MESODOMAIN ANALYSIS AND CONSIDERATIONS OF A HEALTHY SOCIETY

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, Peter Hall has given us an interactionist-based theory of social organization that is both complexly argued and complexly structured. He has taken up a variety of what I would call root images of social organization – images signified by sensitizing concepts such as negotiation, mesostructure, loose-coupling, emergence, and asymmetry – and he has incorporated those images into large scale empirical research endeavors to craft a theory, that throughout its development, has foreshadowed developments in general sociology. Hall’s scholarship is significant not only on its own terms but also because of its potential impact on social science in general. Indeed, as we witness sociology and other social sciences in the last decade focusing more on questions of agency, structure as process, the significance of situations, and the centrality of communication, we find justification in asserting that sociology may well be catching up to interactionism and its grounding in pragmatism (see Maines, 2001, pp. 28, 99 for a discussion of how Hall has anticipated some of these trends).

Citation

Maines, D.R. (2003), "MESODOMAIN ANALYSIS AND CONSIDERATIONS OF A HEALTHY SOCIETY", Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 23-30. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(02)26004-4