Analysis of Arnason's (2001) Capitalism in Context

The recognition that discourse on capitalism is tantamount to the discourse on modernity based on determinist and reductivist premises has to lead to elaboration of systemic relations between economy, culture, and action that in historical perspective has to incorporate the contribitions of Weber, Sombart, Castoriadis, Boltanski, Chiapello, and Braudel for recontruction of the structure of modernity (Arnason 2001: 99). Rapid development of industrial capitalism in the last two centuries has been comparably described by Weber as the most decisive influence on modernity as it took its distinctively disruptive and transformative form, by Marx as the dynamic force behind the development of modernity, and by Durkheim as the process of division of labor unprecedentedly having both positive and negative social effects (Arnason 2001: 99-100). Global deregulation (Lash and Urry 1987), capitalist development (Marx 1848), and world system (Wallerstein 1995) provide highly visible examples of conflation of capitalism with modernity ascribing to the economic system increasingly pervasive social influence with the contradictions of the capitalist logic dictating the course of events around the world increasing thereby the reach of modernization (Arnason 2001: 100).

When identified with modernity (Baechler 1995), capitalism leaves to democracy the political role of institutionalization of utilitarian individualism finding its adequate reflection in the capitalist economic system that by virtue of its inherent efficiency rules out a post-capitalist transition while its development from the late medieval Europe via the modern transformation of the Western Europe towards its global expansion by the end of the twentieth century remains driven by the economic dynamics (Arnason 2001: 100-101). As an economic system, capitalism does not overlap the social system but constitutes only one among other systems that provide prolitical, societal, and association criteria for action also determined by cultural, strategic, and personality systems (Munch 1982: 94) so that the institutionalization of modernity does not change the structure of the action system but provides a uniquely different macro environment for individual and collective action (Baechler 1995). The approaches to modernity as a primarily economic phenomenon cannot but have affinity with Marx's theory of capitalism that providing common conceptual premises drew faultlines for political divisions and struggles (Arnason 2001: 102).

The specification of capitalism in terms of the structure of modernity has to account for the historical dynamics of the disruptions that context-insensitive analyses of capitalist development do not do justice to while avoiding excessive emphasis on the functional integration, adaptive upgrading, and cybernetic control of the modernization theory of Parsons, on the rational integration of contradictions between modernity and capitalism of the critical theory of Habermas, and on the reduction of modernity and capitalism to each other of the theories of modernization (Arnason 2001: 102). The concept of capitalism in classical and post-classical theory does not allow definitional reduction of it as a historical process to basic mechanisms of markets and property rights (Albert 1993) since as a historical phenomenon the understanding of which is open to debate and interpretation it has to be put into the context of contrasting approaches to its evolving theorization (Baechler and Wallerstein 1997). In parallel to the thesis of systemic interpenetration (Munch 1982: 94), Baechler's perspective constructs capitalism as an interrelationship among the systems of property rights, markets, utilitarian actions, and cultures that are oriented at maximization of economic growth (Baechler and Wallerstein 1997: 14).

By contrast, Wallerstein only needs "the permanent accumulation of capital" (Arnason 2001: 103) for his definition of capitalism that upon gaining unprecedented autonomy as an economic system has imposed its normative culture on all other systems constitutive of society and action (Baechler and Wallerstein 1997: 15) that within the relations of interpenetration can nevertheless change strategies of collective action in accordance with their own systemic logic as did the political systems of the former communist states. Even though particular social and action systems play a key role in the constitution of capitalism they do not do that alone but in concert with other systems that interpenetrate with each other via dynamic structure of their relationships rather than deterministically so that capital accumulation, technological progress, and economic growth are subject to "unpredictable patterns of change" (Arnason 2001: 104) while being part of capitalism as subsumption of human activity in the form of abstract wealth according to Marx ([1864] 1969). For the sociological analysis of capitalism to go beyond the narrow focus on capital accumulation or economic growth a more historical attention to the relations between economy and culture is needed since neither institutionalization of democracy (Baechler 1995) nor power struggles among ruling classes (Wallerstein 1995) sufficiently explain the rapidity or stages of the capitalist development (Arnason 2001: 104-105).

Likewise, the dynamics of interrelationships among the systems constitutive of modernity demands for its adequate understanding not their reduction to institutions but their definition as constellations of forces allowing for variation and change so that capitalism cannot be stablized within a single institutional configuration but has to be seen as a recursive process involving in its reproduction the structure of modernity as a whole that is as contingent, variable, and self-reflexive as individual and collective actors themselves (Arnason 2001: 105). The justification of capitalism by its economic rationality, as Castoriadis (1999) contends, appears more properly to belong to the structure of modernity organizing the action system (Munch 1982: 94) since in the process of differentiation and interpenetration the economic system maintains a complex and dynamic relationship with systems where discourse on, institutionalization of, and action governed by rationality become related to capitalist accumulation as elaborations on the neoclassical economic theory attest to (Arnason 2001: 106; Williamson 1985). Only the reformulation of capitalist accumulation as a process belonging to the structure of modernity where the economic system is embedded (Arnason 2001: 106-107) allows to avoid the extreme positions stating that either there is only a capitalist optimum point of economic equilibrium possible between rationality and development (Baechler 1995, 1: 91; 1995, 2: 160-166) or there is no equilibrium to achive because capitalism stands for unequal relations of social power mediated by struggles, institutions, and culture (Wallerstein 1995: 84).

From its earliest formulations, the concept of the spirit of capitalism corresponds to the defining configuration of the interpenetration between economy and culture that sets modernity apart from other historical macro environments for individual and collective action so that "orientation, justification and motivation" (Arnason 2001: 107) reinforce the capitalist economic growth within the structure of contraditions of modernity (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999: 41) as strategies, goals, and conditions of action become increasingly mediated by systems external to, autonomous from, and integrated with their participants (Arnason 2001: 108). The necessity of interpenetration between economy and culture finds its earliest reflection in the absolute, objective, and subjective determinants of action defined by Hegel as spirits that within the sociological context (Hintze 1987: 328) respectively consist in religious, philosophical, secular, and scientific discourses, in economic, social, and cultural institutions, and in motivations, values, and orientations (Arnason 2001: 108). Weber's thesis on the spirit of capitalism restrictively represents the interpenetration between economy and culture as an underdefined interconnection between the protestant ethic and traditional values while excluding their institutional context that only receives its credit for the captialist development as modern bureaucracy (Arnason 2001: 108-109) even though his later analyses of capitalism concentrate on historical and institutional preconditions of economic systems' differentiation (Collins 1986; Swedberg 1998) remaining to be developed into economic sociology of capitalism (Simmel [1900] 1978).

Centering on the psychological analysis of the interpenetration between economy and culture, Sombart's (1987) decription of entrepreneurial individuals that subject to enterprise-oriented goals drive economic growth to historically unprecedented social centrality combines utilitarian calculation with limitlessness of economic development lacking in normative culture to steer its direction (Arnason 2001: 109-110). Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) attempt to develop Weber's thesis within more abstract framework of economic institutions and cultural logic that in conjunction justify and legitimize the economic accumulation exhibiting regional and historical variation hardly accounted for by the concept of spirit of capitalism that as system of culture historically undergoing bourgeois, managerial, and network development has ambiguous relation to capitalism (Arnason 2001: 110). Boltanski and Chiapello extrapolate and abstract the political justification of capitalism from shared orders of worth (Boltanski and Thevenot 1999) that as structural relations among economy, politics, and culture played in early modern Europe (Hirschman 1977) the role of argumentation in favor of capitalism that under contemporary conditions corresponds to a project-oriented principle of legitimization representing a rupture with civic, market, or industrial regimes of justification (Arnason 2001: 110).

Since the spirit of capitalism implies causal relations between economy and culture, the critique of capitalism has accompanied the dynamics of economic development of modernity as its active participant via entrepreneurial strategies of collective actors, institutionalized contestation of its organizational foundations, and structural integration into its self-reflexive reproduction. In the dynamics of the spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999: 82) aesthetic and social critique have differential relation to the development of capitalism since aethetic criticism stressing disenchantment, inauthenticity, and oppression is concerned with impact of capitalist society on individuals while social criticism opposing misery, inequality, opportunism, and egoism is decrying the collective effects of capitalism (Arnason 2001: 111). Exhibiting close affinity to the anthropological critique of capitalism as ideology (Dumont 1979, 1983, 1991), Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) have primarily contributed to the ethnographic study of how contemporary capitalism integrated aesthetic critique, post-Fordism, and organizational innovation into its structure rather than to the theoretical discussion on variability of capitalist development, systemic relations between economy and culture, or institutional framework of economic analysis (Arnason 2001: 111-112).

While the interpenetration between economy and culture does not cease to be debated as the spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999), as the capitalist modernity (Marx 1848), and as social and historical contingency of economic development (Weber 1922), the contradictions of the structure of modernity (Castoriadis 1993; Munch 1992) go beyond Marx's theory of capitalism that depends on the growing role of rationality of its institutions in the theorization of which Marx's and Weber's contributions have to be systemically integrated to account for the institutions-driven economic, social, and cultural development encompassing both autonomy and interdependence as its goals (Arnason 2001: 112-113; Munch 1981). Since in the structure of modernity the economic system does not occupy a central position (Munch 1992: 94), the location of conflict, struggle, and critique in the theoretical discussion of modernity (Castoriadis 1999) is likewise determined by systematic analysis of the historical process of interpenetration of the economic system with other social and action systems that put rationality, autonomy, and variability of capitalism into reciprocal relation to the transformations in the structure of modernity (Arnason 2001: 113).

The defining impact of rationality on the modern interpenetration of economy and culture results from the historical process long preceding the chronology of modernity so that its structure has had variant realizations in much earlier historical periods as collective and individual action oriented at mastery and conquest became translated within the structure of modernity into domination of nature, rationalization of society, and maximization of economic growth harnessing other social systems to the imperatives of economic accumulation (Arnason 2001: 113-114). The interpenetration of economy and culture involves positive feedback between the social and the action systems as the political, societal, and cultural systems develop within the interdependent structure of modernity that via technological innovation, scientific knowledge, and capital investment puts rationality into historical context of economic accumulation that depends on mobilizing myths (Castoriadis 1999; Deutschmann 1997, 2001) as much as on the expanding rationalization (Arnason 2001: 114). The emergence of modernity is coterminous with the institutionalization of territorial states whose competing fiscal, administrative, and military development has connected capitalism with myths of absolutism (Henshall 1992), virtual state (Rosencrance 1999), and nation (Castoriadis 1999) whereby economic accumulation is joined with cultural frames as demarcation, regulation, and rationalization of national, modern, and capitalist spaces brings about a restructuring of individual and collective action (Arnason 2001: 114).

The dual movement of capitalist development towards both autonomy and interdependence took place amid social conflict, radical critique, political divisions (Castoriadis 1993, 1999: 75) that rather than driving capitalism and democracy to mutual negation have seen functional differentiationa and structural integration of the respective systems of action into a dynamic structure of related contradictions of economic, political, social, and cultural development (Arnason 2001: 115). Though Castoriadis recognizes capitalism, autonomy, and modernity as interrelated phenomena he nevertheless does not establish theoretically systematic relations among the structures, logics, and variants of modernity (Wagner 1994) that in his theoretical perspective being closely related to capitalism would allow an institutional alternative had criteria for specifying the social and historical meaning of an alternative modernity existed (Arnason 2001: 115). The permanent processes of growth of autonomy, rationality, and economy relies on their mutual interpenetration (Castoriadis 1999) that realizing itself in a variety of historical configurations is part of a stable structure of modernity mediating economy and culture as systems of action (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999) so that democratic politics, consumer choice, and individual autonomy are system-specific institutionalizations of the stage of economic development that makes them possible (Simmel 1990; Arnason 2001: 115-116).

The reproduction of capitalism within the structure of modernity encompasses the totality of its constitutive systems and interrelationships to integrate autonomy, authority, and rationality into dymanics of economic accumulation (Castoriadis 1993: 180) that transforms productive forces, financial capital, and commercial markets into continually expanding means for exercise of power, regulation, and mobilization (Arnason 2001: 116; Braudel 1979; Deutschmann 2001). That autonomy and interpenetration are organizing principles of the structure of modernity accounts for the political, social, and cultural contestation of capitalism as a side-effect of its development (Baechler 1995, 2: 268; Bauman 1992) since the unfettered process of inter-institutional communication makes proliferation of entrepreneurial collective projects across the structure of modernity into both consequence of and precondition for its further structural-functional differentiation (Arnason 2001: 116-117). The continued relevance of the analysis of the spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Castoriadis 1999) opens opportunity for application of the systematically elaborated modeling of the structure of modernity (Munch 1982, 1984, 1986) vis-a-vis its historical typology, changing configurations, and dynamic interrelationships bearing upon developmental trajectories and inter-systemic exchange that serve as macro environments for engagement of individual and collective action (Arnason 2001: 117).

In this perspective it is possible to interpret the theoretical discussion on the varieties of capitalism as part of a broader analysis of the structure of modernity (Arnason 2001: 118). In classical sociology, Weber (1968) has adumbrated the typology of capitalism, seen as gain-seeking, rationalizing, organizing, and commercial activity, that consists of six types covering economic instrumentalization of politics, war, trade, investment, industry, and finance (Weber [1922] 1976) the institutional implications of which for individual and collective action (Swedberg 1999) remain to be complemented with structural analysis of industrial and financial capitalist economies as particular institutional realizations of the structure of modernity where rationality is a salient feature of interpenetration between culture and economy (Arnason 2001: 118). Varieties of capitalism are mainly theorized based on contemporary regional and economic variation (Orru 1997) conceived of in terms of economic regimes, economic structures, capitalist institutions, functional integration, power structures, and institutional formations that are in need of micro correction of their privileging of structures at the expense of individual and collective agency (Arnason 2001: 118-119; Hall and Soskice 2001).

To capture the complexity of institutional patterns, historical backgrounds, and path-dependent developments a theoretical reconstruction of variants of the economic system such as national economies, macro-economic models (Coates 2000), regional configurations, and civilizational contexts (Eisenstadt 1996; Hamilton 1994) has to be conceptualized within the structure of modernity as much dependent on its constituent systems as the latter on their autonomous and interactive dynamics (Arnason 2001: 119-120). Consequently, the influence of the structure of modernity on the economic system obtains wihin the more general configuration of relations (Elias 1994) that involves the institutional development of the systems acting as factors giving rise to change in the structural relations both internal and external to the organization of economic institutions, social contexts, and state structures with effects contingent on relative position in the structure of modernity, in the process of its development, and in the emergent effects of inter-systemic interaction (Arnason 2001: 120). Given the interpenetration between economy and culture, the plurality of economic systems has to be theorized in the context of the corresponding variability of the structure of modernity that elaborates on Weber's rather than Marx's framework for the analysis of capitalism in comparative and historical perspective (Arnason 2001: 120; Braudel 1979; Frank 1978a, 1978b, 1998; Wallerstein 1982, 1989, 1995, 2004).

While the economic system has existed long before the rapid changes that institutionalization of the structure of modernity has introduced (Swedberg 1999: 9), the internal and interactive systemic changes that have defined the modern period have to be seen in the broad comparative perspective (Arnason 2001: 120-121). The structure of modernity as a macro environment for each of its systems also follows a long-term period of development (Braudel 1979, 3: 532) proceeding via the structural-functional differentiation towards autonomous interpenetration of its systems changing the structure of their relations rather than replacing each other over the course of their mutual development formally separable from its constitutive relations that in their modern configuration make autonomous individual and collective action possible (Braudel 1979, 2: 353) as much as its interpenetration with its systemic environments (Arnason 2001: 121; Braudel 1979, 2: 355). The institutionalization of the interpenetration of the economic system with other systems leads not only to coordination between their systemic logics but also to their conflicts as economic circulation, accumulation, and regulation forges strong systemic linkages with association, political, and societal systems (Braudel 1977: 111; Munch 1982: 94) that put purely economic action into macro environments obtaining from the larger structure of systemic relations where monopolies, state patronage, and global trade participate in already constituted economic worlds (Arnason 2001: 121-122; Braudel 1977: 62).

The dynamics of economic accumulation brings different economic systems into contact with each other developing forms of systemic interpenetration extending to their respective development of the structures of modernity that through overlapping, learning, and intergation transmit ideas, devices, and organizations, as did Islamic and European civilizations and economies, (Braudel 1979, 2: 495-499) which in the process of the growing complexity both of inter-systemic relations and of intra-systemic organization produced integrated differentiation of the instutions of modernity (Arnason 2001: 122; Braudel 1979, 2: 515). The analysis of the structure of modernity (Munch 1982, 1986) can be applied to its contemporary varieties especially given the salience of social changes associated with transition to modernity (Braudel 1979, 3: 540; Munch 1984) as compared to the economic, technological, or industrial developments (Braudel 1979, 2: 216) so that the dominance of the economic accumulation is largely owed to "social structures, political forces and cultural frameworks" (Arnason 2001: 123) putting the diverse configurations of durable inter-systemic relations into the context of comparative conceptualization of systemic coordination, differentiated networks, social institutions, communication infrastructures, entreprenerial strategies, and power accumulation in the environment of which the individual and collective action unfolds (Braudel 1977: 63).

The interpenetration of culture and economy has to be analyzed from the perspective of the strucutre of modernity (Munch 1986) within which the dynamics of transformation, instutionalization, and integration have taken place in the economic, social, and cultural systems (Braudel 1979; Castoriadis 1999; Sombart 1987; Weber [1922] 1976) that allow for multiple varieties of inter-systemic interpenetration definitive both of their respective historical development and of the emergent structures of modernity connecting them into contingent, evolving, and comparable patterns (Arnason 2001: 123-124).

Analysis of Boltanski and Chiapello's (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism

Among the most remarkable economic changes taking place in France between the 1960s and 1990s are disappearance, erosion, and diminution of active social movements, involved trade unions, real wage increases, high market positioning, upward productivitiy trends, and rapport between labor and management. The period starting in 1990s witnesses minimal social movements, defensive and passive social unions, spreading precarious employment, growing income disparity, decreasing strikes and social conflicts, growing work discipline, and improvements in industrial production. Such wide-ranging transition in the economic relations taking place with unprecedented rapidity and without meeting with significant resistance has provoked ethnographic attempts (Boltanski and Chiapello [1999] 2005) to provide explanation of the underlying factors driving such historical change. Weber's sociology of capitalism has centered on the concept of the spirit of capitalism that promises to capture the dynamic economic changes of the second half of the twentieth century especially concerning the cultural implications of the transformation reflected in the economic discourse governing the corresponding practices.

The premise of multi-sited ethnography of managerial discourse is that the practices promoted by it have more influence on general economy than their direct field of application in around one fifth of leading and multinational companies usually applying best practices later adopted by other firms, governmental agencies, and other organizations (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 162). Denoting the interpenetration between culture and economy, the spirit of capitalism changes in correspondence with structural differentiation of the area of overlap between value system and economic system that has developed over last decades of the twenthieth century since the economic transformation of the period has not met with sustained value-based resistance that should have occurred in case value system had remained unaffected. The social dynamics encompassing capitalist economic organization, interpenetration of economy and culture, and value system lends itself to modeling the general relations among these components in the specific form their configuration has taken in France over the period from 1970s to 1990s to contextualize the transformation of relations between economy and culture partly shared by the developed industrial economies and partly specific to structural functional relations and their development within a single country's history (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 162).

Purely ethnographic perspective on the process of interpenetration between culture and economy cannot analytically distinguish between the integration of economic, cultural, strategic, and personal systems into more general action system and the dynamic effects of the mutual development of these systems since contradictions between personal and economic systems, between economic and cultural systems, and between strategic and economic systems threaten to undermine the collective action they give rise to given the unequal structure of distribution of economic rewards, requirements of long-term commitment, and the importance of justification in terms of each of the action systems (Munch 1982: 94). Economic system is both integrated and differentiated from such other systems as political system given its need to mobilize economic resources for collective purposes in a self-perpertuating process of effective allocation and accumulation of capital via circulation, association system given the competition for resources and demands satisfaction creating concern for meeting market standards and for economic means via accumulation, and social system given the necessity to purchase labor power for wages and the exchange of produced goods consumed according to demand within culturally defined economic relations (Munch 1982: 129, 131; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 162).

Weber's formulation of the interpenetration between economy and culture broke the ground for historical contextualization of economic development and for exploring of its integration with other systems in view of the growing interpenetration of economic action with principles of equity and ethical responsibility in response to restitutive sanctions and organized activism, as association and goal-setting systems interpenetrate, and to universalistic ethics and rational action, as cultural and association systems interpenetrate, (Munch 1982: 94, 534) so that economic accumulation becoming increasingly affected by all segments of action system connects to norms of justice, rationality, and governmentality (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 163). Reductively Marxist approaches to economic accumulation cannot adequately account for such central characteristic of capitalism as interpenetration of culture and economy since rather than lacking restraint economic system appears to be integrated into action system that via placing restraints upon economic activity integrates it into the rest of the social system by recognition of its legitimacy and legality that personality, cultural and strategic systems have to internalize in their turn in order that lager social structure maintains its integration through discursive means of justification and normative steering of social order.

The conventional economic theory neglects its interpenetration with other systems of collective action since it restricts economy to narrowly defined links between technological progress and economic order, between enterpreneurial activity and rational economic association, and between economic market and system of rights and liberties (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 163; Munch 1982: 113). Such economistic definition of economic system does not allow for theoretical sensitivity to regional variation and historical change in the affective and cultural components of association system, in the normative and professional components of societal system, and in the justification and administrative components of the political system (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 163; Munch 1982: 113). The economic system interpenetrates with the societal system via exchange of individual commitment for possibilities offered by money, with the association system via exchange of economic security for the commitment it generates on resource markets, and with the political system via exchange of money for political power establishing rules for justice, fairness, and common good (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 163; Munch 1982: 131).

Seen in this perspective the interpenetration of economic system with the rest of the action system as a historical process has gone through such developmental stages as bourgeois capitalism stressing association system via enterpreneurial firms, bourgeois culture and morality, interest association politics, and personal assistance and charity socieities, as large corporation capitalism stressing societal system via professional management, welfare state, career development, and merit and credentials culture, and as contemporary capitalism stressing political system via executive administration, political exchange, legal system, and governmental policies (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 164; Munch 1982: 113). Business practices texts illustrate the change in the interpenetration between economy and culture occurring between 1960s and 1990s in the managerial discourse sampled with the help of two sets of representative literature composed in the respective decades largely covering the French economy so that a particular type of societal, economic, association, and political system exemplified by professional environments, work conditions, organizational forms, and management types corresponds to each period.

Thematic analysis of the two samples of professional literature has sought to uncover the prevalent formulations, problems, solutions, and negations. Additionally, for the two text samples the frequencies of usage of key terms of the analysis were computed (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 165). Among the conclusions that the analysis of the configuration of relations between economy and culture in the 1990s has arrived at are emegence of flexible organizations, project-centric work environments, networks replacing hierarchies, freely circulating flows, loose organizational intergation, horizontal firm structures, and minimization of bureaucracy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 165-166). The problems of the 1960s' managerial literature centering on dissatisfaction with restricted decision-making, narrowly defined roles, powerful management, bureaucratic organization, and large dominating companies have become replaced in the 1990s with non-hierarchical organization, diffuse power structure, self-guiding workforce, competitive culture, and permanent organizational change. The solutions of the 1960s centered on decentralization, meritocracy, objectives-driven management, competent management, and hierarchical control, while the 1990s advised lean restructured companies, network or project organization, flexibility, innovation, competence, motivational leadership, expertise- and councel-oriented management, self-reflexivity, client-orientation, and trust. The 1960s rejected private sphere, personal judgment, nepotism, political promotions, personal ties, and privileges, while the 1990s decried old-style management, bureaucracy, and separation between private and professional spheres (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 165).

The requirements for job security have shifted from merit-based approach based on agreed-upon targets of the 1960s to project-oriented experience accumulation of the 1990s. Managerial discourse of the 1990s proposes organization models, structures, and strategies that suggest by their contrast to the organizational culture of the 1960s a different structure of relations the economic system is embedded into that has become established between the two periods. In the history of interpenetration between culture and economy the contemporary configuration of relations between them involves radical change in the type of interpenetration that obtains between the economic and the societal systems since the relations between the association and the societal systems have signficantly altered the acceptable definition of work situation, justifiable treatment of employees, and the desirable forms of entrepreneurial strategies (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 166). Correspondingly, the economic system has predominantly comprised family-owned pre-Fordist firms in the nineteenth century, large professionally managed Fordist companies from the late nineteenth to late twentieth century, and networked, start-up, financial, and niche post-Fordist companies beginning in the 1980s.

In the period of pre-Fordist capitalism, the association system emphasized independence from local communities and progress, during the phase of Fordist capitalism career development, organizational power, and industrial efficiency came to the forefront, and the transition to post-Fordist capitalism favored non-authoritarian management, fuzzy organizations, creativity and innovation, and permanent change. The societal system before Fordism consisted of domestic and market-based normative culture, during Fordism merit-based professionalism, scientific effectiveness, and objectives-oriented management gained dominance, and after demise of Fordist capitalism professional mobility, network compatibility, project-centric normative culture, and experience-based employability took center-stage. The pre-Fordist political system revolved around personal property, personal relations, charity, and paternalism, the Fordist system allowed long-term planning, career-based management, and welfare state, and the post-Fordist system is largely built around ideas of mobility, adaptability, self-reflexive aministration, self-reliance capabilities, and self-help policies (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 166; Munch 1982: 113).

For the purposes of the multi-sited ethnographic study of the management texts, the place in the social system that the normative culture occupies with respect to communities, professions, sciences, and cultural discourses has been denoted via notion of justificatory regime (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991) corresponding to normative validity of meaningful agrumentation, communal anchoring of commitment, and socially binding fairness and legitimacy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 167; Munch 1982: 617). To bring idealist and positivist strands of sociology into common conceptual framework the changes to the normative culture as justificatory regime should be considered as a process of interpenetration among the components of social system that in the process of mutually accepted interchange correspond to the specifically involved systems thereby combining both hermeneutic understanding and causal explanation into the methodology of general theory of action that ethnography establishes corresponding parallels with standardized procedures of tests (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 167; Munch 1982: 254). Considered within the system of Weber's traditional, charismatic, legal-rational, and value-rational authority types, the justificatory regimes functionally differentiate into such areas of systemic interpenetration as inspirational area between charistmatic and value-rational authority, domestic area between traditional and charistmatic authority, renown area between traditional and legal-rational authority, civic area between traditional and value-rational athority, market area between charismatic and legal-rational athority, and industrial area between value-rational and legal-rational authority (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 167; Munch 1982: 562).

The identified justificatory regimes through evaluation, testing, categorization, and ordering generate their specific standards of comaprison that produce distributions of individuals on the legitimate scale of worth corresponding to the assessment procedure. Consequently, such regimes of justification as inspirational deriving from value specification and affective generalization emphasize spirituality and authenticity, domestic deriving from affective selection and affective bonding emphasize subordination and allegience, renown deriving from norm connection openness and normative constraint emphasize popularity and esteem, civic deriving from norm generalization and value boundedness emphasize representation and collective will, market deriving from means mobilization and goal setting emphasize competition and opportunities, and industrial deriving from rational learning and ethical control emphasize efficiency and professionalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 167-168; Munch 1982: 562). The justificatory regimes are specified in accordance with comparison principles encompassing human, natural, action, and symbolic systems, with scale of worth where relative positions are defined, with interpenetration among the human, action, symbolic and natural systems, with structure of social relations deriving from relations of worth, with relations of exchange reproducing the structure of worth, with standard test establishing a person's worth, and with ideal-typical social order corresponding to the distribution of worth (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 168; Munch 1982: 163).

The ethnographic study of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) that does not rely on highly developed theoretical framework (Munch 1982) reduces the cases of systemic interpenetration, as the justificatory regimes are shown to be, to typological procedure of identification of a "new and increasingly influential justificatory logic" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 168) rather than recognizing it as an indicator of structural change so that mobility, availabolity, and networks are taken for a projects-oriented justificatory logic representing normative culture of network society. The projects-oriented justificatory regime is specified in terms of its assessment by activity, project involvement, and network connections, its low worth being connected to passivity, close-mindedness, authoritarianism, rigidity, and parochialism, its high worth dependent on adaptability, flexibility, sincerity, supportiveness, and leadership, its subjects being managers, mentors, and innovators, its objects being information technologies and work structures of sub-contracting, flexibility, outsourcing, autonomy, and franchises, its relations building on trust, communication, and adaptability, its worth structure enhancing employability within project organization, its exchange structure favours availability and short-term planning, its standard test measuring mobility between projects, and its ideal-typical order being network society (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 169).

The underlying argument behind the ethnographic identification of a new, network-oriented justificatory regime consists in structural functional differentiation of an autonomous agency of networking as an "art of connecting and making use of the most diverse and furtherst ties" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 168) coming in contrast to asserting novelty of networks as such or of their wide reach achieved in the late 1970s. Activity serving as the general standard of the project-oriented justificatory regime differs from the industrial standard in its departure from steady and salaried work towards diffusion of distinctions between work and leisure, stability and unsteadiness, earning and volunteering, and productivity and performance as movement between projects increases in value, as activity becomes permanent state, and as encounters are structured around project-orientation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 169). Duraion of projects is structured according to short-term timelines that promote, motivate, and maintain networking and contact accumulation of their participants. The project-oriented systemic logic values adaptability, flexibility, polyvalency, mobility, initiative, autonomy, risk-taking, and openness to new people, possibilities, and information (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 169).

Project-oriented justificatory regime defines personal worth in non-instrumental terms that encourage contribution to the common good, generation of trust, non-authoritarian leadership, toleran management, respect for differences, sharing of connections, and general enhancement of employability. Since each justificatory regime is represented by a specific vocabulary the content analysis of the management literature samples chosen for their ethographic study has uncovered the frequences of appearance of key terms in the respective bodies of literature (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 170). Unsurprisingly, the industrial justificatory logic dominates the textual samples both for the 1960s and for the 1990s, its criticism has increased between the two periods, its proportion to other logics of justification has decreased in the 1990s with the network logic becoming more represented, its next-ranked logic changing from domestic in the 1960s to project-oriented in the 1990s and doubling its weight in the overall ranking structure of logics of justification (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 170). Greatest discursive changes between the Fordist and post-Fordist periods are that network logic has risen to second ranking place in its frequency, that market logic has increased its presence in response to more competitive, restructured, and client-driven macro environment, that inspirational logic grew in strength as innovation, risk-taking, and personalization gain in traction, and that domestic and civic logics lost in presence to even greater degree than did industrial (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 170).

Transition of France's capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism was accompanied by the restructuring of the systems of value, legitimacy, and relevance as people, things, and situations have become embedded into normative culture, organization types, and entrepreneurial strategies corresponding to the transformed justificatory regime that by changing standard tests alters its own systemic logic (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 171). As part of theoretical framework for analysis of normative change standard tests are subdivided into tests of strength and legitimate tests (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 171). A legitimate test is a kind of test for which the justificatory regime it belongs to supplies legitimacy by clearly stating the strength type, testing device, and test definition used for carrying out its procedure should unambiguous, qualifiable and categorizable results be obtained. In contrast, while dependent on the decision over its succes or failure, a test of strength does not prohibit mobilization of as many capabilities as possible, offers no preliminary specifications or instructions, and the possibilities of what course the test process takes are unlimited (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 171). In the economic system a legitimate test is embedded in the dominant mode of accumulation via normative culture that exerts both constraining and legitimizing influence on corporate activities, organizational models, and general management.

Within the market justificatory regime, the normative culture provides the existing mode of accumulation with legitimization by applying criteria of equality of chances, merit-based success, market opportunities, and competitive advantage while balance of power, "dominant positions, previous agreements and cartels" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172) prevent the income distribution in the economic system from taking form solely attributable to the market forces that are not either identical with or reducible to the normative culture. In the social system the normative culture institutionalized in its legitimate tests does not allow interpenetration among the economic, societal, associational, and political systems that constitute it as a whole even though particular enterpreneurial groups or individuals may possess strategic means to exploit opportunities where independent criteria of systemic evaluation diminish their strengths (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172; Munch 1982: 131). There are situations in which tests of strengths and legitimate tests, without ever being completely separate, either coincide or are related to each other thus putting into question the legitimatory regime they avowedly reproduce as does the correlation between socioeconomic background and scholastic aptitude (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172).

The legitimate test is embedded into the action system as its mode of categorization since it involves public, explicit, and institutionalized judgment that is independent of the situation of its application. The test of strength represents the mode of displacement corresponding within the action system to the entrepreneurial strategies oriented at changing macro environments in which the situational, singular, and dynamic circumstances call for entrepreneurial action rather than rule-based judgment (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172). Systemic change usually involves institutional innovation by enterpreneurial groups or individuals that seeking to improve their structural position reduce the binding power of legitimate tests via strategic action involving risk, opportunity, and institutional innovation. Success of such enterpreneurial strategies gradually shifts the definition criteria of normative culture from legitimate tests to the tests of strength in any given institutional environment where novel, covert, and unregulated relationships consequently gain in importance (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 172). However, enterpreneurial strategies that prove to be effective in their action environment entail their institutionalization as the structural differentiation they have triggered takes form of new legitimate tests in case the change is intended to be either widely accepted or reproduced in other institutional contexts (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 173).

Actors benefiting from the enterpreneurial innovation tend to describe such institutional change in terms of a justificatory regime that puts high worth value on their structural position thereby rendering their achievement transparent, moral, and justifiable. Institutional change in the process of its legitimization employs legal regulation to draw the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable utilization of new opportunities, resources, and strategies. In this respect, a justificatory regime appears to derive from a process of institutionalization of a wide-ranging transformation that in case of the transition to post-Fordist mode of regulation has made network- and project-oriented individual and collective action into a subject of discursive legitimization enabling and restricting the reproduction of the post-Fordist accumulation at the same time (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 173). The change of justificatory regimes depends on dual influences of the balance of power and legitimate relations that in their interplay make use of criticism of the existing system to either promote a desirable situation different from the status quo or put into question the existing normative foundations so that the discrepancies betweent the actual state of affairs and the justificatory regime constitute part of the self-reflexive dynamic of their transformation (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 173).

In the action system, criticism and testing practices are interrelated in as much as, on the one hand, enterpreneurial groups and individuals put into question the legitimacy of the social structure while, on the other hand, testing procedures legitimize the distributtion of individuals within the social structure. Corrective criticism of tests aims to maintain them within the boundaries of normative culture so that the application of tests and the strengths' distribution in the action system adequately reproduce its guiding principles that are assured via methodological, conventional, legal, and regulatory means used for the institutionalization of test coherence, openness, and improvement (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 174). Radical criticism of tests aims at their elimination or replacement on the grounds that their validity is in question. Based on the legitimacy principles of the relevant justificatory regime, corrective criticism of tests institutionalized within the action system calls for either refutation of the former by recourse to evidence or its bringing to bear on the testing procedure. Also, corrective criticism can elicit a strategic action oriented at cirucumvention of rather than direct reaction to the possible loss in legitimacy of the test so that the trade-off between test improvement and its marginalization is decided in favor of transformation of the legitimacy test into a test of strength where costs are shifted to the test-takers (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 174).

For the economic system the cost displacement strategies in response to contradictory pressures for both higher profits and increased wages can involve geographic relocation into regions with labor relations or environmental regulations favorable for the employers, redefinition of the career-management policy by dropping its expensive components, and transition to informal recroutment techniques to avoid testing and screening costs (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 174-175). These entrepreneurial strategies of displacement alter the action system as a whole so that the criticism of its justificatory regimes can no longer be waged based on previous normative culture since the configuration of interpenetration between the societal, economic, association, and political systems necessitates elaboration of new critical concepts to account for emegrent interrelationships whose "recognition, institutionalisation, codification or categorisation" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 175) is yet to crystallize into the standard tests that the criticism can apply to. Criticism, therefore, can have bearing on testing processes by catagorizing tests by legitimacy and measured strengths in order to show their role in the structural and functional differentiation of individuals, by ensuring the conformity of tests to the precepts of normative culture via regulation, oversight, and correction, by maintaining the centrality of legitimate tests to the reproduction of the action system according to its normative culture, and by eliminating tests that are widely perceived to impede desirable social change (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 175).

The form of interpenetration characteristic of a particular action system finds its reflection the legitimate tests applied in its economic system. Interpenetration among societal, economic, association, and political systems dates to the beginning of modernity that employs justificatory regimes for its reproduction. Criticism as an integral part of a justificatory regime focuses on indequality, exploitation, and individualism when it is oriented qua social criticism at the association system where it calls labor movements to life. Criticism of the economic system takes the form of artistic criticism (Chiapello 1998) deriving from aesthetic critique of oppressive discipline, mass society, standardization, and commodification in defence of ideals of liberation, autonomy, originality, and authenticy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 175-176). The transition from Fordism to post-Fordism has as its underpinning the changing configuration of interpenetration within the action system going beyond the impact of globalization, economic development, or technological change that on the example of France exemplifies the dynamics common to industrial economies. In France, the transition to post-Fordism began with the crisis in its normative culture in 1960s, when the criticism of its justificatory regimes reached its peak of labor strikes and violent confrontations, with the disorganization of industrial production when product quality fell and labor costs rose, and with the pervasive loss of legitimacy of standard tests establishing distribution of wages and profits, justifying power relations and social hierarchies, and reproducing educational, economic, and social institutions (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 176).

The criticisms raised at the Fordist action system centered on the crisis of its normative culture, as reflected in the corruption of the standard tests since both legitimate tests were growing more marginal to the actual reproduction of social structure and tests of steength were gaining in centrality within the action system. Institution leaders within the economic system have imputed responsibility for the crisis of the normative culture to the labor force failing to uphold discipline and common goals and to the inadequate socialization of younger entrants into the job market (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 176). For the crisis of 1968 in France both artistic and social criticism played equally important role as in the previous decade cultural capital stopped being restricted to narrow social circles to become available to rapidly increasing student numbers who subsequently filled managerial, professional, and technological positions it the economic system. In France the artisitic criticism demanding self-management, personal autonomy, and creativity was supported by holders of executive, professional, and technical eduication while the social criticism had its primary base of support among skilled and manual workers (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 176-177).

The first stage of the transition to post-Fordism taking place between 1968 and 1973 has responded to social criticism only by reliance on established procedures of collective bargaining involving state, unions, and employer organizations with improvements in minimum wage, reduction of income disparities, and improvement in job security as a result at the same time as allocation of authority was brought into closer alignment with normative culture of meritocracy (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 177). Thereby the centrality of the legitimate tests to the action system was restored by increasing penalties for undue advantages. The second stage of post-Fordist transition commenced in 1975 after the crisis of Fordism has continued to deepen as its justificatory regimes failed to regain legitimacy, as profits of industrial production continued to fall, and as Fordist normative culture started to be abandonded. By the late 1970s large companies have changed labor relations and working conditions based on best practices developed by sociologists and consultants that together with employer organizations have implemented a post-Fordist mode of regulation emerging out of crises of the previous decade (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 177).

In the economic system the disintegration of the Fordist mode of regulation into "autonomous teams, flexible schedules, bonuses, efficiency-related salaries" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 177) has spread across economic structure from the management to the production organization broken down into a network of small, contract-connected, project-oriented units on the periphery of company's core activities. In the economic system the second stage of the transition to post-Fordism has involved replacing legitimate tests with tests of strength less amenable to criticism due to the incapacity of the Fordist normative culture of their "qualification, categorisation, and regulation" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178). In the 1980s, the post-Fordist mode of regulation has consolidated around networks discourse, effective labor force control, and reinvigorated economic expansion. Since post-Fordist normative culture has failed to form, the transition to post-Fordism was not met with criticism. Moreover, the post-Fordist interpenetration among economic, societal, association, and political systems has left the social criticism by labor unions without an independent object because the worker movement has lost its "isomorphic relationship to its opponent, the large integrated firm" (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178).

There was no artistic criticism of post-Fordism because it has achieved its economic, social, and cultural goals, its frame of reference cannot account for systemic interpenetration replacing structures of Fordism, and its proponents have become integrated into dominant positions across social structure in France (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178). The economic growth of 1980s stems from the overcoming of limitations of Fordism, the systemic interpenetration of diverse macro environment, and the transformation of normative culture that with tests of strength at its center has led to rising inequality, precarious employment, and worker impoverishment. In the economic system, the negative effects of post-Fordism brought social criticism and labor strikes of the 1990s to bear upon the efforts to introduce legitimate tests into the project-based normative culture by new regulatory means seeking to governmentally structure the flexibility, to stabilize the precarious work conditions, and to integrate profit and non-profit organization of labor relations (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178). While the configuration of the action system in France is defined by the network-oriented transformation led by socialist governments responsive to the artistic criticism of the economic system, in other countries, as in the Great Britain where Thatcher government implemented market-oriented reforms, the models of systemic interpenetration depending on the outcome of collective struggles, dominant normative cultures, and legitimate justificatory regimes vary according to historical interrelationships among these components of their respectively constitutive systems (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 178-179).

On the basis of the ethnographic study of France's transition to post-Fordism, I have tentatively demonstrated applicability of the action theory (Munch 1982) and structural functionalist approach (Colomy and Rhoades 1994) to the ethnographic and multi-sited data exploring the crisis of French Fordism and systemic dymensions of its post-Fordist change (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) within the framework of systemic interpenetration dynamically articulating action system and interpenetration among its differentiating subsystems. Within the proposed theoretical framework I placed the emphasis on the entrepreneurial strategies that collective and individual agents undertake within the specific macro environments they confront, on the effects that collective struggles have on the historical change in the configuration of systemic interpenetration, and on the empirical application of more general theoretical specifications of action theory, structural functionalism, and micro-macro link.

The ethnographic and multi-sited reasearch of social and economic change (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) when decoupled from detailed theoretical frameworks (Munch 1982, 1992) exemplifies insufficiences that include lack of conceptualization of individual and collective action as strategic agency oriented at systemic environments, inability to construct capitalism as subject of theoretical reflection and to embed discussion of economic change into framework of systematically related concepts leading to their substitution by such artifacts of ethnographic methodology as tests, regimes, capitalisms, and criticisms, and weakness of explanatory models as applied to ideal-typical relations that characterize one historical configuration of systemic interpenetration from another. Nevertheless, France's example of the more general phenomenon of transition to post-Fordism has served to outline an analysis of the structure of systemic relations of interpenetration that an economic system can enter in the process of historical change that in order to avoid a macro-analytical bias has brought the theory of action (Munch 1982) to bear upon systemic relations in which individual and collective enterepreneurial strategies are deployed by active agents facing particular national traditions, political situations, economic practices, and ideological expressions (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 179-180).

Analysis of Burawoy's (1998) Critical Sociology: A Dialogue Between Two Sciences

The discipline of sociology has, on one hand, a set of texts that have exercised guiding impact on the history of its development and, on the other hand, a number of practices that evolve in the process of their application, which constitutes the point of Stinchcombe's (1959) essay on Weber that Burawoy (1998) relates to contemporary state of sociology. Stinchcombe's distinction of mode of operation of ideal-typical bureaucracy into, on one side, properly bureaucratic work with detailed rules, division of labor, and set procedures, and, on another side, craft-like work with only cognitive map of theory to steer the interaction between researcher and informants equally applies to sociology (Burawoy 1998: 12). Bureaucratic sociology belongs to positive models of science with separation, distance, and detachment as its hallmarks, while craft sociology relies on reflexive models of science with connection, proximity and dialogue as its major features. As each theoretical practice responds to specific sets of characteristics of social reality, the distinction of sociology as a discipline lies, however, in avoiding predominance of any single approach in favor of "mutually enriching, reciprocal engagement of positive and reflexive science" (Burawoy 1998: 12).

The practice of science carries such implications for each model of scientific inquiry that context poses most challenge for the principles of positive science while power for reflexive science as these limits to scientific inquiry simultaneously demarcate the boundaries of the world each mode of science can make transparent. Beginning with Comte who opposed positivism with its search for empirical social laws to metaphysical thinking the transformation of sociology into science has been accompanied with qualification of its claims as the discipline underwent professionalization where representation of the world and scholarly practice are held to be separate. Positive science follows four basic regulatory principles (Katz 1983) that include avoidance of reactivity where researcher should refrain from inducing bias into studied reality, insurance of reliability whereby researcher systematically selects from available data, assurance of replicability where idiosyncrasies of observer are minimized, and demonstration of representativity where derivation or testing of theory must be valid for entire population of data. However, survey research as most representative of bureaucratic mode of science demonstrates its limitations of its guiding principles as stimulus-response expectation becomes affected by survey structure, location and subject, as standardization expectation meets with diversity of respondent understanding and reaction, as stabilization expectation gets subverted by external field effects on the interview, and as sampling expectation comes undone in situations of interaction that construct their subjects and situations rather than represent (Burawoy 1998: 13).

As the survey research progressively refines its methodology to control for context effects of interview by ethnographic sensibility, of respondent by focus groups, of field and situation by factoring in larger social forces the limitations of positive science and advantages of reflexive become more apparent (Burawoy 1998: 13). While objections to objectivist effects of social science frequently proclaim the "inviolability of local knowledge" (Burawoy 1998: 13), by Geertz (1983), Bauman (1992) and Latour (1993) among others, the interpretive turn towards research context from subjective standpoint should maintain communication with positivist social science to prevent another one-sided perspective from prevailing. Reflexive sociology, as proposed by Mills (1959), Gouldner (1970), and Bourdieu ad Wacquant (1992), invites methodological specification should transition towards "reflexive model of science" (Burawoy 1998: 14) be accomplished. Corresondingly, reflexive science presupposes intersubjectivity its subjects develop over course of research, embeddedness of its objects into context-specific social processes, structuration within assymetric relations between local contexts and extralocal processes, and reconstruction of theories by strategic choice of case studies to elaborate or revise conceptual frameworks (Burawoy 1998: 14).

Reflexive science allows for transition from procedural objectivity where empirical data either corroborate or falsify theories towards embedded objectivity where gradual improvement of theory overcomes epistemological dualisms of rigidly positivist orientation to find its foundation in intersubjective participation, process dependence, complex structuration, and theoretical reconstruction. Following Lakatos (1978) reconstructions should be consistent with existing knowledge, account for anomalous cases with parsimony, offer new theoretical perspective, lead to original predictive statements, and lend themselves to corroborations. The mutual dynamics found between anomalous empirical phenomena and theories or research programs that engenders theory reconstruction should supply the starting point for the production of new knowledge through discovery of anomalies and theoretical programs. This perspective opens an interdisciplinary space where each research program plies a reflexive, political and situational course in "hierarchically organized field of competing, overlapping, clashing, and mutually constituting theories" (Burawoy 1998: 14).

As a result of the theoretical historicization and de-exoticization of the anthropological encounter, rather than reconstruct fixed norms and isolated communities reflexive anthropology started to take account of strategic action by research subjects, of problematization by anthropologists of their research, and of direct observation of events by means of extended case method (Gluckman 1958, 1961; Mitchell 1956; van Velsen 1967). As ethnography becomes methodological tool increasingly widely used in sociology it incorporates theoretical concerns of extended case method into studies that cover street society (Bourgois 1995; Susser 1982), workplace (Lee 1997; Thomas 1985), migration (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Stack 1996), family (Devault 1991; Stacey 1990), schooling (Lareau 1989; Willis 1977), social movements (Fantasia 1988; Ray 1998), underdevelopment (Enriquez 1991; Beneria and Roldan 1987), organizational dynamics (Blum 1991; Smith 1990), the state (Espeland 1998; Haney 1996), and science (Epstein 1996; Fujimura 1996). As applications of ethnography continue to develop along the dimensions of intersubjective experience, comparative tracing of processes across contexts, historical interpretation of translocal structures, and cumulative theory reconstruction such methodology has to grapple with subversive effects of "multiple dimensions of power" (Burawoy 1998: 15).

Ethnographic research tends to come into contact with networks of domination that restrictively affect the possibilities for communication and discovery the attempts at intervening into which contribute to dynamics of domination already found in the research field where contestatory intention of research needs to address relations of power in their fullness. The analysis of social process cannot be rid of the objectifying effects whereby sociological reduction commits silencing by reconstructing relations of power, production of differences, and reproduction of complex field centered around actors privileged by ethnographer's account. The differences in historical, social, and theoretical scale that enter into ethnographic research of connection between micro processes and large-scale social forces lead to their contingent objectification in order to highlight their social reality as is done in institutional ethnography (Smith 1987, 1990). Ethnography sensitive to anomalous subjects of its discourse in the process of extending the reach of reconstructed theories should refrain from normalizing social reality through naturalization of existing relations, homogenization of differences, domestication of resistances, and stigmatization of traditions.

While researcher's authority in both positive and reflexive science is exercised through dimensions of "domination, silencing, objectification, and normalization" (Burawoy 1998: 16), the medium of application of authority is the control over research design in positive science and the power over context of research in reflexive science. The contradictions that science harbors in its principles and operation demand its reshaping and reappropriation with critique contributing to continuous self-monitoring of scientific practice, which, as opposed to postmodernist renunciation, does not lead to standing "helpless before the ravages of modernity" (Burawoy 1998: 16). As both positive and reflexive science discover their respective limitations the use of techniques, methods, and models becomes differentiated according to the model of science they serve. In case of interview, it can be employed either as objectifying tool of survey research of positive science or as part of reflexive method where it is "self-consciously intersubjective, highlights process through space and time, and locates the individual in historical and social milieus" (Burawoy 1998: 16). Correspondingly, participant observation can be used reflexively as part of application of extended case method or be put to positive use of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967) with outside observation, coding apparatuses, context bracketing, and theory induction.

The difference between application of ethnography in positive as opposed to reflexive science lies in whether inductive derivation of conclusions (Hochschild 1989) or critical engagement of discursive practices (Devault 1991) is sought. In historical sociology the distinction between positive and reflexive principles takes form of, on one hand, outer-historical standpoint, formal standardization, simultaneous comparison of historical contexts, and theoretical induction of explanatory factors (Skocpol 1979), and of, on the other hand, participatory reconstruction of history, orientation to singular processes over homogeneous events, changing context of interactions, and theory reconstruction vis-a-vis single case (Trotsky [1906] 1969, [1930] 1977). Being among the methods that has explored the methodological space between positive and reflexive science, feminist ethnography has not developed into systematic research, has refused to develop totalizing theories of class, race, and ethnicity, has not yet related everyday life to translocal forces, and has not translated deconstructions of theory or ideology into research programs (Burawoy 1998: 17).

Among the contributions to the reflexive science of sociology that allows to locate the discipline in the changing conditions of its existence is Castells' (1996, 1997, 1998) sociology of the post-industrial order where disparities and concentration of power, transnationalization of corporations, and development of global networks reach unprecedented scale. Proliferation of possibilities, spatial flows, and risks puts sociology together with other practices of knowledge production at the center of increasingly self-referential social order. Giddens (1992) and Beck (1992) highlight the need for reflexive science to respond to paradoxical consequences of unfolding of advanced modernization that call science to internal self-regulation, social accountability, context sensitivity, and consequences and fallibility awareness. The disciplinary reflexivity deficit of sociology has to be met with recognition of interdependence of positive and reflexive methods that can be arrived at "by holding them in tension, by interweaving them, by playing them off each other" (Burawoy 1998: 18).

How effective research methods prove to be also depends on methodological scale of phenomena studied so that translocal social forces receive reflection in survey and demographic data that is unavailable through ethnography. When different research methods are combined, their criteria of evaluation should not be merged or confused. Implication of methodologies in either positive or reflexive science also governs the choice and formulation of problems which makes interdisciplinary combination of methods conditional on corresponding change in methodological orientations. Similar to how rise of mass society brought prominence to survey research (Coleman 1986), reflexive sociology belongs to the present historical moment when apparatuses of global control proliferate in developing countries, local rebellions against the global, and postcolonial challenging of marginalization. Changes afoot in outside world also constitute the theoretical practice of sociology as symbolic analysis (Reich 1991) fits better into horizontal than hierarchical networks, action research (Touraine 1988) reinforces the dynamics of new social movements, and extended case method becomes "increasingly tied to the polarized world we study" (Burawoy 1998: 19).

Integration of structural functionalism of Parsons (1949, 1960) into present practice of largely reflexive sociology will provide it with ability to methodologically mediate between more positive economics and political science and more interpretive anthropology, history, and geography, to deal with ethnography, silencing, globalization, modernity, and theory non-dualistically, and to provide reflexive social critique sensitive to both context and power relations. However, in order to avoid imbalance between reflexive and positivist methodologies within sociology it has to articulate counterhegemonic theoretical frameworks, to force research methodologies to confront their limitations, to reconnect sociology to interdisciplinary developments, and to "respond creatively and critically to the troubles and (dis)illusions of the epoch" (Burawoy 1988: 19).

Analysis of Colomy and Rhoades' (1994) Toward a Micro Corrective of Structural Differentiation Theory

To alleviate a macro bias of structural differentiation theory a micro corrective taking into account institutional projects, organization building, and support enlistment strategies allows for description of new levels of differentiation based on "comparative and historical case studies of structural change" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 547). Despite claims that macro and micro levels allow for analytic or empirical reduction (Blau 1987; Collins 1981), recognition of their interpenetration has given significant impetus to comprehensive perspective that seeks to resolve the conceptual distinction between these levels of analysis via integrative theoretical frameworks (Munch and Smelser 1987; Ritzer 1990a, 1990b). Conceptual and empirical shortcomings of either macro or micro approaches open possibilities for their theoretical reconstruction that incorporates neglected analytical dimensions into research programs of multiple speciality areas. To correct macro bias evidenced in its limited empirical validity, structural differentiation theory has to integrate into its conceptual framework notion of institutional entrepreneurs, theory of social movements, and studies of comparative and historical structural change. Critical examination of the insufficient place micro-macro link occupies in structural differentiation theory demonstrates necessity for its micro corrective.

Alexander (1987) reformulates Parson's (1937) means and ends conceptualization as "micro-translation of norms and conditions" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 548) into theory of social agency where micro and macro levels of analysis are linked. Such reconceptualization of social agency incorporates microsociological theories as cases of emphasis on analytical dimension of individual coordination between micro and macro levels so that rational choice theory conceptualizes the macro-micro link as immediate costs calculation, phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology as order-seeking activity, and symbolic interactionism as individual interpretation (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 548). Whereas micro theories treat macro structures as residual categories contingent on but distinct from action, macro theories "specify their pertinent dimensions" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 549) so that hermeneutic, structural, Durkheimian, and Weberian theories refer to macro level in terms of normative complexes while conflict and Marxist theories in terms of conditional elements. Micro theories can be shown to describe social action along two complementary dimensions of interpretation and strategization the former of which includes typification and invention processes while the latter includes reward maximization and cost minimization.

The two dimensions of action interact since interpretative understanding contributes to production of relevant knowledge for strategic action at the same time as interpretive efforts extend to phenomena manipulated by strategic action. That emergent qualities and constraining effects of social order cannot find adequate explanation by means of micro theories has lead to attempts at their contingent integration with macro theories via conditional effects of macro environments on individual action that reflexively reproduces them. Parsons' division of social systems into society, culture, and personality corresponds to dimensions of social differentiation and political institutions, of solidarity bonds and sense of community, and of social roles and norms and sanctions. Cultural systems affect action along both interpretation and strategization dimensions by supplying reality descriptions, drawing moral boundaries, and institutionalizing value classifications. Capacities of interpretation and strategization of personal systems vary both over life cycle and across social systems. Dimensions of interpretation and strategization "enable actors to formulate new courses of action and recreate their environments" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 550) at the same time as the latter limit the contingent action.

Within the research program of structural differentiation theory micro refers to activities of individuals and groups that propose and implement structural alterations into the institutional order while macro characterizes environmental conditions informing and constraining these activities. Without conceptual model of micro dynamics macro environments are treated as actors by such theories as Marxist, neo-Marxist, and Weberian reifications of social classes and the state even though they are incisive as macro accounts of social transformation (Evans et al. 1985; Hindess 1986; Skocpol 1985). Weak theorization of macro processes exceedingly shifts the analytical balance in favor of micro level that hypervoluntarist treatment of party politics in Marxist tradition (Lenin [1902] 1929) and of charismatic leadership in Weberian tradition (Dow 1968; Fagen 1965) exemplify. Overlooking micro dynamics, structural differentiation theory (Alexander 1992) has largely treated environments as causal actors and has attributed contingency of individual action to systemic agency. A classical work on structural differentiation, Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society ([1893] 1933) connects greater social complexity to higher levels of specialization while it attributes structural adjustments in resources distribution to environmental pressures rather than to individual and group contributions.

Based on Weber's analysis of social institutions, Parsons (1966, 1971) pays more attention to historical detail than does Durkheim at the same time as he likewise neglects individual and group impact on structural change while depicting macro dynamics of institutions and societies. Smelser (1959) offers more sophisticated model of social differentiation which, however, is "almost exclusively concerned with the interface between subsystems and their environments" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 552) as a form of interplay between institutions and social structures. Adopting an interest oriented explanatory model Smelser (1974, 1985, 1990, 1991) has combined functionalist analysis of macro environments with Tocqueville's notion of estates and with primordial groups allowing him to discuss micro dynamics more compellingly even though without avoiding the conflation of macro and micro dimensions. From post-Parsonian perspective, Luhmann (1982, 1990, 1992) explains transition from stratificatory differentiation to functional differentiation via "movement to greater structural complexity" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 552) of social systems that undergo self-referential evolution triggered by interaction with their environments. In this regard, Munch (1985), while favoring in his analysis interaction between systems over individual and group agency, offers more pluralist than Parsons' analysis of institutional change making it conditional on "existing traditions, consistency with general values, directedness towards collective goals, and adaptability to changing situations" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 553).

Accounting for its limited empirical support, the macro bias of differentiation theory follows from treating systems as agents responding to changes in their environments that cause them to differentiate over and above individual and group efforts. Theoretical attention to contribution of individual actors to the process of structural differentiation will bring micro-macro link to bear on explanation of how systems "select one course of institutional change over another" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 553). The growing awareness of impact that individual and group agency has on structural change (Champagne 1992b; Colomy 1990a) accounts for departures from macro interpretation of structural differentiation that emphasize blunted differentiation (Smelser 1990), unequal differentiation (Champagne 1990), uneven differentiation (Champagne 1992a; Colomy 1985) , dedifferentiation (Lechner 1990; Tiryakian 1992), and incomplete differentiation (Surace 1992). Explanatory frameworks of differentiation remain incomplete without attention to micro processes of "coalition formation, negotiation, and group conflict" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 554). Understanding of consequences of differentiation has to include along its positive effect on flexibility, adaptiveness, and effectivity the corresponding negative effects should "new circles of interest" (Colomy 1990b; Rhoades 1990; Smelser 1974, 1985) form in connection to groups that resist further differentiation.

By introducing micro corrective into its explanatory framework, structural differentiation theory extends its empirical and conceptual applicability to comparative study of individual and group agency and its impact on differentiation. Pioneering work in this regard is Eisenstadt's (1964, 1965, 1971, 1973, 1980) that identifies institutional entrepreneurs as groups of agents that move and direct differentiation as they taking lead in promoting structural change "crystallize broad symbolic orientations in new ways, articulate specific goals, and construct novel normative and organizational frameworks" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 554). In contrast to Marx's notion of class, Weber's of the state, and Smelser's of estate, institutional entrepreneurs are groups that are "usually small in number, communicate regularly, share a corporate identity and culture, and are mobilized in pursuit of an identifiable program" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 554). Eisenstadt approaches structural differentiation as an outcome of struggles and alliances among groups (Alexander and Colomy 1985a, 1985b) that makes the process of social change fraught with uncertainty and problems as differentiation depends less on rational response to systemic environments than on the "relatively autonomous processes of group formation and functioning and of goal articulation" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 555).

Eisenstadt avoids micro reductivism by limits that environments impose on institutional entrepreneurship within which actors pursue their ends as part of entrepreneurial conduct that in his analytical understanding comprises "agentic processes of typification, invention, and strategization" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 555). While the notion of institutional entrepreneurship has been applied to explain the rise of bureaucratic empires (Eisenstadt 1963) and development of ancient civilizations (Eisenstadt 1982, 1985, 1990), it can be extended for the "study of micro dynamics affecting differentiation" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 555) along dimensions of new differentiation project articulation, project supporting organization development, and other groups and organizations cooptation. Deriving from existential Marxism (Sartre 1968: 91-166) the notion of an institutional project facilitates sociological generalizations by combining construction of organizational or institutional niche, identification of pretexts for change, recommendation of new differentiation levels, employment of institutional prototypes, and elaboration of appropriate imagery (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 555-556). By proposing institutional projects entrepreneurial groups open a space unfolding between their actions and their macro environments (Sartre 1968: 91), which through interaction with micro dynamics contingently steers course of crystallization of new institutions. The process of leigitimization of the structural change that institutional projects instrumentalize as their pretexts includes condemnation of existing conditions (Turner and Killian 1987: 242-245, 266-272) and evaluative institutional contrast (Shibutani 1970) as show empirical studies of feminist strategies of institutional change in urban police departments (Rose 1977; Turner and Colomy 1988).

Most significantly institutional project is defined by the type of advocated differentiation, scope of the promoted change, and proposed "interchange relations between the focal institutions and other subsystems" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 556) as it specifies social sectors of change, indicates its functions, outlines its structure, and makes authority claims. Among the forms of differentiation that institutional prject may advance are autonomous mass media (Alexander 1990a), differentiated public sphere (Mayhew 1990), uneven political party differentiation (Colomy 1990b), unequal functional differentiation (Champagne 1990), and dedifferentiating syndroms (Lechner 1985). The scope of entrepreneurial projects exhibits wide range as their variations include historical revolutions (Eisenstadt 1978), backlash and fundamentalist movements (Lipset and Raab 1978), ethical prophecies (Weber [1922] 1964), cultural revolutions and fundamentalisms (Lechner 1990), and incremental change (Colomy and Tausig 1994). The interchange relations between focal institutitions and their environment take forms of interpenetration (Munch 1987, 1988), which being more widespread is exemplified by relations between educational institutions and the state (Tyack and Hansot 1982), domination, which absolutist states (Anderson 1974), one-party state (Bendix 1978), sectarian dictatorships (Miller 1956), and unencumbered capitalism (Polanyi 1944) embody, and isolation, which corresponds to self-sufficient communities (Berger 1981).

Entrepreneurial projects confront their macro environment as given element of their institutional programs. For instance, educational entrepreneurs endeavor to temper the consequences of political economy (Haskell 1984), educators perceive public high school as means for differential nationalization of immigrants (Tyack and Hansot 1982), secondary education reproduces social and historical patterns of marginalization (Anderson 1988), schools attempt to impart national and moral values to immigrants (Tyack and Hansot 1980), schools try to counteract urban criminality and social problems (Dreeben 1971), schools participate in allocating students into occupational niches (Tyack and Hansot 1980), religious reformers affect social and territorial reach of common schooling (Cremin 1988; Meyer et al. 1979; Tyack and Hansot 1982), and reformers extend social rights by expanding educational system and social services (Perkin 1981; Rodman 1964; Sabine 1961). To extend and justify their project, institutional entrepreneurs employ prototyping based on metaphors giving direction to their activities, frames of reference for innovators and potential supporters, and value-giving archetypes serving as symbolic resource of institutional legitimization.

Cross-societal prototyping occurs in situations of perceived competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis another country, community, or group as is the case when educational systems of industrially advanced and commercially successful countries become models for emulation (Cremin 1961). Cross-institutional prototyping involves "selective borrowing from other institutional spheres in the same society" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 559) by introduction of respected practices and metaphors in order to gain legitimacy (Tyack 1974) and by active adaptation of assimilated exemplars (Diggins 1978). Revivalistic prototyping draws on historical exemplars to stress the continuity between advocated institutional project and previously existing forms that lend legitimacy by providing stable frame of reference (Kass 1965). Prototyping takes course over innovative and derivative phases of its implementation (Colomy 1985) that in the first phase articulates, specifies and constructs an altered institutional order while in the second the developing institutional structure itself serves as point of evaluative reference for other reformers (Tyack and Hansot 1982). Typifying processes build upon cultural content of institutional projects that usually refers, in separate or conjoint manner, to injustice of existing arrangements and to legitimization of alternative structures, which formation of differentiated political parties illustrates (Wallace 1969, 1973).

New cultural frameworks facilitate inventive dynamics of institutional project implementation when long-standing conditions become subject of critical reassessement and when more satisfactory alternatives receive expression in social movements for their advocacy (Blumer 1939; Smelser 1991; Turner and Killian 1987). Cultural themes and symbols strategically legitimate introduction of alternatives to institutional order among the examples of which are social progressivism in universal public schooling (Ravitch 1974), "preparation for life" in public high schools (Cremin 1961), and professionalization in civil service and administration (Larson 1977, 1984; Tyack 1974). Institutional projects are subject to continuous revision under the influence of communicative feedback within entrepreneurial group, reconciliation of disagreements over project's objectives, coalitions with other groups with divergent projects, project modification to appease or undermine opposition, and changes in opportunities structure of the macro environments (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 560).

Institutional projects require group coordination as part of mobilization of means for their realization that also reflects efforts to articulate objectives of innovative action. While below certain thresholds of contention internal conflict is not inimical to effective project organization (Shibutani 1978), when dissent stalls institutional change a more cohesive constellation of actors has to carry forward and sustain the organization. Preexisting communication networks, organizations, and communities are either redeployed in the process of construction of organizations around institutional projects or substantially altered within emergent relations, which "typically involves modification of conventional modes of interaction and the articulation of new relationships" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 561). In organization building either redeployment or emergence of relations usually predominate to the extent that the attempts to implement both these types undermine the supporting social foundations of the entrepreneurial project (Calhoun 1983). However, the institutional project redeploying organizations, networks, and communities as it promotes structural change undergoes significant transformation that emergent process within its own organization trigger (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 562).

The emergent effects of redeployment on the organizations and communities involved in institutional project of structural change subordinates them to the imperatives of the emergent organization that takes shape on the existing but changing institutional base, as was the case with anti-segregation project of more inclusive society (Morris 1981). Emergent dynamics are amplified "when two or more networks, organizations, and/or communities are simultaneously redeployed toward a common end" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 562) to sometimes create new institutional structure that can accumulate power and authority in its own right (Branch 1988). Emergent dynamics of institutional entrepreneurship culminates in creation of clearly separate organization that features distinct leadership group and institutional project that sets it apart from preexisting structures (Killian 1984). In the absense of significant barriers to collective action, redeployment of existing structures rather than creation of new not only incurs less expense (Morris 1981) but also follows the strategic consideration of micro-macro dynamics favoring either redeployment or emergence in organization building. Consequently, organizations, networks, and communities rule out their redeployment in support of an institutional project that can negatively affect ties with their organizational environments, which promotes predominantly emergent and innovative organization building for projects that meet with hostility (Hole and Levine 1971; Freeman 1973).

Institutional projects require creation of new organizations also when overcoming resistance of existing organizations and networks can exhaust resources of the entrepreneurial group. However, the assessment of how worthwhile redeployment may prove to be depends on "collective definition of a situation" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 563) that by changing the interpretive understanding of the macro environment in which the organization building occurs also alters the perception of strategic interest upon whicb other groups act (Freeman 1973). Among the changes in the macro environments that can diminish the obstacts to the organization building and thus precipitate its formation are unravelling of political and economic alliances, electoral realignments caused by migrations, and international politics (McAdam 1982). Reconstitution of macro environment of networks and communities can foster organization building through, for example, new channels of communication, characteristic culture, increase in similar organizations, identities organized around shared norms (Bledstein 1976; Haskell 1977) and network-related channels of influence (Tyack 1974; Tyack and Hansot 1982), which can enable implementation of related institutiomal projects.

Via reconfiguration of social ties changes in macro environments make available new resources for organization building. In response to environment marked by political fragmentation, weak centralization, and local diversity arise decentralized organizations, which enables them to flexibly react to local conditions, cope with unanticipated events, confront mobilized opposition, and disseminate local project or strategy modifications (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 565). As internal environments for institutional projects serve incentives relating to their purposes, material rewards, and solidairity providing support for the motivation committed by the members of the entrepreneurial group that through internalization and public circulation of its motives generates support among its adherents and macro environments (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 565). When envisioned project aims at collective good, rewards for the associated effort that mobilized group reaps (Olson 1965) include material advantages to its leaders in the form of control over significant patronage (Colomy 1985), and powerful administrative posts (Tyack 1974), and such intangible benefits as prestige, elite social circles membership, and public recognition (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 565).

Whether enduring organization is built on the basis of redeployment or emergence of cohesive groups around institutional projects for their members, regardless of organization size (Olson 1965), they provide both solidary incentives 0f firendship, mutual identification, esteem, and expressive gratification together with respective sanctions, and commitment forms such as sacrifice, investment, renunciation, and communion (Kanter 1972). Taking sustained part in the activities of the institutional project group and in the struggle for realization of its goals can fundamentally change how personal strategic calculations are made by reconstructing participants' schemes of interpretation, conceptions of rewards and risks, and views of continued organizational involvement (McAdam 1988). Internal adaptation carries influence on the type of organization that project group eventually translates into its structure as it affirms the shared values of the group (Rothschild-Whitt 1979). Disagreements over character of the project, its implementation strategies, organization structure, program modifications to enlist support, and accomodations to opposition or recalcitrant environment drive the need for compromise (Turner and Killian 1987) that necessitates articulation of either consistency, coherence, and continuity (Berger 1981) or coertion, exception, denial, and concealment (Pestello 1991).

When project amendments or new strategies are proposed, affective responses are common consequence of compromise (Hochschild 1983) that giving rise to perceptions of unfair redistribution of power or abandonment of core ideas may "endanger concerted action within the entrepreneurial group and the success of the institutional project" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 567) which typically calls for misgivings reassessment, project prioritization, and group cohesion mobilization. To implement institutional project its leaders need legitimation, power, and resources that require capacity both to garner agreement of various groups and to surmount opposition the efficacy which is conditional on macro environments. Since strategic action takes recourse to interpretive frameworks and macro structures, theoretical reconstruction of the calculation behind it cannot be restricted to micro level of rewards and costs. Mobilization of support takes typified form of a repertoire of collective action (Tilly 1978) that relies on slow change of action strategies, perceptions of obviousness, and meeting acceptability expectations, which nevertheless leaves room for its reflexive application making tactical adjustments, innovation, and novel action forms possible.

Selection process of action tactics from within the group's repertoire is guided by probable success calculation, associated costs, and response estimates whereas lack of success, high cost, incompatibility with the project, or trenchant opposition prompt selection of alternative or invention of new courses of action. Structure of opportunities, configuration of macro environment, and power of opposing groups condition the propensity of action repertoire for invention so that the greater the levels of differentiation the more dispersed are support resources, the more differentiated and inclusive society is the more likely cross-cutting coalitions are, and the more differentiated symbol systems are the more likely are alternative structures to arise respectively (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 568). Openness of opportunity structure being dependent on relative position that enterpreneurial groups, their supporting bodies, and their larger constituencies occupy, higher levels of local social differentiation create more openings for mobility and inclusion through which minority groups can improve their position (Alexander 1990b). Under conditions of closed opportunity structure institutional projects promoting greater levels of differentiation have to rely on innovative strategies of action to reach accommodation of their program by political authorities and various elites (Piven and Cloward 1977), which leads these strategies to be subsequently conventionalized, added to action repertoire, and appropriated for other projects.

The tactical dynamics obtaining between project groups and their opponents influences the choice or invention of a particular strategy when adoption and redeployment of tactical innovations prompts tactical counters by their opponents, which neutralizes old and stimulates further strategic inventions (McAdam 1983). Exchange mechanisms facilitate support for an institutional project on the premise of benefits deriving from it such as offers of situational advantages, valuable information, and public legitimation for its allies (Tierney 1982). The application of negative inducement strategies in reaction to intractable constituencies, uncongenial elites, and obstinate opposition relies on perception that their outcome is more effective than restraint from coersion (Turner and Killian 1987), that sessation of attack tactics provides sufficient incentive for consessions (McAdam 1982), and that these macro environments "worsen their condition unless compliance is granted" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 570).

The relative amount and structure of resources that institutional entrepreneurs control condition their ability to remunerate supporters and to penalize opponents, which gives inherent advantage to proponents of instututional projects most richly supplied with resouces to become successful entrepreneurs which explains disproportianate elite representation among them (Eisenstadt 1964). Under circumstances of rapid transformations undermining political stability resource-poor groups by taking recourse to diverse forms of mass disobedience can occasionally bring about signficant institutional changes (Piven and Cloward 1977) the process of which is reciprocally amplified within even minimal opportunity structure by the entrepreneurial group's accumulation of resources by appealing to constituencies, networks, and organizations that are sympathetic to their project (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 570). Entrepreneurs interpetatively align the framing of their institutional project towards complenetarities with orientations of their constituencies, sometimes appealing in universalistic terms beyond their situational advantage (Parsons 1963a, 1963b, 1968), the employed frames of which are "a vital but unmet need, presenting a favorable benefit-cost ratio, invoking solidary ties, and appealing to common value commitments" (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 571).

The alternatives proposed by institutional projects employ adaptive frames of salient claim to argue for inadequacy of the existing level of differentiation and complementary argument that the promoted program meets poorly recognized needs more adequately (Knowles 1991). Often institutional entrepreneurs depict their project as a suitable investment, exaggerate the anticipated benefits, and underestimate the probable costs (Smelser 1991). Institutional entrepreneurs rely on solidary identification by highlighting commonalities that putatively obtain between themselves, their constituencies, and their potentional allies. Typically entrepreneurs possess an acute awareness to the dominant values and motive vocabularies of their time (Mills 1940). Exchange processes can modify the initial project of institututional innovators as seeking its generalized support in broad outline they modify their program implementation in response to the demads of outside groups on whom access to support and resources is contingent (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 572). Established authorities may seek to undermine institutional innovation project by assimilation of enterpreneurial organization, cooptation of its leaders, and negotiated exchange of concessions on both sides (Piven and Cloward 1977).

While resistance commonly accompanies efforts to change institutional order the related group conflict does not have direct impact on resultant structural differentiation since possible range of outcomes of the opposition to an enterpreneurial project stretches from failure to even partially realize its goals to nearly complete institutionalization. To derail institutional projects opponents typically deploy countervailing strategies, allies and resources, challenge entrepreneurial frames, and furnish oppositional frames of reference (Colomy 1990a). When the institutional project advancing greater degree of differentiation receives public, formal, and legal affirmation, powerful constituencies can empty it of practical substance by subverting its objectives, which converts structural change into symbolic achievement (Rhoades 1990). Incomplete differentiation is likely outcome of competition between groups with approximately equal power that struggle to control particular functions and dispute rival claims to exclusive authority (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 573; Surace 1992). In macro environments divided by lines of primordial belonging, competition between enterpreneurial groups creates parallel structures (Smelser 1991: 107; Tyack 1966). Should insitutional entrepreneurs considerably gain in support and resources, persistent struggle by opponents to institional change leads to their eventual adoption of constituent elements of the enterpreneurial project to partially appropriate the resources mobilized by the innovators and to polarize their differences from the innovative project the unintended consequence of which is modification of existing order (Colomy 1985; Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 573-574).

While in the long run implementation of an institional project may meet with success or changes in macro environment can produce favorable opportunity structure (Smelser 1991), in the short run attempts at introduction of new levels of differentiation usually evoke staunch opposition that causing entrepreneurial group to fail can prompt it to redouble its efforts, modify its project, and revise its strategy (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 574). Should efforts at structural differentiation succeed, its legitimacy and viability may be questioned by its critics on the grounds of divergence from society's most fundamental principles, defense of traditional rights and privileges and of public welfare, and perceived inadequacy in addressing emergent problems (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 574). Thus, micro correcive of differentiation theory enables systematic and comparative study of institional projects, analytic examination of organization building via support generation and resistance defusion, reflexive account of coalition formation, exchange processes and competition and conflict, and theoretical awareness of contingence on institutional project of adaptive and performative effects its implementation frequently has on further structural differentiation (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 575).

To examine particular reconfigurations of institutional order, a tenable theory of transformation of modernity has to operate with specific and concrete terms (Alexander 1992) so that its investigation has to include elaboration on its articulation as institional project, its translation into organization building, and its strategies of acquisition of support and prevailing over opposition (Colomy and Rhoades 1994: 575).