In the chapters collected here, distinguished representatives of major research traditions in sociological social psychology highlight its bearing on understanding social order – that is, in general, predictability, regularity, and stability in social relations. Some focus more specifically on coordination problems in which mutual rewards result when two or more participants select compatible actions, others on cooperation in partial conflict/collective action situations in which self-interested actions are at cross-purposes with group-oriented ones. All examine processes – omnipresent though often informal and taken-for-granted – that undergird social organization, noticed more in their absence than presence. Most facilitate mutual adjustment, the most basic and ubiquitous approach to aligning the activities of multiple and possibly heterogeneous actors (Mintzberg 1992).

It was a compliment to be invited to identify commonalities and contrasts in these essays. I do so from the standpoint of a sociologist with most experience in studying networks and organizations; I specialize in neither social psychology nor the problem of social order. The arguments set out in this book do offer insights into network and organizational phenomena, and my remarks allude to some of those connections. In what follows, I first depict the intellectual setting for these statements on sources of micro-order. Next I consider microfoundations for the work, emphasizing the affective capacities that many (although not all) authors stress. Following that is a survey of the major ordering mechanisms and the meso- and macro-level features that shape them, and then the corresponding sources of disorder and fragility. After a brief discussion of scaling up from the micro-level, I conclude with conjectures about the bearing of this primarily theoretical work on organizational practice.

THE SHARED INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND

I began by examining the common intellectual roots of the chapters, as reflected by similarities and differences in their citations. Figure 16.1 depicts a chapter-to-first author citation network for this book; only authors cited by more than one chapter appear in the display. The diagram locates chapters near the authors they cite, and vice versa.

Consider first the chapters, labeled in UPPERCASE and identified by first author. The horizontal dimension distinguishes between chapters that stress ordering mechanisms involving emotions (at the left) and those that reflect a greater influence of social exchange and rational choice-oriented theories (toward the right). Lawler, Thye, and Yoon's chapter, near the middle, involves both types of mechanisms.