain degree. But it has its limits. We think it is useful to explore the commonalities across these subfields. We are convinced that most of the concepts employed in this book can be traced back to scholarship on social movements, organizations, economic sociology, and institutional analysis within political science. We are also convinced that this is so because scholars in all of these areas have discovered a foundational social reality at work, a generic theory of social action, one that provides the building blocks for the theory on offer here.

It is useful to consider what these fields have in common. All are focused on the emergence, stabilization/institutionalization, and transformation of socially constructed arenas in which embedded actors compete for material and status rewards. Political sociology focuses centrally on change and stability in the insti­tutions and agencies of the state and their relation to civil society. Much energy has been spent trying to show how the state is a set of organizations and how powerful nonstate actors take their grievances to the state (for example, Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985; Laumann and Knoke 1987). For their part, social movement scholars have been centrally interested in how perceived “threats and opportunities” catalyze the mobilization of new actors who, in turn, have the capacity to destabilize established institutions and fields in society (Goldstone 2004; McAdam 1999; Tarrow 2011; Tilly 1978). Organizational theory has been traditionally concerned with the emergence and spread of for­mal organizations and the role of the environment, key actors, and the state in this process (Scott 2001). Economic sociology has focused on the formation of markets and the role of firms and states in their construction (Fligstein 2001b). Historical institutionalists in political science have sought to understand how institutions emerge as answers to recurring problems of conflict and coordina­tion and how they are reproduced—or not—over time (Mahoney and Thelen 2009; Pierson 2004; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth 1992).

Scholars in all of these fields are concerned with the ability of actors to engage in successful collective strategic action within constructed social orders. We call the terrain of action within which all of these collective actors operate a strategic action field when it is well defined and unorganized social space when it is not.

Scholars in all of these subfields are also centrally concerned with the state. For political sociologists and scientists and social movement scholars, this interest makes intuitive sense. For their part, organizational theorists and economic sociologists have conceived of the state mostly as an exogenous force that provides rules for what constitutes an organization, an enforcer of those rules, and the creator of organizational environments (Dobbin 1994; Fligstein 1990)

After favoring structural accounts of action for an extended period of time, a renewed interest in culture is another emphasis these subfields share in common. Culture, as a concept, has crept back into political sociology and polit­ical science (particularly historical institutionalism) in recent years. It is also central to institutional theory in organizational study (Powell and DiMaggio 1990).        The “cultural turn” has been very much in evidence in the study of social movements since the mid-1980s, with much of this interest focused on the role of “framing processes” in collective action (Snow et al. 1986). But just as we will argue that sociologists have not gone very far in conceptualizing social space, we likewise see the notions of culture that inform current work in these subfields as generally impoverished. We will have much more to say about this issue later in the chapter.

The problem is that these elements—collective action, social space, culture, organization, the state, and mobilization—which are present in all of these liter­atures, have not been integrated into a systematic theory in any of the subfields. Indeed, authors tend to focus not only on a specific empirical phenomenon but often also on a theoretical view that only emphasizes a few of these elements. This is understandable in light of the fact that the subfield concerns often require focus on fairly narrow empirical phenomena. But this means that authors rarely engage in theory building with an eye to fashioning a more general perspective that incorporates all of these elements in a systematic fashion. This is very much our goal here.

We are also interested in rethinking the problems of the relationship between agency and structure (Giddens 1984; Sewell 1992) and the links between mac­rosocial processes and microinteractions (Alexander et al. 1987; Coleman 1986). Much of sociology posits that people are enmeshed in social structures that are out of their control and operating at a level that is above or outside of them. This gives people little leeway to act autonomously and makes them en­tirely subject to the control of social forces. Examples of such structures include the class system and patriarchy. Those concerned with the issues of micro/macro linkages and especially the structure/agent problem have struggled to under­stand how it is that individuals act in spite of these macro processes and/or structural constraints. Scholars in this area are also interested in the conditions under which actors are either the direct beneficiaries or the victims of structures and the conditions under which it may be possible for actors to resist structures and create alternative worlds.

While this debate has been useful in clarifying some issues, it has generally been highly abstract in orientation. For example, the debate has successfully highlighted the fact that structural accounts underestimate the role of actors in reproducing everyday life (Giddens 1984). Every time we go to work, for instance, we reproduce the part we play in the system of labor relations. If even a fraction of us stopped going to work, much of social life would quickly bog down. The debate, however, has proven less useful in other ways. It has been carried out at such an abstract level and generally outside of empirical subfields that it has not informed actual research in sociology. As a result the central concepts of both structure and action remain empirically underspecified. In spite of much con­cern with the idea of actors’ resistance to structure, there is very little elaboration of a genuinely sociological view of how actors enact structure in the first place and the role they play in sustaining or changing these structures over time. We have only begun to theorize the complex dynamics of emergence and institution­alization, stability and change, and rupture and settlement in constructed social worlds. While scholars have invoked the idea of institutional entrepreneurs as agents of change, there has been little concern with thinking about what kind of specific social processes and skills helps these actors get what they want or suc­cessfully resist other actors’ power. There has also been a decided lack of atten­tion to how the opportunities and constraints that shape the prospects for strategic action within fields depend critically on the complex latticework of rela­tions that tie the strategic action field to a host of other state and nonstate fields.

The literatures on organizations, historical institutionalism, economic soci­ology, and social movements have been directly concerned with dealing with these questions. They are concerned with how some actors work to set up stable mesolevel social worlds. Scholars in these fields have had to think long and hard about how such orders are built, held together, and destroyed. Scholars have dis­covered that the most useful way to push forward the discussion about agents and structures is by creating a mesolevel theory of action that involves asking what a sociological theory of actors should look like. A mesolevel theory of action implies that action takes place between and within organized groups. By understanding more clearly the role of social actors in producing, reproducing, and transforming their local fields of action, we think we can gain a great deal of leverage on many foundational issues in social life.

Finally, much of the concern in these subfields has been with trying to under­stand the problem of social change. On the one hand, many aspects of social life appear extremely stable across the life course and even across generations. On the other hand, it often feels as if change is ubiquitous in social life. We do not necessarily see a contradiction between these perspectives. We argue that sta­bility is relative and even when achieved is the result of actors working very hard to reproduce their local social order. That is, even under generally stable condi­tions, actors are engaged in a constant set of adjustments that introduce incre­mental change into constructed social worlds. Skilled social actors work to improve their position in an existing strategic action field or defend their privi­lege. To a degree, change is always going on.

Even more difficult is the question of the emergence of genuinely new social arenas or fields. There are two related problems here. The first is to specify the conditions under which this happens. The second is to theorize the agency involved in these processes. How are new fields created and by whom and for what purposes? The fields of political science, political sociology, organizations, social movements, and economic sociology have been searching for the answers to these kinds of questions since at least 1960. In recent years, scholars in a number of these fields have begun to emphasize the role of framing and entre­preneurship in such efforts. It is interesting that the researchers in these subfields have ended up focusing on these few elements as central to their particular micro/macro, agent/structure problems somewhat independently of one another.

It is this convergence that leads us to believe that a unified theoretical view of field-based strategic collective action is possible.

In this book, we mean to offer a general theory of social change and sta­bility rooted in a view of social life as dominated by a complex web of strate­gic action fields. In proposing this theory we hope to fill a significant conceptual void in contemporary social theory. Theory in sociology has become a subfield almost entirely divorced from empirical research. Within this subfield, as Abend (2008) points out, there are at least seven distinct views of what theory means. As research subfields have proliferated, so too have specialized perspectives designed to explain the specific empirical phe­nomenon central to the area of study. Reflecting this trend, we now have dis­tinct “theories” (or, perhaps more accurately, orienting perspectives) for social movements, organizations, religion, culture, and so on. But increas­ingly these seem “thin” to us, insufficiently general to tell us much about the overall structure of contemporary society and the forms of action that shape that structure. That is what we hope to come closer to describing in the perspective on offer here.

To be sure, there is a handful of theories that we see as legitimate alternatives to our perspective. These include new institutional theory in organizational studies, Anthony Giddens’s theory of “structuration,” and, closest to our per­spective, Bourdieu’s account of the role of habitus, field, and capital in social and political life. We have borrowed elements from each of these perspectives and admire the ambition inherent in all of them. At the same time, however, we see all of these alternatives as, in one way or another, inadequate to the task at hand, which we take to be explaining the underlying structure of, and sources of change and stability in, institutional life in modern society.

We begin by sketching the basic elements of the theory. We then use these elements to think about the dynamics of field emergence, stability, and change. We end by critiquing some of the alternative theories on offer in contemporary sociology.

The Central Elements of the Theory

In this section we identify and briefly describe what we see as the key compo­nents of the theory. We will elaborate these ideas in subsequent chapters. We stress the following seven key elements of the perspective:

1.     strategic action fields

2.     incumbents, challengers, and governance units

3.     social skill and the existential functions of the social

4.     the broader field environment

5.     exogenous shocks, mobilization, and the onset of contention

6.     episodes of contention

7.     settlement

We take up each of these elements in turn.

1.   Strategic Action Fields—We hold the view that strategic action fields are the fundamental units of collective action in society. A strategic action field is a con­structed mesolevel social order in which actors (who can be individual or collec­tive) are attuned to and interact with one another on the basis of shared (which is not to say consensual) understandings about the purposes of the field, rela­tionships to others in the field (including who has power and why), and the rules governing legitimate action in the field. A stable field is one in which the main actors are able to reproduce themselves and the field over a fairly long period of time.

All collective actors (e.g., organizations, clans, supply chains, social move­ments, and governmental systems) are themselves made up of strategic action fields. When these fields are organized in a formal bureaucratic hierarchy, with fields essentially embedded within other fields, the resulting vertical system looks a lot like a traditional Russian doll: with any number of smaller fields nested inside larger ones. So, for example, an office in a firm can be a strategic action field. It is itself located in a larger structure within a firm, say a division. That division vies for resources in a firm structure. The firm interacts in a larger field with its competitors and challengers. They are embedded in an interna­tional division of labor. Each of these strategic action fields constitutes a meso­level social order in the sense that it can be fruitfully analyzed as containing all of the elements of an order from the perspective we outline here. In general, the ties between fields highlight the interdependence of strategic action fields and their very real potential to effect change in one another. Indeed, we will argue that these links constitute one of the main sources of change and stability in all fields.

This first element of the theory is the insight that action takes place in con­structed mesolevel social orders, which is implied in various versions of institu­tional theory. These orders have been variously called sectors (Scott and Meyer 1983), organizational fields (DiMaggio and Powell 1983), games (Scharpf 1997), fields (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), networks (Powell et al. 2005), and, in the case of government, policy domains (Laumann and Knoke 1987) and policy systems/subsystems (Sabatier 2007). In the economic realm, markets can be thought of as a specific kind of constructed order (Fligstein 1996, 2001b). For their part, social movement scholars conceive of movements as emergent orders composed, in the most successful cases, of collections of formal social move­ment organizations and more informal groups of activists. McCarthy and Zald (1973, 1977) refer to these emergent orders as social movement industries. Movements also have the potential to spawn conflict arenas composed of move­ment groups, state actors, the media, and countermovement groups, among others (McAdam 1999: chapter 5).

If, however, many analysts have come to focus on mesolevel orders as central to institutional life, their conceptions of these fields are quite varied. Bourdieu sees “social power” as the underlying key to both the structure and logic of any given field. Institutional theorists such as Jepperson (1991) tend toward a more culturally constructionist view of fields, stressing the unifying force of shared understandings among a set of mutually attuned actors resulting in a “taken for granted” everyday reality.

Our view attempts to combine the social constructionist aspects of institu­tional theory with a central interest in understanding the sources of stability and change in strategic action fields. We see strategic action fields as socially con­structed arenas within which actors with varying resource endowments vie for advantage (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Emirbayer and Johnson 2008; Martin 2003). Strategic action fields are socially constructed in three important respects. First, membership in these fields is based far more on subjective “standing” than on objective criteria. So, for example, while there are some 2,500 four-year col­leges and universities in the United States, they do not, ordinarily, constitute a single strategic action field. Instead subsets of these schools have come to regard themselves as comparator institutions. It is within these more narrowly con­structed educational fields that schools compete and cooperate with each other.

The boundaries of strategic action fields are not fixed but shift depending on the definition of the situation and the issues at stake. So, for instance, imagine if Congress was to take up a sweeping reform bill that threatened to change the tax status of all institutions of higher education. For the duration of the conflict, the narrow comparator strategic action fields described above would cease to be all that relevant. Instead the conflict would define a new field, composed of all 2,500 colleges and universities, which would probably unite and oppose such legisla­tion. So fields are constructed on a situational basis, as shifting collections of actors come to define new issues and concerns as salient.

Finally, and most important, fields are constructed in the sense that they turn on a set of understandings fashioned over time by members of the field. The term “institutional logics” has often been used to characterize these shared un­derstandings (Friedland and Alford 1991; Scott 2001). We think this concept is too broad and too amorphous to really capture the set of shared meanings that structure field dynamics. We want to distinguish between four categories of shared understandings that are critical to field-level interaction. First, there is a general, shared understanding of what is going on in the field, that is, what is at stake (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Here, we would expect that actors in a settled strategic action field would share a consensus as to what is going on. Such a consensus does not imply that the division of spoils in the field is viewed as legitimate, only that the overall account of the terrain of the field is shared by most field actors.

Second, there is a set of actors in the field who can be generally viewed as pos­sessing more or less power. Here, we have in mind that actors occupy a general position within the field and further that they share a generalized sense of how their position relates to that of others in the strategic action field. One way of thinking about this is that actors know who their friends, their enemies, and their competitors are because they know who occupies those roles in the field.

Third, there is a set of shared understandings about the nature of the “rules” in the field. By this, we mean that actors understand what tactics are possible, legitimate, and interpretable for each of the roles in the field. This is different from knowing what is generally at stake. This is the cultural understanding of what forms of action and organization are viewed as legitimate and meaningful within the context of the field.

Finally, there is the broad interpretive frame that individual and collective stra­tegic actors bring to make sense of what others within the strategic action field are doing. And here, rather than positing a consensual frame that holds for all actors, which is implied by the idea of “logics,” we expect instead to see different inter­pretative frames reflecting the relative positions of actors within the strategic action field. We expect that actors will tend to see the moves of others from their own perspective in the field. In most fields, for example, we expect that dominant or incumbent actors will embrace a frame of reference that encapsulates their self-serving view of the field, while dominated or challenger actors will adopt/ fashion an “oppositional” perspective. The reactions of more and less powerful actors to the actions of others thus reflect their social position in the field.

All of these aspects of strategic action field structure are lumped together in the conventional view of institutional logics. This leads to a number of problems. The use of the term “institutional logic” tends to imply way too much consensus in the field about what is going on and why and way too little concern over actors’ positions, the creation of rules in the field that favor the more powerful over the less powerful, and the general use of power in strategic action fields. In short, the relative and potentially oppositional positions of actors within the field are not well captured by the concept of institutional logic. The term fails to capture the ways in which different actors in different positions in the strategic action field will vary in their interpretation of events and respond to them from their own point of view.

One of the key differences between our perspective and most versions of institutional theory is that we see fields as only rarely organized around a truly consensual “taken for granted” reality. The general image for most institutionalists is one of routine social order and reproduction. In most versions of institutional theory, the routine reproduction of that field is assured because all actors share the same perceptions of their opportunities and constraints and act accordingly. To the extent that change occurs at all, it is relatively rare and almost never inten­tional. In contrast, for us, there is constant jockeying going on in fields as a result of their contentious nature. Actors make moves and other actors have to interpret them, consider their options, and act in response. Actors who are both more and less powerful are constantly making adjustments to the conditions in the field given their position and the actions of others. This leaves substantial latitude for routine jockeying and piecemeal change in the positions that actors occupy. Even in “settled times,” less powerful actors can learn how to take what the system will give them and are always looking to marginally improve their positions in the field. Constant low-level contention and incremental change are the norm in fields rather than the image of routine reproduction that tends to define most versions of institutional theory.

We can extend this view even more. In place of the simplistic distinction between settled and unsettled fields, we argue that even settled fields exhibit enormous variation in the extent to which there is consensus. Settled fields should, we argue, be arrayed along a continuum, anchored on one end by those exceedingly rare strategic action fields that exhibit very high consensus on all of the subjective dimensions touched on above and on the other by those fields that, despite widespread dissent and open conflict, nonetheless exhibit a stable structure over time. Indeed, if one studies a particular strategic action field over time, one could observe it moving back and forth on such a continuum as crisis undermines existing relationships and meanings and order becomes reestab­lished with a new set of relationships and groups. If the field is more oriented toward the pole of settlement, conflict will be lessened and the positions of actors more easily reproduced.

But if there are more unsettled conditions or the relative power of actors is equalized, then there is a possibility for a good deal of jockeying for advantage. All of the meanings in a field can break down including what the purpose of the field is, what positions the actors occupy, what the rules of the game are, and how actors come to understand what others are doing. Indeed, at this extreme, we have left the continuum and entered the realm of open conflict in which the very existence and structure of a strategic action field is up for grabs. It is possible for a whole new order to appear with a redefinition of the positions of the players, the rules of the game, and the overriding ends of the strategic action field. The purpose of our theorization is to understand better where such orders come from and how they are continuously contested and constantly oscillating between greater or lesser stability and order. In short, we expect strategic action fields to always be in some sort of flux, as the process of contention is ongoing and the threats to an order always present to some degree. This stress on the essential contentious character of fields and the constancy of change pressures within strategic action fields is one of the distinctive new elements that we bring to this theoretical project.

Our view has a great deal of implication for how to think about change and stability in fields. We think it is useful to separate out the dramatic changes that occur in the formation and transformation of a field from the more piecemeal changes that result from contention in fields on an ongoing basis. The more rad­ical moments of change can be characterized through a more social movement­like process that we will describe shortly. The more continuous sources of change will be the result of the period to period jockeying for position within the field. We expect that as the arrangements in the field are challenged successfully by various groups, the possibility for change is ongoing. We will discuss this issue more thoroughly in chapter 4.

2. Incumbents, Challengers, and Governance Units—Our interest in the dynamics of both conflict/change and stability/order is reflected in our general character­ization of the composition of strategic action fields. We see fields as composed of incumbents, challengers, and very often governance units. First introduced by Gam- son (1975), the incumbent/challenger distinction has long been a conceptual staple of social movement theory. Incumbents are those actors who wield dis­proportionate influence within a field and whose interests and views tend to be heavily reflected in the dominant organization of the strategic action field.^[1] Thus, the purposes and structure of the field are adapted to their interests, and the positions in the field are defined by their claim on the lion’s share of material and status rewards. In addition, the rules of the field tend to favor them, and shared meanings tend to legitimate and support their privileged position within the strategic action field.

Challengers, on the other hand, occupy less privileged niches within the field and ordinarily wield little influence over its operation. While they recognize the nature of the field and the dominant logic of incumbent actors, they can usually articulate an alternative vision of the field and their position in it. This does not, however, mean that challengers are normally in open revolt against the ineq­uities of the field or aggressive purveyors of oppositional logics. On the contrary, most of the time challengers can be expected to conform to the prevailing order, although they often do so grudgingly, taking what the system gives them and awaiting new opportunities to challenge the structure and logic of the system.

In addition to incumbents and challengers, many strategic action fields have internal governance units that are charged with overseeing compliance with field rules and, in general, facilitating the overall smooth functioning and reproduc­tion of the system. It is important to note that these units are internal to the field and distinct from external state structures that hold jurisdiction over all, or some aspect of, the strategic action field. Virtually every industry has its trade associa­tion. The system of higher education in the United States has various accrediting bodies, police departments have internal affairs divisions, and bond markets have their rating agencies. It is important to note that virtually all such gover­nance units bear the imprint of the influence of the most powerful incumbents in the field and the ideas that are used to justify their dominance. Regardless of the legitimating rhetoric that motivates the creation of such units, the units are generally there not to serve as neutral arbiters of conflicts between incumbents and challengers but to reinforce the dominant perspective and guard the inter­ests of the incumbents.

The presence of these governance units aids the incumbents in at least three ways. First, in overseeing the smooth functioning of the system, they free incum­bents from the kind of overall field management and leadership that they neces­sarily exercised during the emergence of the strategic action field. Second, the very presence of these units serves to legitimate and “naturalize” the logic and rules of the field. They do this in a variety of ways. They often collect and provide information about the field to both incumbents and challengers. They also pro­duce standardized versions of this information that can serve to inform the actions of all parties. Finally, besides their “internal” functions, such units typi­cally serve as the liaison between the strategic action field and important exter­nal fields. So trade associations typically cultivate powerful allies in various state fields that exercise nominal control over the strategic action field in question. They are in a position to call on these allies for help should a crisis begin to develop within the field. In short, governance units can be expected to serve as defenders of the status quo and are a generally conservative force during periods of conflict within the strategic action field. While the incumbent/challenger distinction draws on a long line of theorizing by social movement scholars, the concept of the internal governance unit is one of the unique elements we bring to the proposed theory.

Field stability is generally achieved in one of two ways: through the imposi­tion of hierarchical power by a single dominant group or the creation of some kind of political coalition based on the cooperation of a number of groups. At the core of the problem is whether or not the strategic action field will be built on coercion, competition, or cooperation. In practice, it should be noted that fields contain elements of all three, but it is useful to consider these as ideal types. Coercion implies the threat or actual use of physical force or the with­holding of valued resources. Competition occurs when different groups vie for advantage without resorting to violence. The outcome of the competition is expected to turn on some combination of initial resource endowments, the strength of internal and external allies, and variable social skill. The eventual winners will command subsequent resource flows and the opportunities to exploit them. The losers may get less but may manage to remain in the field.

Cooperation involves building a political coalition to keep the strategic action field together. The purpose of a given cooperative project is to provide resources—both material and “existential”—to members. (We will have more to say about these “existential” rewards in the next section and even more in the next chapter.) A political coalition reflects an alliance between two or more groups in relation to other groups. Our ideal typical view of political coalitions is that they are based on cooperation. This cooperation is generally rooted in a combination of shared interests and a common collective identity. People join groups and cooperate for narrow material rewards but also for the existential benefits that a sense of meaning and membership affords. In practice, a stable strategic action field can be built on any of these three bases or some combina­tion of them (Wagner-Pacifici 2000).

Forging political coalitions is a tricky task that requires social skill. Actors have to convince other groups that if they join together, their collective interests will in fact be served. If groups are of different size and purpose, then the larger groups obviously have advantages. Strategic actors use cooperative coalitions and enforced hierarchies as alternative means to organize fields. They can form coalitions with some groups in a strategic action field to build a larger group and then use that larger group to coerce or compete with other groups.

Depending on the evenness of the distribution of resources and position, political coalitions at one extreme are clearly based on cooperation between social groups, but at the other, where one group has more power, political coali­tions may come to resemble a hierarchy. Equally sized incumbent groups can share power in one kind of political coalition, making it look “flat” rather than hierarchical. But we can also imagine a situation in which a dominant incumbent group controls a strategic action field in coalition with a number of much smaller partners. The latter closely resembles a hierarchical field even though the rela­tionship between coalition members is nominally cooperative. Over time, the relative power of individuals or social groups can change, thereby moving the strategic action field toward either more hierarchy or more coalition.

The structure of incumbents and challengers depends on the nature of the strategic action field. So, for example, the number of incumbent groups will reflect the relative power of those groups and the underlying basis of that power. Incumbent groups may fashion an informal agreement to share the field. The result might be separate spheres of influence within the field, allowing these groups to cooperate without stepping on one another’s toes. They might even ritualize this agreement even as they periodically test its limits. For their part, challengers can use their resource dependence within a strategic action field to their advantage. If groups are dependent upon other groups, this can create a stable situation in which “contracts” are made. There will always be tension in these kinds of relations because they define the roles of unequal partners.

In our ideal types, we have associated hierarchies with coercion and competi­tion and political coalitions with cooperation. In reality, hierarchies are not just held in place by coercive or competitive advantage, and political coalitions do not rely entirely on cooperation. Hierarchies often depend on the tacit consent of challengers and can even provide some rewards for compliance with a hierar­chical order. So, incumbents will keep the lion’s share of resources for themselves but allow challengers to survive and share in the spoils, even if in a somewhat inequitable manner. In return, challengers will keep their opposition to incum­bents generally in check. By the same token, political coalitions often experience some level of ongoing conflict and competition. Groups in the coalition will believe that they are not getting their fair share of rewards. They may also believe that their vision of the coalition is not being honored. They can try to remake the coalition by mobilizing a different collection of groups based on an emergent oppositional account of the field. Obviously, the changing size of groups and their resources can affect the ongoing politics of hierarchy and coalition. The idea that fields can be organized either in a hierarchical or coalitional fashion offers a more integrated view of the possibility of field order. This is also a new element in our perspective.

3.  Social Skill and the Existential Function of the Social—The next new element in our perspective is a unique theory of “social skill” peculiar to humans and rooted in a fundamental understanding of what we term the “existential function of the social.” So central to our perspective is this distinctive microfoundation that we will devote a good part of chapter 2 to its explication. For now, we con­tent ourselves with only the most general introduction to this aspect of the theory.

How to think about the role that actors play in the construction of social life has been one of the core controversies in social theory in the past twenty years (Fraser 2003; Honneth 1995; Jasper 2004, 2006). On the one hand, sociologists tend to see overriding cultural or structural factors as facilitating or impeding the ability of individuals or organized groups to actively affect their life chances. On the other, it is hard to be a participant in social life without being impressed at how individuals and groups are able to affect what happens to them (Ganz 2000, 2009). Much of sociology contends it is interested in society’s challengers, the downtrodden and the dispossessed. This concern, when combined with the view that there is little challengers can do about their position (at least according to many sociological perspectives), puts sociologists in an awkward position, intellectually and politically. Our approach tries to define a sociological view of strategic action and link it to the possibilities for change in strategic action fields at different moments in their evolution.

Following Fligstein (2001a), we define strategic action as the attempt by social actors to create and sustain social worlds by securing the cooperation of others. Strategic action is about control in a given context (Padgett and Ansell 1993; White 1992). The creation of identities, political coalitions, and interests may be motivated by a desire to control other actors. But the ability to fashion such agreements and enforce them requires that strategic actors be able to “get outside of their own heads,” take the role of the other, and work to fashion shared worlds and identities (Jasper 2004, 2006).

Put another way, the concept of social skill highlights the way in which individuals or collective actors possess a highly developed cognitive capacity for reading people and environments, framing lines of action, and mobilizing people in the service of broader conceptions of the world and of themselves (Fligstein 2001a; Jasper 2004, 2006; Snow and Benford 1988; Snow, et al. 1986). To discover, articulate, or appropriate and propagate these “existen­tial packages” is inherently a social skill, one that underscores the “cultural” or “constructed” dimension of social action. We view social skill as an indi­vidual capacity and assume that it is distributed (perhaps normally) across the population.

What socially skilled actors will do will depend on what role they occupy in a particular strategic action field. In stable social worlds, skilled strategic actors in incumbent groups help to produce and reproduce a status quo. They are aided by a collective set of meanings shared by other actors that defines those actors’ identities and interests. It is also the case that in “institutionalized” social worlds, meanings can be “taken for granted” and actions are readily framed in relation to those meanings. In emergent or unsettled strategic action fields, the task for skilled strategic actors is somewhat different. In unsettled strategic action fields, it is possible for skilled social actors to assume the role of “institutional entrepre­neur” (DiMaggio 1988). Here, their ability to help link groups based on appeals to common interests and identities comes to the fore. These skills are at the greatest premium in unorganized or unstable strategic action fields. Here, actors use their skill to mobilize others, either to help them build a political coalition able to organize the field or to use their superior resources to produce a hierar­chical field (Ganz 2000, 2009).

By emphasizing the cognitive, empathetic, and communicative dimensions of social skill, we hope to underscore the central point that actors who undertake strategic action must be able to use whatever perspective they have developed in an intersubjective enough fashion to secure the cooperation—willing or other­wise—of others (Fligstein 2001a). This kind of skill enables actors to transcend their own individual and narrow group interests and to take the role of the other as a prerequisite for shaping a broader conception of the collective rooted in an emergent worldview and shared identity (Mead 1934).

We make one final, crucial point regarding the exercise of the social skills alluded to here. Virtually all past perspectives on strategic action have focused primarily on disparities in power and preferences. Much of what we have said to this point in the book could be interpreted in this narrow instrumental light as well. However, we see strategic action as inextricably linked to the distinctive human capacity and need to fashion shared meanings and identities to ensure a viable existential ground for existence. This is not to say that power and prefer­ences do not matter but that our attempts to exercise the former and achieve the latter are always bound up with larger issues of meaning and identity. What is more, our preferences themselves are generally rooted in the central sources of meaning and identify in our lives. We discuss this complicated topic in the next chapter. For now, we simply assert that for us collective strategic action is rooted at least as much in Weber’s stress on meaning making and Mead’s focus on empa­thy as on the naked instrumental orientation of Marx.

4.   Broader Field Environment—Many other theorists, as we have noted, have proffered descriptions of the kind of mesolevel orders that we are calling strate­gic action fields. Virtually all of the previous work on fields, however, focuses only on the internal workings of these orders, depicting them as largely self­contained, autonomous worlds. The next distinctive feature of our perspective derives from the central analytic importance we accord the broader environ­ment within which any given strategic action field is embedded. More specifi­cally, we conceive of all fields as embedded in complex webs of other fields. Three sets of binary distinctions will help us characterize the nature of these “other fields” and their relationships with any given strategic action field. The first distinction is between distant and proximate fields. Proximate fields are those strategic action fields with recurring ties to, and whose actions routinely affect, the field in question. Distant fields are those that lack ties and have virtu­ally no capacity to influence a given strategic action field.

The second distinction is between dependent and interdependent fields. The distinction captures the extent and direction of influence that characterizes the relationship between any two fields. A field that is largely subject to the influ­ence of another is said to be dependent on it. This dependence can stem from a variety of sources, including formal legal or bureaucratic authority, resource dependence, or physical/military force. Formal bureaucratic hierarchies of the Russian doll variety embody the first of these sources of dependence. Within these vertically organized systems, all lower level fields are nested in, and formally dependent upon, all higher level systems. When two linked fields exercise more or less equal influence over each other, we say that they stand in an interdependent relation to one another. It should go without saying that fields can also be independent of one another, that is, unaffected by the actions of the other. Indeed, the great majority of strategic action fields are independent of each other.

The final distinction is between state and nonstate fields. The distinction is an obvious but important one. In the modern world state actors alone have the for­mal authority to intervene in, set rules for, and generally pronounce on the legit­imacy and viability of most nonstate fields. This grants to states considerable and generally unrivaled potential to affect the stability of most strategic action fields. But states for us are also dense collections of fields whose relations can be described as either distant or proximate and, if proximate, can be characterized as existing in either a horizontal or vertical relationship to one another. We there­fore reject the all too common notion of a singular, hegemonic state. On closer inspection states are made up of myriad social orders whose dynamics are nearly indistinguishable from other fields. Indeed, we see this particular conception of the state, as a dense system of interdependent fields, as another of the original contributions of the theory. We discuss states as collections of fields in chapter 3.

Armed with these distinctions, it is now easier to appreciate just how compli­cated and potentially consequential are the ties that link any given strategic action field to its broader field environment. Consider a single product division within a large firm. The division constitutes a field in its own right, but it is also tied vertically to the larger field defined by the entire firm and to all other divi­sions within the firm with which it routinely competes for resources. But this only exhausts the intrafirm fields to which the division is tied. The division is simultaneously embedded in a complex web of proximate fields external to the firm: financiers, suppliers, customers, competitors, and state regulators. We use this example and offer these distinctions to make a simple point. For all the attention paid to mesolevel orders by other analysts, the failure to take seriously the constraints (and opportunities) imposed on those orders by the myriad ties they share to other fields significantly truncates our understanding of field dynamics and, in particular, the potential for conflict and change in any given field. The stability of any given field is largely a function of its relations to other fields. While fields can devolve into conflict as a result of internal processes, it is far more common for an “episode of contention” to develop as a result of change pressures emanating from proximate state and/or nonstate fields.

5.   Exogenous Shocks, Mobilization, and the Onset of Contention—The main theoretical implication of the interdependence of fields is that the broader field environment is a source of routine, rolling turbulence in modern society. A sig­nificant change in any given strategic action field is like a stone thrown in a still pond sending ripples outward to all proximate fields. This does not mean that all or even most of the ripples will destabilize other fields. Like stones, changes come in all sizes. Only the most dramatic are apt to send ripples of sufficient intensity to pose a real threat to the stability of proximate fields.

While these continuous moments of turbulence will offer challengers oppor­tunities to better their positions and even change the rules of the game, in already existing fields, most incumbents are generally well positioned and fortified to withstand these pressures. For starters, they typically enjoy significant resource advantages over field challengers. They also may not face a challenge even in the face of a significant destabilizing shock because of the perception by challengers that incumbents are secure in their power. Finally, incumbents can generally count on the support of loyal allies within governance units both internal to the field and embedded in proximate state and nonstate fields. Possessed of these material, cultural, and political resources, incumbents are positioned to survive.

Sometimes, however, these advantages may not be enough to forestall an “episode of contention.” In rare instances, the sheer magnitude of the perturba­tion—for example, the recent subprime mortgage crisis to which we will devote considerable attention in chapter 5—may virtually impose crisis on many prox­imate fields, especially those that stand in a vertically dependent relationship to the strategic action field in question. More typically, however, the magnitude of the destabilizing change is not so great as to compel crisis. Exactly how much of a threat the change proves to be is determined by the highly contingent mobili­zation process depicted in figure 1.1. This process speaks to the capacity for social construction and strategic agency that is at the heart of our perspective.

The process—which will be familiar to many social movement scholars (McAdam 1999; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001)—consists of three linked mechanisms. The first is the collective attribution of threat/opportunity. The simple question is how are the destabilizing change processes interpreted by incumbents and challengers? Unless they are defined as posing a serious threat to, or opportunity for, the realization of collective interests, there is no possi­bility that any serious field crisis, or “episode of contention,” will develop.

opportunity Figure 1.1

The collective attribution of threat or/opportunity is not, however, enough in and of itself to ensure the onset of contention. For that to take place, two other things must happen. First, those perceiving the threat/opportunity must command the organizational resources (e.g., social appropriation) needed to mobilize and sus­tain action. Second, the hallmark of a true episode of contention is heightened interaction involving the use of innovative and previously prohibited forms of collective action (e.g., innovative action). Should challengers, in the face of a shared sense of threat or opportunity, continue to hew to “proper channels” and established rules for pressing their claims, no crisis or sustained episode of con­tention is likely to develop.

An example may serve to make this more concrete. Rosa Parks’s arrest in December 1955 for not giving up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus hardly ordained the crisis that ensued. After all, countless blacks had been arrested for similar offenses in the past. But this time, perhaps because Parks was well connected to the city’s civil rights establishment, the arrest was quickly defined as an opportunity to protest the injustices of the bus system (e.g., attri­bution of opportunity). But it was the next two steps in the process that trans­formed the arrest into the highly consequential episode of contention it became. By convincing the majority of black ministers in Montgomery to take to their pulpits on Sunday, December 4 to urge congregants to protest the arrest of Ms. Parks, civil rights leaders effectively “appropriated” the central institution of the black community—and for many the key source of meaning and identity in their lives—in the service of the incipient movement. Still, had the leaders sought to “protest” the arrest through traditional channels, there would have been no crisis. It was the decision to engage in innovative action by launching the one-day symbolic boycott of the buses that effectively triggered the episode of contention.

6.  Episodes of Contention—An episode of contention “can be defined as a pe­riod of emergent, sustained contentious interaction between . . . [field] actors utilizing new and innovative forms of action vis-a-vis one another” (McAdam 2007: 253). Besides innovative action, contentious episodes contain a shared sense of uncertainty/crisis regarding the rules and power relations governing the field. In the case of fields already characterized by well-established incumbents and challengers, the mobilization of both groups can take on extraordinary in­tensity. An episode can be expected to last as long as the shared sense of uncer­tainty regarding the structure and dominant order of the field persists. Indeed, it is the pervading sense of uncertainty that reinforces the perceptions of threat and opportunity that more or less oblige all parties to the conflict to continue to struggle. In his book on the 1966-1968 Red Guard Movement in Beijing, Walder (2009a) offers an extraordinary description of just such an episode. He convincingly argues that it was not prior or even emergent interests that motivated the conflict so much as the generalized sense of chaos and uncertainty that obliged all parties to engage in round after round of reactive struggle.

In this sense, contention—at least for a period of time—can often feed on itself. Along with the generalized sense of uncertainty, perceived threats and opportunities generally change the consciousness of field actors by exposing rules that had been taken for granted, calling into question the perceived bene­fits of those rules, and undermining the calculations on which field relations had been based (McAdam and Scott 2005: 18-19). As the commitment to the on­going structure of the strategic action field collapses, new actors can be expected to join the fray. In response to an emerging crisis, incumbents are apt—at least initially—to appeal to the status quo in an effort to try to stabilize the situation. For their part, challengers are likely to be the first to engage in innovative action, sensing an opportunity to advance their position in the field through novel means. Wholly new groups are also likely to emerge during the crisis.

One form of action that is ubiquitous during episodes of contention is framing (Benford and Snow 2000; Goffman 1974; Snow et al. 1986). All manner of combatants—sometimes including actors from outside the field—can be expected to propose and seek to mobilize consensus around a particular concep­tion of the field (Fligstein 1996; Snow and Benford 1988). Incumbents may well persist in trying to reconstitute the old order, often with the help of internal gov­ernance units and allies in proximate state fields. Indeed, the imposition of a settlement by state actors is a common, if not always stable, method for resolving an episode of contention. Very often the advantages—material, cultural, political—enjoyed by incumbents may be enough to overcome crisis and restore order. In rare instances, however, oppositional logics may carry the day as chal­lengers successfully sustain mobilization and slowly begin to institutionalize new practices and rules (DiMaggio 1991; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). Consistent with the distinctive “microfoundation” alluded to above, it is worth noting that the desire to resolve a field crisis often reflects “existential” motives as much as narrow instrumental ones. That is, all manner of field actors—even those who stand to benefit from severe and prolonged crisis—have a stake in restoring the shared sense of order and existential integrity on which social life ultimately rests. The important empirical implication here is that in researching an episode of contention and especially its resulting settlement, researchers should attend as closely to “existential” motives as narrow instrumental ones (e.g., to issues of meaning, identity, burnout, and general stress).

7.    Settlement—Through either sustained oppositional mobilization or the reassertion of the status quo by incumbents and/or their state allies, the field begins to gravitate toward a new—or refurbished—institutional settlement regarding field rules and cultural norms. We can say that a field is no longer in crisis when a generalized sense of order and certainty returns and there is once again consensus about the relative positions of incumbents and challengers (McAdam and Scott 2005: 18-19; Schneiberg and Soule 2005: 152-53).

We have already noted the role of state actors in restoring field order, but other external parties may be involved as well. In general, if proximate fields are the source of the destabilizing shocks that set contentious episodes in motion, they often provide the models for the settlements that bring these crises to a close. When field rules are uncertain, actors tend to be more receptive to new perspectives and to engage in search processes to identify alternatives. Proxi­mate fields are a readily available and generally trusted source for new ideas and practices. So social movements experience “spillover” (Meyer and Whittier 1994) or “spin-off” movements (McAdam 1995); organizations appropriate the “legitimate” forms used in other fields (Clemens 1993, 1996; DiMaggio and Powell 1983: 151-52; Meyer and Rowan 1977); and judges justify new legal interpretations by analogy (Epstein 1987).

Other Perspectives

In developing the perspective on offer here we have borrowed elements from many existing theoretical points of view. We think it is useful to acknowledge our debts and common themes but also to highlight areas where we think we have added new insights or have some disagreements or critique. Our goal here is not to denigrate other perspectives but to suggest what we have to add to the rich thinking already out there. We do not view what we have done as just a synthesis of what already exists but instead a reconceptualization that draws on some ele­ments extant in other theories but adds significantly to them as well. Our per­spective solves a number of puzzles in the way that scholars have studied sociological forms of collective action, and it is that novelty that we wish to high­light. One way to do that is to distinguish our view from others by pointing out not only our debts to other perspectives but also where our concepts push forward the field theory project.

At several points we have alluded to what we see as significant differences between our theory and other alternative perspectives. But we have not done so in any detailed or systematic way. In this section we review some of the alterna­tive perspectives that are most relevant to a field conception of social life, taking pains to acknowledge how closely some of our ideas align with those of other major theories/theorists. We then go on to suggest what may be missing from each of these perspectives and how our approach might redress those holes. In general, while all of the perspectives reviewed below imply elements of the field approach, none of them, in our view, constitute a general theory of social order that can account for such disparate phenomena as the alternative we propose here. We briefly consider the approaches proposed by Bourdieu, Giddens, insti­tutional theory, network analysis, and social movement theory and suggest how our more general approach draws on each while extending them.

Bourdieu

Obviously, there is substantial affinity between Bourdieu’s scheme and the one proposed here. Bourdieu is as responsible for the idea of situating action in fields as any scholar. His theoretical apparatus is one of the most developed (although it is not the only one^[2]). We view our theorizing as developing both the theory of fields and the idea of action in order to explain more phenomena more explicitly. As such, we are not hypercritical of his approach but believe that he would take much of our argument as a useful way to expand the scope and power of field theory.

One of the places where our theory advances the theory of fields and action is our more systematic focus on collective actors. Bourdieu’s three main concepts are habitus, capital, and fields. Almost all of Bourdieu’s discussion of these phenomena is pitched at the level of individual actors who find themselves in fields (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). He has few accounts of how collective actors work or how cooperation and competition between collective actors actually structures fields (for an exception, see Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art [1996]). In general, he has little to say about the architecture of fields beyond the general view that they contain positions that are structured by the relative power of actors. He also does not have much to say about the relation­ships between fields.

There are complex reasons this is so. In many ways, Bourdieu’s theoretical starting points in classical social theory offered few clues about creating some­thing like field theory, and this meant that he was breaking new and novel ground in the construction of his theory of capital, habitus, and field. He did so by creating a relatively simple but flexible set of ideas that offer a powerful orga­nizing lens for research (see Sallaz and Zavisca 2007 for a review of how these ideas have been used in American sociology). His main theoretical contribution was proposing the concept of field and combining it with a theory of action. One of the problems he was trying to solve was a deep one for social theory and one that is close to the core of this project: the problem of agents and structures. His goal was to overcome the usual opposition between agents and structures and to demonstrate that both mattered if we are to understand what actors do. He was not only one of the first to articulate these theoretical ideas but also among the first to deploy them in the empirical analysis of particular cases. Those cases, not surprisingly, were focused on how individuals acted in fields.

For us, the challenge is to extend these arguments and clarify the theoretical lenses we can use to analyze these sorts of phenomena in a deeper way. Our perspective widens the object of study and draws into it insights from other lit­eratures. Bourdieu’s focus on individuals acting in fields means that his theory is generally less about the problem of collective action (again there are some excep­tions in his work, such as The State Nobility [1998]). Instead, his actors have a position in a field, they come to that field holding some form of capital, and they have their habitus, which gives them a cognitive framework with which to inter­pret the action of others in the field. This focus on individuals is very useful. But it does tend to obscure the all-important collective dynamics of fields. Our focus is on how people cooperate, how groups get things done, and how we are to understand the interaction that goes on between groups. This, needless to say, is our key point of departure.

Actors in Bourdieu’s theory are generally only responsible to themselves and motivated by a desire to advance their interests within the constraints of the sit­uations in which they find themselves. But fields also turn more centrally on coordinated action, which requires actors not to simply focus on their position in a field but to seek cooperation with others by taking the role of the other and framing lines of action that appeal to others in the field. We view these collective dynamics as complementary to the generally individual action that is Bourdieu’s central concern.

One advantage of our approach is that it views both competition and cooper­ation as fundamental to field analysis. Thus, collective action, which depends on cooperation, will rely on actors being able to convince others that their view of the problems of the field and the identity they provide for others in solving those problems work for everyone. This kind of action is common in the social move­ments literature and the organizations literature because scholars in both of these fields are centrally concerned with the demands and dynamics of coordi­nated action. This is one of the main differences between the Bourdieusian per­spective and the view of most scholars of fields in American sociology.

Another difference between Bourdieu’s theory and the one developed here is our focus on the emergence or transformation of social spaces by collective actors. Most of Bourdieu’s work was oriented toward establishing that fields exist, that they shaped the behavior of actors in profound ways, and that actors took what such systems gave. But his work was less concerned with the emer­gence of new fields and the transformation of existing ones (again with a few exceptions such as The Rules of Art [1996]). His one insight on the matter was that when the conventional wisdom (what he called “doxa”) was called into question, there emerged at least the possibility of field transformation or disso­lution (Bourdieu 1977). But he had little or nothing to say about how this happened and how collective actors produced new identities and frames to form new fields or transform existing ones. We think that Bourdieu would broadly agree with this aspect of our theory. Our approach, which explicitly relies on social movement theory to understand the emergence of a field and its transfor­mation, fills an important gap in field theory.

Finally, while Bourdieu was very aware of the fact that fields were connected to one another, he rarely theorized the linkages between fields and the dynamics that could result from the interactions between fields (although The State Nobility [1998] certainly provides one of the few extant empirical cases of the interde­pendence of fields). For us, these linkages are fundamental to an understanding of stability and change in existing fields. As such, these mechanisms need to be explicitly explored and theorized. Indeed, this will be the sole focus of chapter 4 in this volume.

Giddens

Anthony Giddens’s work shares many of the same assumptions about how social life works as the perspective outlined here. Giddens’s theory of structura­tion (1979, 1984) is very much concerned with the reflexivity of actors, even in the most mundane reproduction of a system. Giddens also appreciates the role that preexisting structures and systems of power play in the reproduction of social life. For Giddens, social structures are rules and resources. Rules are patterns people may follow in social life. Giddens defines two types of resources. Authoritative resources control persons, whereas allocative resources control material objects.

The theory employs a recursive notion of actions constrained and enabled by structures that are produced and reproduced by those actions. Agents’ knowledge of their society informs their action, which reproduce social struc­tures, which in turn enforce and maintain the dynamics of action. Giddens defines “ontological security” as the trust people have in social structure; every­day actions have some degree of predictability, thus ensuring social stability. Social change occurs when the trust that people have has broken down. The agency of actors allows them to break away from normative actions, and depending on the sum of social factors at work, they may instigate shifts in the social structure. The dynamic between agency and structure makes such gener­ative action possible. Thus, agency can lead to both the reproduction and the transformation of society.

This phenomenological view of the duality of agency and structure shares many common themes with Bourdieu’s and the position we have elucidated.

Actors work to produce and reproduce their positions in social structures. They use rules (i.e., the rules of the field), resources (i.e., forms of capital), and their understanding of the field to make moves. Giddens also suggests that when structures appear to be broken down, actors can reimagine their worlds and bring about social change.

While we find this view to be attractive, we also think that it is a little vague. Giddens lacks several critical elements. First, he does not have a theory of col­lective action. Actors are instead located in nameless social structures where they are imposed upon to act. The motives of actors, their actual relationships to each other, and the desire to engage in collective action never appear in Giddens’s view.

Second, Giddens lacks a conception of the arena of social action, that is, the concept of strategic action field. Instead, he has a much more general (and we would argue vaguer) idea about social structure. His use of rules and resources as structure makes it difficult to imagine how such structures are circumscribed. So, for example, in the theory of fields, there is always something at stake in the field. What distinguishes a particular field is that something is at stake and that the actors in the field are striving to control it. The theory of strategic action fields causes us to be able to ascertain who are members of a field, what their positions are, and what their moves might be. It also gives us insight into the fact that action is social and oriented toward others. Whether the goal of action is cooperation or competition, in a specific strategic action field, we can get closer to explaining the critical dynamics.

The lack of a theory of strategic action fields means that Giddens is also not good at understanding the common dynamics of individual and collective action that occur in fields. The theory of strategic action fields provides a way to under­stand if a mesolevel social structure is emerging, stable, or in the process of trans­formation. Without such a theory, it is hard to make sense of what actors are doing, as both individuals and collectivities. Our theory of strategic action fields specifies which state a field is in and therefore gives us leverage on the types of dynamics that are possible. In an emerging strategic action field, the problem of what the field is about, what exactly constitutes a resource, and the struggle over creating the rules all come front and center. The problem of gaining collective action, producing identities, and forging a field is what is up for grabs. Similarly, our perspective pro­vides sources of social change in such fields. First, the connections between fields cause disruption in existing fields or new opportunities for field organization. Our view that reproduction in a field is not a rote process but instead the outcome of a round of interaction that does not necessarily only have to exactly reproduce a given order gives us a way to understand the piecemeal changes that can occur in particular fields. The theory of strategic action fields gives much more analytic leverage on how organized social life gets created and changes.

Institutional Theory

We owe a serious debt to institutional theorists in political science and especially sociology. Institutional theory in organizational studies (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Scott and Meyer 1983) is pitched at the same mesolevel as is our approach. Scott and Meyer (1983) use the term “sector” to describe fields as containing all of the organizations that one can imagine that might affect a particular organization. DiMaggio and Powell begin with the Meyer and Scott definition of a field containing all relevant actors. They identify three kinds of forces driving organizations in fields toward similar outcomes, what they call mimetic, coercive, and normative isomorphism. Their basic argument is that actors in organizations face uncertain worlds. In order to reduce this uncertainty, actors will be swayed by different kinds of forces. They may follow what they con­sider successful organizations. They may also follow the advice of professionals or experts on what they should do. Finally, they might be coerced by either other organizations or the government to conform to expectations. This has produced a powerful research agenda that has studied how new institutions spread in existing fields. We borrow much from this perspective: a concern with fields and the mutual constitution of fields by actors who come to take one another into account in their actions and who operate to give one another a sense of what to do and why to do it.

While acknowledging a serious debt to the institutional framework, we none­theless see two problems with the perspective. First, institutional theory is really a theory of how conformity occurs in already existing fields. It lacks an under­lying theory of how fields emerge or are transformed. The theory, by its very nature, is antithetical to the notion of agency. Actors follow rules, either con­sciously by imitation or coercion or unconsciously by tacit agreement (DiMaggio 1988; Jepperson 1991). DiMaggio’s article (1988) is frequently cited as inspira­tion for the idea of institutional entrepreneurs. But its main argument is that in­stitutional theory lacks a theory of agency, power, and conflict. The reason DiMaggio posits the idea of an institutional entrepreneur is that he is trying to make sense of what happens when a field comes into existence or is transformed. Here he suggests that this can only happen when someone comes along and figures out how to do something new and is able to convince others to go along with them. But even as useful as the concept of institutional entrepreneur is, it hardly constitutes a systematic theory of field stability and change. Without em­bedding strategic action fields in broader field environments, DiMaggio has no deeper structural account of the kinds of ruptures that typically catalyze entre­preneurial action. In the end we are left with a thinly veiled “great man” theory of agency. In short, for institutional theory in its Meyer-Rowan and DiMaggio- Powell variants to work it needs a theory of change like the one proposed here to complement its emphasis on stability and reproduction.

The leads to the second problem, which is that the institutionalist view greatly underestimates the role of power in the structuring of fields, even those that are stable. Indeed, in both the Meyer and Scott and DiMaggio and Powell versions of a field, actors do not have interests, resources, or positions that determine what they can get. They are not jockeying with one another in a game in which they are playing to maintain or improve their position but instead following scripts that tell them what to do. This problem means that not only does institu­tional theory lack a theory of emergence or transformation (that is consistent with its basic terms), but also it cannot even account for the piecemeal changes that we expect in the constant playing of the game as conditions change within a field or between fields.

Network Analysis

The idea of using network analysis as a way to model fields dates back to DiMag­gio and Powell (1983). There has been a lot of interesting research into how networks function to shape the relations between, and fate of, the actors em­bedded in them. So, networks, we are told, can serve as a source of information (Davis, Diekmann, and Tinsley 1994), resource dependence (Burt 1980), trust (Uzzi 1996), or collusion (Baker and Faulkner 1993). In one of the most ambi­tious attempts to capture how networks and alliances help structure an entire field, Powell et al. (2005) argue that firms in the biotechnology industry appear to use networks to do all of the above.

For all of its virtues, however, network analysis is not a theory of fields. It is principally a methodological technique for modeling various aspects of the rela­tionships between actors within a field. And while it can be a powerful tool to help map fields and especially to monitor changes in the composition of strate­gic action fields, it is mute on the dynamics that shape fields. There are, to be sure, network researchers who have sought to theorize the role that social ties, or other properties of networks, play in shaping social dynamics (Burt 1992; Gould 1993; Granovetter 1973), but no one, to our knowledge, has fashioned anything close to a network-based theory of fields.

So, for example, we remain very much in the same situation that social move­ment theorists find themselves in with respect to network analysis. While net­work analysis has been a staple of social movement scholarship, theory has not kept pace with empirical research. So while the field has amassed an impressive body of studies showing significant network effects, especially regarding move­ment recruitment, there is still no theoretical agreement on what it is about net­works that explains the effect. Or as Passy put it succinctly a few years back, “We are now aware that social ties are important for collective action, but we still need to theorize the actual role of networks” (2003: 22).

Network analysis has the potential to be a powerful aid to the study of strate­gic action fields but only when informed by some broader theory of field dynamics. A structural mapping of field relations, however sophisticated, will never substitute for a deeper analysis into the shared (or contested) understand­ings that inform and necessarily shape strategic action within a strategic action field. In short, the analyst always has to provide the theoretical underpinning for what is important about the relationships (i.e., networks) being studied for any given outcome. If a field is really an arena in which individuals, groups, or orga­nizations face off to capture some gain as our view suggests, then the underlying logic of fields is not encoded in the structure of the network but in the cultural conceptions of power, privilege, resources, rules, and so on that shape action within the strategic action field.

We close this section with a simple example designed to illustrate the difference between formal network analysis and the perspective on offer here. Network ana­lysts have gotten extraordinarily good at empirically mapping overtime changes in network structure. The tendency is to interpret these changes in the relationships between actors in a network as substantively important changes in the field. If any set of relationships either disappears or emerges, then it is interpreted as a direct measure of an important change in the field. However, without understanding the ways in which these shifts are viewed by challengers and incumbents in the field, the analyst is powerless to tell us anything about their significance. So, for example, a shift in the relationship between actors might signify the improving fortunes of one actor in the field but nothing of significance concerning the field as a whole. Alternatively, the ascendance of a single actor might, under other circumstances, portend a dramatic restructuring of the entire strategic action field. The problem is that the technique of network analysis that only describes the change in that one actor’s position cannot tell us which of these two outcomes is taking place. Only by wedding the structural sophistication of network analysis with attention to the meaning of the shifts for all relevant actors in the field can we tell if a change in the network structure has implications for the field as a whole.

Social Movement Theory

The final perspective we take up is social movement theory.^[3] Looking at the key elements of the perspective sketched here, it should be clear that we have drawn heavily on social movement scholarship in fashioning our theory. A host of our key concepts—framing, political opportunity, rupture and settlement, episodes of contention, incumbents and challengers—have been borrowed directly from social movement theory. On the other hand, the framework proposed here is much broader in its application than social movement theory and different from the latter in a number of crucial respects. For starters, unlike the various organi­zational perspectives sketched above, social movement theory has never been oriented to the concept of “field.” Second, as the name suggests, the study of social movements has become increasingly narrow and “movementcentric” in its focus (McAdam and Boudet 2012; Walder 2009b), while the theory proposed here emphasizes the critical interplay, not only of the actors within a field but also between the field and the broader field environment in which it is embedded. Finally, if institutionalists have been better at explaining stability and reproduction, social movement scholars have understandably sought to explain the dynamics of emergent conflict and change. Accordingly, social movement theory has very little to tell us about the processes that make for stability and order in strategic action fields. By contrast, the perspective sketched here aims to account for field emergence, stability, and transformation.

Each of the perspectives reviewed above captures an important aspect of the way in which strategic action fields work. The fact that scholars across these fields have found common grounds and borrowed from one another’s theories implies that they resonate with other point of views. But all of these alternative perspectives fail to recognize their deeper theoretical affinity. The theory of stra­tegic action fields is a far more general perspective that allows us to understand how new mesolevel social orders are produced, sustained, and come unraveled. Our brief consideration of these perspectives illustrates how, by ignoring this deeper level of convergence, each perspective offers an incomplete picture of how organized social life works.

Conclusion

A recurring theme in sociology is the existence of powerful social institutions or structures that are extremely resistant to change. “Greedy” institutions, class structures, states, corporations—all are viewed as enduring structures that defy change, even in the most turbulent situations. Capitalists always win, states always beat nonstates, and social movements are generally doomed to failure. Our view is that this perspective is at best partial, at worst, highly misleading. Strategic action fields represent recurring games. Even in stable fields, the game is being played continuously and the skill of challengers and/or destabilizing changes in proximate fields might render incumbents vulnerable and prevent reproduction of the field. At the very least, the rules, composition, and structure of the field will be in play constantly. Reproduction of the field may be the norm, but it is always accompanied by routine jockeying for position and incremental changes. As new actors appear and old ones disappear, rules get modified and incumbent/challenger relations are renegotiated. These kinds of piecemeal adjustments are the rule in virtually all fields, even the most stable.

This kind of incremental change is distinguished from those rarer, but still frequent, field foundings or transformations. Here, the order itself is altered. New fields suddenly emerge or old ones are transformed or perhaps even col­lapse and disappear entirely. These dynamics are different. Incumbents are struggling while challengers are emerging or rising up. It is at these moments that new identities and shared meanings define emergent interests to produce new and innovative social forms. But either way, collective strategic actors have to organize their groups, motivate their participants, and organize action vis-a-vis other groups. In settled times, the structural positions of actors may well deter­mine their fate. If rules, resources, and political alliances favor incumbents, skilled strategic actors in challenging groups will do all they can to survive or improve their position. Backed by internal governance units and allies in proxi­mate state fields, skilled strategic actors in incumbent groups will use the exist­ing rules and resources to reproduce their advantage. But when resources or rules are up for grabs and when the existing order does not hold, skilled strategic actors fight hard to produce alternative orders.

The rest of our book lays out this theory in some detail. In chapter 2 we artic­ulate the microfoundation for our theory—nothing less than a foundational per­spective on how the nature and fundamental communicative/interactive capacities of modern humans inform our theory. In chapter 3 we move from the micro to the macro. As we noted above, all of the other approaches to the study of fields are, in our view, fieldcentric. That is, they attend exclusively to the internal dy­namics of strategic action fields. We are concerned with this as well, but we are convinced that to truly understand a field and its dynamics, we must begin by systematically situating it in the complex network of “external” fields—state and nonstate—to which it is tied. Indeed, for us, the distinction between internal and external is largely illusory. Or more precisely, it is the complex interplay between the internal and the external that shapes the possibilities for field emer­gence, stability, and transformation. Then, in chapter 4 we link these macrody­namics to the prospects for change and stability in fields.

Chapter 5 applies the framework in two detailed case studies. Our goal is to use the framework to understand phenomena that at first glance seem to have little to do with each other. We illustrate many of our principles by reconceptual- izing the twentieth-century civil rights revolution in the United States as a story of rupture in the national field of racial politics, triggered by destabilizing changes in three proximate fields. We contrast that case study with an account of the emergence of the market for mortgages in the United States since the 1960s and the eventual rise and fall of that market in the 1990s and 2000s. We hope the analytic utility of thinking of these cases in field terms will be clear from the extended narratives offered in chapter 5. In chapter 6, we address the methodo­logical implications of our theory, offering something of a practical blueprint for anyone who would adopt the perspective as a basis for studying a given strategic action field. We bring the book to a close in chapter 7 by highlighting what we see as the central insights and implications of the theory on offer here.

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^[1]  Gamson’s actual distinction was between challengers and members, but “incumbents” has come to be the preferred alternative term.

^[2]  Martin (2009) examines the history of the idea of fields and argues that there are varieties of field theory in sociology that draw on different takes on the problem. Fligstein (2009) shows how much of new institutionalism in sociology, political science, and economics can be read as being about the problem of constructing mesolevel social orders, that is, fields.

^[3]  In fact, a number of different theories of social movements have been proposed over the years (e.g., collective behavior theory, new social movement theory). Here the term “social movement the­ory” refers to the synthesis of resource mobilization, political process, and framing theory that has come to dominate the field over the past two decades.