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A synthesis of the various strands of macro-sociology that is commensurate with a more robust theory of evolutionary institutionalism.

Drawing from what may be conceived of as classical institutionalism and from neo-evolutionary sociology and other related traditions, this chapter endeavors to provide a general theory of evolutionary institutionalism as an overview of institutions and institutional autonomy (along with the underlying forces driving the process of autonomy), to present a theory of institutional evolution that delineates the relevant units of selection and evolution, the types of mechanisms that facilitate institutional evolution, and a typology of the sources of variation.

The chapter constitutes the attempt to provide a theoretical framework intended to engender an improved historical-comparative institutionalism inspired by the works of Max Weber and Herbert Spencer.

The purpose of the theoretical framework presented should not be misconstrued as a general, “grand” theory for the discipline of the sociology as a whole, but rather understood as the model of a common vocabulary for sociologists interested in macro-sociology, institutions, and socio-cultural evolution designed to complement other available models.

As a synthesis, the originality of the theoretical framework presented lies in (1) elucidation of the idea that institutional autonomy as the “master” process of institutional evolution, (2) more precise delineation of the link between meso-level institutional entrepreneurs and institutional evolution, and (3) combination of a body of complementary – yet often loosely linked – bodies of scholarship.

Habituation is one of natural selection's tools to limit the activating role of positive emotions. It is a barrier to expanding needs. The structural requirements for getting around this barrier are similar to the characteristics of a system of expanded inequality. Such inequality was the most likely social structure to first break this barrier. Only much later in human history could mass production technology offer an alternative means to bend habituation rules.

In this paper, I sum up more than 20 years of research and reflection on jealousy. A chronological account of this work is followed by a thematic summary of the findings and some discussion of the relationship between sociology and psychology. Sociological analysis shows that jealousy and other emotions are shaped by social situations, social processes, and social forces. Micro‐sociology reveals that jealousy is learned. Jealousy reflects the life experience of the individual. Meso‐sociology reveals that jealousy is socially useful, indeed, indispensable to social order. Jealousy reflects the institution of marriage and the prohibition of adultery. Macro‐sociology reveals that jealousy is shaped by society and culture. Jealousy reflects the history and the values of a people—and the relevant values vary from time to time and place to place. In the United States, for example, a new and more negative view of jealousy emerged after about 1970 as a result of the sexual revolution and the women's movement.

This chapter reviews 30 years of Advances in Group Processes. Its primary purpose is to study the part the series has played in the advances in the study of group processes that have taken place between 1984 and 2014.

This chapter places the 30 years of Advances in Group Processes in the context of the changes that took place between small groups research in the 1950s and group processes research in the 1980s and beyond.

Analyzing the policies of Advances in Group Processes and its contents, this chapter reflects on its role in the advances in group processes that have taken place since the 1980s. Between 1950 and 1980, small group research reinvented, reconceptualized, and reinvigorated itself as group process research. Between the two periods, small group research, its applied research, and its research programs became increasingly theory-driven and its concept of the group and its levels increasingly analytic. As a consequence of these changes, the concept of the field itself became increasingly analytic. The changes between the two periods in its theory, research, application, programs, and in its concept of the group and the way the field was conceptualized led to marked advances in group process research in the 90s and beyond – to more theory, more impact of it on application, and more, and more cumulative, growth of it. Advances in Group Processes was at once a reflection of the changes that took place between the two periods and a driving force in the advances in group processes research that have taken place ever since.

Advances in Group Processes is a fundamental resource for the development of theory and research on small groups and group processes. This chapter provides an overview of its contributions and places them in the context of the development of the field as a whole.

Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and tectonic shifts in institutional configurations. However, there is a twist: taking these themes seriously ultimately challenges any naïve division of micro and macro, and undermines the claim of either to a genuinely foundational role in social analysis. The authors propose an alternative “optometric” imagery – positioning the micro and the macro as arrays of associated lenses, which bring certain things into focus at the cost of others. The authors argue that this imagery should not only encourage analytic reflexivity (“a more optometric institutionalism”) but also draw attention to the use of such lenses in everyday life, as an underexplored but critical phenomenon for institutional theory and research (“an institutionalist optometry”).

This article takes its point of departure from the intellectual milieu in the mid-1980s that gave rise to Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s book, On Justification: Economies of Worth. It shows how exposure to ideas and concepts in that book came to take varied forms as they were elaborated and modified in the work of an American sociologist across several decades of research in diverse empirical settings.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a more basic macro‐sociological approach to a discussion on the archaic marketing practices of the Russian firm as examined in the empirical research of Wagner.

To show fundamental conditions for relationship marketing being implemented in Russia, the paper applies assumptions of sociology of knowledge, systems theory, world society theory, organisation theory, network theory, and economic sociology.

The paper argues that the global diffusion of relationship marketing first observed on mature Western markets, to a transitional economy such as Russia will depend on global interrelation by technology, formal organisation, epistemic community, network, and event within the four relevant function systems: science, education, mass media, and economy which primarily determine the knowledge capacities of the Russian firm.

In this paper, relationship marketing is reduced to knowledge. Further, the paper pinpoints social structures that lead to global knowledge diffusion. Since the Contemporary Marketing Practices, University of Auckland, NZ approach is concrete rather than abstract, the paper contributes to analytical considerations of a paradigm shift from transactional to relational marketing in present transition economies.