Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action

White, Harrison C.

ISBN 10: 069100398X / ISBN 13: 9780691003986

Published by Princeton University Press, 1992

About this Item

Oversized softcover. Covers are clean with minor edge-wear, creasing on spine. Binding is tight and secure. Pages are clean, crisp, and bright with some occasional pencil markings and light toning at outer edges. Copyright page dated 1992. 423 pages. A very nice copy. This is an oversized book, so extra shipping will be necessary for priority or international shipping. We ship everyday from a real neighborhood bookstore. This description is written by an actual person, who is holding the book in front of them to make sure it?s properly described. Please contact us with questions or if you would like to see photographs.

Seller Inventory # F-13136

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 069100398X
• ISBN 13: 9780691003986
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

In proposing a comprehensive network theory that cuts across the range of social sciences, Harrison White rejects conventional hierarchical models and focuses instead on efforts of control in a social structure described as a tangle of locked-in practices. He argues that the widely held conceptions of person and goal grounded in traditional political economy do not provide a basis for social theory that is either coherent or consistent with current developments in psychology and anthropology. White replaces person with identity, which, in a distinctively human sense, emerges from frictions and social noise across different levels and disciplines in networks. Likewise he reshapes the notion of goals, maintaining that they merely inhabit sets of stories used to explain agency, and that action itself comes through selective strategies to break through formal organization. As his main empirical basis, White uses case studies covering a wide range of topics, including tribal religions, changing rhetorics of industrial administration and the premodern Church, practices of State-building, and change of style in popular music. His analyses draw from English social anthropology, natural science, French rhetorics, mathematics, German industrial history, control engineering, and American pragmatism.