To situate this selection, here is a précis of the argument as a whole

The Argument If society is not an organism, why do its parts—people and groups of people—tend to act in regular and predictable ways? A long line of social theorists have argued that regularity is due to a general process whereby the fluidity of social relations can crystallize into definite structures that then confront further interaction as objective social facts. In Chapter 1 I propose that this vision—and in most cases it has been little more than that—is a reasonable starting point for an investigation of social structure. But to make it analytically useful, we must focus on the different stages or moments of this dynamic in close empirical detail.