Bureaucratic mobility converts settled residents into transients who never become recognizable

Evidence

For my friend, being a participant in great historical transformations has had a very personal meaning. It has meant an unsettling alteration in her formerly solid world. The change in that world is hardly a massive one, but it is perceptible to her. She can see, and recognizes that she must cope with the fact, that what was once an environment of personally-known others, is becoming, however limited the degree, a world of unknown others. “People are always coming and going,” she says. They arrive, but they never seem to stay long enough to be recognizable. They come, not as settlers, but as transients; they come because one of the great governmental or private bureaucracies of which they are a part asked them to come, and they will go when the great bureaucracies want them to be someplace else. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 1041

Categorization

• XREF: Directly names the causal machinery behind Simmel’s blasé urban condition: large bureaucracies shuffle people such that even small towns lose stable known others.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘world of strangers’ as a condition where people arrive as transients, not settlers, making recognition impossible regardless of town size.