Sublime

functional and therefore become stable and observable. Such patterns are expressed not so much in terms of people’s race, ethnicity, language, or place of birth but in what they do for a living.

A number of long-range random links, if combined with densely knit clumps, produce a low degree of separation of each person from everyone else on the planet. This patterning of networks and the low level of separation of people worldwide is one reason why future diseases, rumours, information and innovations can spread rapidly (Watts 1999, 2003).

What values and practices can hold people together as the institutions in which they live fragment?

Another of Forrester’s classics was his study of urban dynamics, published in 1969, which demonstrated that subsidized low-income housing is a leverage point.3 World Bank, The less of it there is, the better off the city is—even the low-income folks in the city. This model came out at a time when national policy dictated massive low-income housing

“dramaturgical” act: “We find that upward mobility involves the presentation of proper performances and that efforts to move upward and efforts to keep from moving downward are expressed in terms of sacrifices made for the maintenance of front.”

Turner noted that “man is both a structural and an anti-structural entity, who grows through anti-structure and conserves through structure.”

Together, these elements—a community’s social facts—inform how members of that community see the world and how they show up in the world.

Research sociologist

But from the standpoint of modern sociology we feel that man is necessarily a social thing, if only for the reason that no individual can come into being without a father and a mother—and this is already society.