Social worlds/arenas theory is concerned with what we may call the meso-level—recognizing, of course, that there are no boundaries in practice—just complex fluidities. I have always been especially interested in this meso- or organizational/institutional level of analysis. It is where the macro-level long duree forces of urbanization, industrialization, gender/racial/ethnic formation, neoliberalism and globalization/transnationalization are temporally, geopolitically and temporarily instantiated—grounded in local/regional practices that become routinized, normalized, mundane. As a young social scientist in the 1980s, I felt this level had been comparatively under-developed in sociology and beyond. Interestingly, I was far from alone in thinking this and there are today a number of such theoretical frameworks from actor-network theory to assemblage theory, various forms of network analysis and, of course, a number of forms of discourse analysis (about which more below). These various approaches foreground different facets and it is exciting to have an array of approaches that can do the full range of work.
Engaging Complexities: Working Against Simplification as an Agenda for Qualitative Research Today