Microsociology of everyday life must link micro events to macro power structures

Evidence

For a long time traditional bias in the social sciences favored “grand” developments, while excluding everyday life from what was considered a relevant area of research. Changes in the late 1960s and 1970s came about with the emergence of microsociology, most notably the leverage of phenomenology (Luckmann, 1978). Advocates of the study of meaningful social phenomena on their own grounds claimed that “we must begin all sociological understanding of human existence with an understanding of everyday life” (Douglas, 1974:x). Pathbreaking in their analytical eye for the details of everyday situations, many phenomenological and ethnomethodological interpretations of everyday events fall short where they fail to take into account the social and political framework of intergroup relations. Significant for the development of a theory of everyday racism has been a small number of theoretical attempts to link micro events to macro structures, in order to show “how practice is structured by organizational context and the distribution of power” (Alexander and Giesen, 1987:36). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1469

Categorization

• QUESTION: The logic here echoes the person-environment debates in the sound/noise literature — worth chasing whether ‘everyday’ harm theory generalizes across domains.
• XREF: connects to: Microsociology’s localism fails once interaction is disembedded from physical place. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 21