Abstract
A person dropped into downtown Manhattan in the middle of the day for the first time would face an unpredictable, disorderly world: fast-walking people dodging around each other on sidewalks, pedestrians and cars contesting for street access at every corner, trucks double parking and blocking access to and from sidewalks, rampant jaywalking amidst this tumult, horns honking and cabbies shouting, sirens of fire engines and ambulances blaring, and the ever-present construction projects posing obstructions to most everybody. Yet, it would not take long for our visitor to sense a semblance of order—in the form of repeated, predictable behavior patterns. This patterned local world would emerge “on the edge of chaos,” with order and predictability eroding and re-emerging moment-to-moment and situation-to-situation. In time that local, immediate social order would reveal both resilience and dynamism. This is a fundamental message of sociological social psychology.
The regularity, repetition, and predictability of social lives are constitutive of social orders, macro and micro (see Collins 1981). Sociological social psychologists construe such patterns of regularity as social constructions that people create and sustain under conditions of uncertainty, instability, or tension. Without prospects of disorder, social order as such would be of little interest or perhaps even meaningless. Repetitive, predictable patterns of behavior are meaningful to people because of this contrast, real or hypothetical. Repetitive patterns that constitute order enable people with vastly different social backgrounds, conflicting cultural ideas or material interests, or a myriad of organizational affiliations to navigate close proximities, work around or take advantage of interdependencies, and generate joint goods of mutual value. To social psychologists, micro (local) orders are taken for granted, obdurate, pervasive, subtle, and often invisible. People do not see it or think about it unless it is disrupted or threatened. Disorder and conflict are more salient, discomfiting, and threatening than the repeated patterns of interaction constitutive of social order. In this sense, there is a fundamental asymmetry in the ontological status of social order and social disorder.
The pervasiveness and subtlety of social order at the micro level raises broader questions about the theoretical scope of the Hobbesian problem of social order, which is conceived today primarily in social-dilemma terms—as an inherent tension between individually-rational action and collective or group interests. A convergent claim of disparate theories of social psychology is that people have vast, almost unlimited, capacities to impose or find order in their social worlds and to resourcefully manage or resolve uncertainties. This implies that any Hobbesian “war of all against all” would be short-lived, because regularity and predictability are re-constructed rather quickly by individual actors, especially when “on the edge of chaos.” Even in the context of large scale disorder or conflict at the macro level, one tends to find stable orders emerging and being sustained at the local, micro levels.
An implication of much sociological social psychology is that micro-level, situational processes undergird social orders at the macro level. Consider a few examples. Expectation states theory (Berger) explains how social inequalities, reflecting the larger society, emerge and are sustained in social interactions at the micro level. This theory helps to explain how cultural beliefs and expectations about performance and competence bear on stable status structures in local, micro settings. Exchange network theories (Emerson) expand the concept of “the actor” to include collective actors (organizations), analyze social relations as nested within networks, and cast networks as representations of a macro entity. This theoretical tradition shows how interactions of self-interested actors in networks produce socially emergent results. Structural symbolic interaction (Stryker) examines how people define and enact identities, in particular role identities that represent a key unit in macro social structures. People modify structural roles in social interactions within those larger structures. Affect control theory (Heise) indicates further that roles and identities entail fundamental affective meanings (sentiments), and people strive to maintain and confirm these in their immediate, local interactions. Affective sentiments are integrally tied to cultural meanings and labels for roles. All of these theories have something to say about micro social orders and how these are interconnected with macro social orders. With the Hobbesian problem as backdrop, this essay examines several recent books that amplify and develop some of these connections.
Books Covered
One characteristic of sociological social psychology is the presence of ongoing programs of interrelated theory in which empirical studies and theorizing build step by step in incremental and often painstaking ways. These are termed “theoretical research programs” (Berger and Zelditch 1993). Another characteristic is that scholars tend to write articles rather than books, and when books are written they are a product of years of work. Most of the books here represent such programmatic lines of theory and research, initiated in the last third or so of the twentieth century. My aim was to choose high-quality complementary books and use them to analyze implications of sociological social psychology for the Hobbesian problem of order.
Each book sheds important light on the micro dynamics underlying macro social orders. Three books treat identities as the critical link between macro and micro domains. Peter Burke and Jan Stets (2009) point to identity-verification as the central stabilizing force in social structures. Neil MacKinnon and David Heise (2010) treat affective sentiments attached to roles or identities as a source of stability, revealing the institutional foundations of these sentiments. Steven Hitlin (2008) “brings morality back in” by conceiving of individual actors as “moral satisficers,” who have an identity-based conscience that constrains unbridled self-interest. Three books interconnect local interactions with cultural beliefs or meanings brought to interaction contexts. Cecilia Ridgeway (2011) broadens the reach of her status construction theory to explain how and when cultural beliefs and expectations for men and women are reproduced in local status orders and promote the persistence of gender inequalities at the macro level. Douglas Maynard (2003) shows how the sequencing of elements composing a conversation (statements, phrases, pauses, etc.) enacts a local, immediate order that enables people to jointly produce a mutually satisfactory interaction. The book by Gary Alan Fine (2011) posits that small group cultures in local settings anchor social orders and serve as the linchpin between macro phenomena and interaction-based individual meanings. Two books explicitly question the capacity of individual rationality and self-interest-based interactions to sustain social orders. Karen Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi (2005) argue that trust is not sufficient to generate and sustain social order (cooperation) in modern societies, pointing instead to institutional mechanisms. Edward Lawler, Shane Thye, and Jeongkoo Yoon (2009) theorize how and when repeated exchanges or interactions lead people to make social unit attributions of their individual emotional feelings and thereby form non-instrumental affective ties to relational units (groups, organizations, communities). Finally, Turner (2007) analyzes the central role of emotions in human evolution and social interaction, tying macro social order to micro processes that repress negative emotions and spread positive emotions from micro to meso to macro levels. The following sections offer a micro-sociological framing for the problem of order and then derive several micro mechanisms of order from the above books.
Micro-Sociological Framing
Social dilemmas are the standard way to frame the problem of social order today, and such conceptions resonate with the classic Hobbesian framing. The crux of the problem is self-interested or under-socialized individual actors, manifested in free-riding, ineffective norm enforcement, or failures of socialization (internalization). Virtually all variations on this theme presume that people, if left to their own devices, will go their own individual, self-interested, hedonistic, ill-informed ways. That this framing has limits is well-known and recognized. People cooperate more than expected in prisoners dilemma settings, share more than expected in ultimatum games, process information in imperfect or biased ways, and act pro-socially despite personal costs. The cumulative evidence of the limitations of self-interest assumptions raises serious questions about the theoretical and empirical adequacy of the historic unitary, monistic, rational-cognitive assumptions about the human species that have come to dominate the social sciences.
Recent evolutionary research may drive the final nail into the coffin of the standard, monistic, self-interested perspective on the human species. Recent work in evolutionary psychology and primatology traces presumably inherent social tendencies of the human species to the “fact” that humans have a special capacity among primates to form and sustain large communities that include non-kin. The main reasons are that humans have an enlarged neo-cortex that enhances their information-processing capacity, and a more developed limbic system that allows more precise reading and expression of emotional cues. These dual capacities—cognitive and emotional—enable human primates to collaborate and generate shared products that they could not generate alone or in kin-only groups, and to do so on a large scale. Whereas most evolutionary theories stress the cognitive capacities (neo-cortex) of human actors and reciprocal altruism, Jonathan Turner has built a persuasive argument for the central role of emotional capacities (limbic system). He is one of a small number of sociologists who has done sustained work in this area. In his 2007 book, Human Emotions: A Sociological Theory, Turner argues that people are unique in their capacity to feel a wide variety of complicated emotions, to generate distinct emotions (guilt and gratitude) from fundamental ones such as fear and happiness, and to suppress or control their emotions through repression and attribution. Without these complicated, finite, nuanced feelings, large non-kin based groups are not sustainable even if people have the cognitive capacities to conceive and imagine them. He musters substantial evolutionary evidence in support of this view.
The general implication of Turner’s work is that people are essentially wired with the capability to construct social orders that are larger than and include non-kin. Therefore, that people cooperate, consider each others’ interests, and work together is not as problematic as implied by social dilemma or Hobbesian framing. Most problematic are the structural forms and cultural content of those social orders, manifested in micro-level social interactions. At the macro level, the question then is about the cultural and social structural content that gives shape to and concretizes evolved human capabilities for constructing groups, organizations, and communities. At the micro level, the question is how the dual capacities of humans for both self-interest and altruism—which are evolutionarily selected and wired—play out as people interact repeatedly with each other, form groups, and resolve issues posed by the challenges of producing joint goods. In these terms, it makes little sense to try to build highly general theories on the assumption that humans are self-interested or asocial or, correspondingly, that they are altruistic or social, because humans are fundamentally both. The conditions under which these dual capacities are activated, as well as in what proportions and with what cultural or structural content, are decidedly social and situational. This is where theories of sociological social psychology can enter the modern-day Hobbesian playing field, enacting dualistic conceptions of the individual, and developing theories that articulate better with macro theories of order.
Micro-Sociological Mechanisms
The books included here suggest different entry points to this playing field, reflected in six micro-mechanisms for social order: (1) meanings are coordinated among individuals; (2) identities (self-definitions) are verified by reflected appraisals; (3) cultural beliefs and expectations are activated and made salient in local situations, reproducing macro structures locally; (4) trust relations are embedded in macro institutions; (5) people form affective ties to groups making those units expressive objects and ends in themselves; and (6) positive emotions spread from micro to meso to macro levels while negative emotions are moderated or repressed. These mechanisms are discussed in turn below.
Coordinating Meanings
In Bad News, Good News, Maynard argues that people create meaning, predictability, and stability on a “moment to moment” basis by how they sequence conversational acts. Using the delivery of news as the exemplar, “news” is not a matter of A communicating to B and B interpreting and responding, or A and B negotiating a shared view. News—good or bad—is coproduced by sequences of utterances, such as a preannouncement (“I have news” “did you hear the news”) or a preface to an announcement that prefigures it and an utterance (“Oh Dear”) acknowledging that bad news is forthcoming. Once news is delivered, there are sequences of acts confirming that the news is understood on some level by the recipient, but these conversational sequences are infused with ambiguity; fully correspondent or convergent meanings are unlikely and a residue of ambiguity remains. Conversational sequences entail shared or “enacted practices” rather than shared meanings (see Rawls 2004).
These conversational dynamics occur in a social-cultural context that makes available standard “resources” (strategies, conversational options) but that context is not subject to a distinct or independent analysis. The context is relevant or implicated only insofar as the actors use it in their statements or utterances—that is, insofar as it affects the sequencing of utterances and information. For example, a doctor/patient relationship is important to the degree that doctors and patients enact and use associated conversational resources or strategies to co-produce a jointly understood result; and these resources have a macro foundation. Overall, conversational analysis demonstrates at a molecular level how people navigate the grey areas of life and essentially exist on the edge of disorder.
Fine’s Tiny Publics aims to bring the next level, “the group,” back to a more central position in sociological theorizing. He locates the primary basis of order in group cultures that develop in ongoing interactions of people who have a shared history and an anticipated or projected future. Group cultures are significantly limited by obdurate realities and external macro forces that actors cannot control but that they negotiate responses to on an ongoing basis. Small groups undergird macro social orders because this is where people are exposed to and take account of community expectations (norms) and where interactions generate the shared meanings and collective identities that reflect and correspond with community expectations but also can depart from them. Here, cumulative products of interactions are more central than moment-to-moment dynamics. Group cultures are a trans-situational, order-generating force that engages the macro level realities beyond the control of individual actors.
Verifying Identities
For Burke and Stets, in Identity Theory, identity dynamics are central to understanding stability and instability in social interactions. Identities are consensual or shared self-meanings or definitions. Like conversational orders in Maynard, these self-meanings are a moment-to-moment construction built on an unstable foundation. Identities have a situational, fluid quality, in part because of the enormous amount of information people process about themselves as they interact with others. Identities also have a resilient, stable quality in the sense that people enter situations with “identity standards” or situational definitions of self, grounded in structural roles, cultural expectations, or group affiliations. Burke and Stets theorize that people continually compare and adjust their behaviors to align perceptions of self with identity standards, thereby affirming or verifying their identities. Most any work setting, for example, exposes an employee to streams of behaviors with implied meanings about self: employees continually compare the self they are exuding in that situation to relevant identity standards, which are generalized meanings for the employee. Inconsistencies between the identity standard and situational self meanings create internal tensions (discomfort) and motivate behaviors that change perceptions of self and others to be consistent with the identity standard.
Burke and Stets posit a cybernetic model in which “perceptual control” is central in order to capture both the moment-to-moment and enduring structural basis for identities. Change in identity standards can occur due to conflicts between the identity standards associated with the enactment of different roles (woman, man, spouse, parent, employee) or to changes in organizational structures or cultural expectations. But such change is slow and cross-situational. The identity verification mechanism is strongest for identities that are salient (activated in the situation), prominent (important to self beyond the situation), and embedded in a set of dense or close network ties (to which the actor is highly committed). Identity standards represent the linkage between identity-verification processes and macro structures.
MacKinnon and Heise, in Self, Identity, and Social Institutions, offer a complementary view of identity that elaborates the institutional basis for identities, emphasizing the affective dimensions of identity in affect control theory. Identity meanings are manifest in the mere names or linguistic labels that characterize roles, identities, and actions; this lexicon constitutes a society’s “cultural theory of people,” and serves to transmit cultural content to micro interactions. The words people use reflect the linkages of micro and macro levels. Given a voluminous language for describing people and their actions, people in most any situation enact and interweave multiple identities, choosing from a wider range of institutionally-relevant role meanings. Institutions in this sense are “semantic fields” that provide the language and plausible “identity sets” for people to choose among in concrete situations. Thus, a considerable degree of stability, order, and constraint is implied by the fact that languages for describing fathers, mothers, women, men, workers, and managers are deeply infused with cultural meanings and content.
In affect control theory, “fundamental sentiments” play the same role as do “identity standards” in Burke and Stets, but there is an important difference. Here people are comparing affective meanings about self in the situational interaction with institutionally-based identity sentiments about the identity or role; orders are sustained by efforts to maintain consistency, as in Burke and Stets, but to MacKinnon and Heise, identities are emotional objects—people “feel identities” as much as they perceive them. This book adds a higher level of self-meanings to identity theories by positing that unifying self-sentiments (feelings about self in general) subsume identity standards and identity sentiments. An authenticity motivation therefore underlies the identify verification processes.
Higher level self-meanings are personal identities, and these are the focus of Hitlin in Moral Selves, Evil Selves. His book develops a strong argument for the notion that selves have a moral core, representing a person’s “conscience.” Conscience is not a stable, unitary standard, but rather a malleable, fluid process in which authenticity is a central. People want to appear both competent and moral, but it is often not clear what being moral means in given situations. Thus, they tend to be “moral satisficers,” striving to be “minimally moral” or “good enough.” The moral core of a person (conscience) reduces ambiguity by (a) defining moral boundaries or, metaphorically, “bright lines” that cannot be crossed, and (b) specifying moral purposes or, metaphorically “bright lights” that draw people’s attention and serve to reshape or modify their individual goals. The inhibitions (moral boundaries) and directions (moral purposes) of the moral self mitigate or channel the unbridled pursuit of individual self-interest. Hitlin reviews and musters a wide array of theory and research to support his argument about the centrality of moral selves to human behavior.
Enacting Cultural Beliefs
Ridgeway’s Framed by Gender explains how and why gender inequalities persist across institutional areas—family, school, work, and so on. The explanation traces macro-level gender inequalities to micro-level interactions of men and women in local, task-oriented settings. The most fundamental reason that gender inequalities persist at the macro level is that people act on culturally-based status beliefs (about women and men’s talents, orientations, or worth) in their immediate, local interactions and thereby affirm those cultural beliefs. This micro process extends across institutional realms in part because gender inequalities are intertwined with positional (power, resources) inequalities, and in part because men and women interact with high frequency in a wide range of institutional contexts. Gendered interactions thus are a conduit that spreads status beliefs about men and women across institutional realms. Ridgeway argues that macro level inequalities cannot be sustained unless a micro-level mechanism is activated repeatedly in local settings.
Gender is a diffuse status characteristic, meaning it is a general characteristic or state of a person that is differentially evaluated in the larger culture. Status beliefs are “out there” and a part of a cultural “tool kit” that people call upon to promote productive, comfortable, and satisfying interactions with others. The status beliefs are subtle, non-conscious shapers of interpersonal evaluations, and people do not have to agree with them to act on and reproduce them in local structures. Because gender is so deeply embedded in virtually all cultures, it is very difficult to eliminate it entirely from social interactions, though its effects can be mitigated by adding countervailing status information about women or overtly challenging behaviors in the context of a demonstrated group (as opposed to self-interest) orientation. Given the underlying link to culture, diffuse characteristics tend to be activated at the micro level unless something in the situation makes them clearly irrelevant to the collective task at hand.
Drawing out broader implications of her analysis, Ridgeway argues that one of the most intractable sources of macro level gender inequalities is the persistence of micro-level differentiation within households. Changing divisions of labor in households is construed as a major pathway for changing cultural status beliefs. The persistence of gender inequalities therefore entails a reciprocal macro-micro process, whereas the change process has a strong micro-to-macro emphasis. The logic of Ridgeway’s theorizing about the micro foundations of macro inequality can be applied to other diffuse status characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, class, and occupation.
Institutionally-Embedding Relations
The disparity of local relations and larger social ties or units is central to the argument of Cook, Hardin, and Levi about the role of trust in social order. Cooperation Without Trust? adopts an “encapsulated interest” approach to trust, which holds that actor (A) trusts another (B) if A can infer that B defines their interests as encapsulating or including A’s interests. In other words, A trusts B when A thinks B’s interests incorporate A’s. This is a strong source of order at the relational or micro level. However, Cook, Hardin, and Levi contend that the informational needs or requirements for such trust are too great for it to be a viable foundation for social order in larger more complex units or societies. Trust relations tend to develop only if people interact repeatedly and can observe each other’s actions across time, and such relational orders do not spread or diffuse beyond the micro level, primarily because of the social dilemma problems in larger groups (or societies) where “arms-length” relations predominate. Modern social orders increasingly require social order (cooperation) without trust.
How then can cooperation without trust be generated or sustained? The answer, offered by Cook, Hardin, and Levi, is a complicated and insightful normative/institutional argument that boils down to the notion that social order (cooperation without trust) is founded on “externally regulated behavior.” External regulation is exogenous to local relations and stems from social and political institutions that create incentives for cooperation and reliably sanction malfeasance or noncooperation. Such institutions are tantamount to an insurance mechanism that allows people to infer reliably that others, about whom they know little (strangers), will cooperate; this then makes it possible for them to take personal risks to generate joint goods of mutual benefit. Under some conditions distrust is a stronger source of social order than trust. The institutional conditions typically involve both informal (reputational) and formal (governmental) constraints. Overall, Cook, Hardin, and Levi provide a rich and nuanced normative argument about the foundations of social order.
Forming Person-to-Group Affective Ties
In Social Commitments in a Depersonalized World, Lawler, Thye, and Yoon theorize that affective ties to groups are an important basis for collectively-oriented behaviors such as the trust of others or the willingness to sacrifice self-interest for group interest. Person-to-group ties are construed as a powerful force for social order, independent of relational or network ties between or among individuals. People may join or remain in relations and groups because of instrumental benefits, but the argument here is that instrumental ties grounded in individual self-interest are unstable and often unsustainable unless those ties incorporate an emotional-affective component. The central proposition is that frequent exchange or interaction around joint tasks or activities promotes affective ties to social units due to the emotional-affective byproducts of repeated interaction. The reason is that people associate those individual feelings with social units, local or larger, within which they repeatedly occur.
The mechanism for this process is social unit attributions of individual emotions. If people attribute their individual feelings to a social unit, that unit becomes an object of attachment (in the case of positive feelings) or detachment (in the case of negative feelings). Two basic conditions generate such social unit attributions and related effects on group ties: actors are engaged in a joint task or activity, and they perceive shared responsibility for the results of the task. Shared responsibility is the key contingency or moderator for the transformation of individual feelings into affective attachments to or detachments from a group. Thus, if people have a sense of shared responsibility, feelings they experience in groups or organizations are more likely to generate affective ties to those groups and they become more willing to sacrifice their own interest for them or redefine their own individual interests in more collective terms.
A key problem of order however, is that social unit attributions for emotions may be directed at local, immediate groups or larger, more removed groups in which local ones are nested. This book adopts the notion that people engaged in joint tasks will adopt a “proximal bias” for positive emotions and “distal bias” for negative emotions (see Lawler 2001). Thus, if things are going well and people feel good as a result of their interactions, they will attribute their positive feelings to the local group (e.g., a work group, department, neighborhood, local chapter); if things are not going well and they feel bad about the interactions, they will attribute their negative feelings to the larger, more distant group (e.g., the corporation, community, national organization). This implies a tendency toward fragmented orders in which affective ties to local units are strong and those to larger encompassing groups or organizations are weak. The role of micro processes in shaping ties to units at different levels suggests the multi-level nature of the problem of social order. Turner (2007) addresses this multi-level dimension and theorizes how social order can spread from micro to macro levels.
Spreading Positive Emotions
Turner (2007) posits that social orders have an emotional foundation, as do MacKinnon and Heise (2010) and Lawler, Thye, and Yoon (2009). The main reason is that positive emotions are integrating and the basis for social bonds, whereas negative emotions are disintegrating and undermine social bonds. However, positive emotions hold societies together only if they spread across levels—from micro levels, where Turner argues they originate, to meso (organizational) and to macro (societal) levels. Turner posits that positive emotions are attributed internally within local, immediate groups (the proximal bias), whereas negative emotions are pushed outward or externalized or attributed to larger, more encompassing organizations, communities or societies (the distal bias). The externalizing of negative emotions protects the bonds of the local group but at the expense of undermining the commitment to and legitimacy of larger social units, setting the stage for a fragmented order.
The question then is: when are positive emotions likely to spread? One condition is that people experience positive feelings across many different encounters in different situations and subgroups within the same larger organization or community; that is, multiple local group situations that generate positive feelings. Another condition is the degree of embedded-ness of local groups in larger social units. Stronger or tighter connections between micro, meso, and macro levels promote the spread of positive emotions from lower to higher levels, especially when they are experienced repeatedly in different situations and subgroups at each level. Negative emotions however, remain a persistent threat of disruption and disorder. Social orders are “protected” by micro level processes of repression, attribution, and other regulatory mechanisms (e.g., guilt and shame). Repressed emotions are “transmuted” into more intense versions of the emotion or into different emotions, and have the potential to trigger eruptions of anger or generate passive forms of alienation (withdrawal). Overall for Turner, the strength of a social order is contingent on the degree that positive emotions flower at the micro level and spread upward and outward through meso and macro levels, while negative emotions are repressed or reshaped through guilt and shame.
Conclusions
These books share a fundamental tenet found in much of sociological social psychology: Micro level, situational processes are necessary for macro social orders. Large scale social units (organizations, communities, nations) are governed via small groups such as boards, executive committees, and management teams. From the works reviewed here, the resilience and dynamism of macro social units is contingent in part on whether macro culture and structure enable people to: (1) express and coordinate relevant meanings in conversation and talk (Maynard); (2) affirm valued identities by enacting role identities in ways that maintain consistency between role standards or sentiments, their own behavior, and reflected appraisals (Burke and Stets; MacKinnon and Heise; Hitlin); (3) cooperate with others without having to trust them and thus be able to generate joint goods otherwise impossible to produce (Cook, Hardin, and Levi); (4) engage in joint tasks that generate positive feelings which people attribute in part to the enabling macro social units (Lawler, Thye, and Yoon); (5) experience positive feelings across distinct micro settings within a macro unit, thereby spreading positive feelings from macro to meso to macro units (Turner); and finally, (6) macro level social inequalities are reproduced if cultural beliefs about competencies and worth are activated in distinct micro settings across institutional realms (Ridgeway). The other processes above—shared meanings, verification of identities, person-to-group affective ties—may strengthen the connections between cultural status beliefs and social inequalities.
The six micro foundations discussed above, all assume an underlying potential for unpredictability, disorder, or chaos. The social world is problematic for these books, not only because of fundamental tensions between individual and collective interests, but because people have to coordinate meanings to jointly produce successful interaction; they monitor reflected appraisals and strive to affirm and verify valued identities, including being “minimally moral;” they import cultural expectations to local interactions, and so forth. From such work, the paradigmatic social dilemma framing of the problem of social order has a decidedly more narrow scope than typically presumed. Social orders are just as problematic when people have common interests or interact in cooperative contexts (e.g., Fine; Maynard; Ridgeway), as when they have different interests or incentives to compete. It simply is not as obvious or visible. Even if individual self-interest is the basis for extant ties to others or groups, with repeated ongoing interaction these ties tend to become non-instrumental, because of shared meanings and small group cultures that emerge (Fine), or the unintended emotional effects of those interactions (Lawler et al.; Turner). Finally, the affirmation of who we are as individuals or in roles is a basic human motivation (Turner) and also fundamentally non-instrumental and moral (Burke and Stets; MacKinnon and Heise; Hitlin). Free-riding plays a relatively small role in most of these works, yet all have important implications for social order, micro and macro.
The message, then, is that sociological social psychology offers a rich and promising tapestry of theory and research identifying micro-level mechanisms and processes that underlie and reflect macro orders. The empirical evidence for these processes is generally quite strong, being based on 15 to 30 years of research in most cases. These works and others in sociological social psychology (see Burke 2006) make possible a deeper understanding of the reciprocal interconnections between macro and micro phenomena and suggest a more generic framing and research agenda for the Hobbesian problems of social order facing societies in the twenty-first century.