The Macro and Meso Basis of the Micro Social Order
7.8 Conclusion
Humans are born into ongoing patterns of social relations in societies. Each newborn begins to acquire the behavioral capacities that enable them to role take with varieties of others in orga- nized contexts and within common culture. Thus, from a biographical standpoint, it is the person that must fi rst learn how to navigate in the expec- tations of micro, meso, and eventually macro- structures and, only later, become part of encounters that can reproduce or change meso and, perhaps eventually macrostructures and their cultures. Much depends upon the ratio of positive to negative emotional arousal that indi- viduals experience at the level of the encounters in meso units across a range of institutional domains. As such, a top-down perspective from macro and micro encounters gives us a good look at what all humans must do. Together with the
ability to meet or the failure to meet expectations states derived from ideologies and meta- ideologies of institutional stratifi cation systems, expectations generated by transactional needs, coupled with sanctioning experiences, set into motion complicated emotional dynamics that either reproduce and thereby reinforce the power of expectation states and the macro-level cultural beliefs generating these states, or alternatively, undermine the culture (i.e., ideologies, meta- ideologies, status beliefs, and corporate unit beliefs) of meso and macrostructures. As with- drawal of legitimacy proceeds, the expectations at the level of micro-level encounters become less coherent, consensual, and powerful—thereby disrupting encounters even more and causing negative emotional arousal.
Ultimately, the forces of the micro realm of the social universe are constantly feeding back to the meso and macro realms, making them more or less viable. As long as this feedback reinforces commitments to the structures and cultures of the meso and macro realm, a top-down analysis offers a great deal of explanatory power of what is likely to transpire in the micro universe. But, once feedback is driven by negative emotions, then the power of macro and meso structures and cultures declines, and confl ict and disintegration of a society become more likely—until, if possi- ble, a new macro and meso order is built up again.
There are now large literatures on social movement organizations; and it is at this meso level that micro-level emotions congeal into organized efforts to change the institutional structures and cultures of a society. If social movements are not possible in a society (because of repression by the state), then more revolution- ary protests will eventually begin to erupt; the key to sustaining a society, therefore, is the capacities of persons to meet expectations from all sources on a consistent basis across a wide variety of corporate units in diverse institutional domains. Only in this way can the macro-to- meso-to-micro forces outlined in this chapter be effective; when these forces fail, analysis must shift to how the negative emotions generated at the level of the encounter begin to erode commit- ments to the structures and culture of the macro
realm and to arouse persons to mobilize into vari- ous types of organizations to change the structure and culture of particular institutional domains and perhaps the whole society. In short, a top- down analysis tells us only one half of the story about how societies remain integrated, but unlike most other sciences, sociology also has the abil- ity to outline the bottom-up dynamics that allow sociology, as much or more than any other sci- ence, to have theories explaining the relations among all levels of the social universe. Lawler’s, Thye’s, and Yoon’s theory demonstrates how far sociology has come and, I hope, so does mine.
Sociology is close to doing what no other science has done: explain all levels of its operative uni- verse theoretically.
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