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This chapter examines levels of social reality, arguing that the social universe unfolds at three levels of organization: (1) the macrocomposed of institutional domains, stratification systems, societies, and intersocietal systems; (2) the microconsisting of focused (face-to-face) and unfocused (copresence without face-to-face contact) interaction; and (3) the mesocomposed of corporateunits revealing a division of labor (groups, communities, organizations) and categoricunits marking differences (by gender, race, ethnicity, class) among persons in a society. The various approaches for linking theoretically micro and macro social reality are reviewed and criticized. An alternative approach emphasizing the dynamics of the mesorealm—that is, corporate and categoric units—is proposed. The macrorealm is ultimately built from corporate and categoric units, while these mesostructures are built from iterated encounters. At the same time, once constructed, mesolevel sociocultural formations constrain what transpires in encounters, while macrolevel structures constrain the dynamics of corporate and categoric units. The goal of the book is explained: to develop abstract models and principles on the dynamics driving the mesolevel of social reality, emphasizing the constraints imposed by the micro- and macrorealms on these mesolevel dynamics.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-6221-8_1

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