Content area
Full text
In this article I generalize ecological theory by developing the notion of separate but linked ecologies. I characterize an ecology by its set of actors, its set of locations, and the relation it involves between these. I then develop two central concepts for the linkage of ecologies: hinges and avatars. The first are issues or strategies that "work" in both ecologies at once. The second are attempts to institutionalize in one ecology a copy or colony of an actor in another. The article investigates the first of these concepts using two detailed examples of hinge analysis between the professional and political ecologies. Both concern medical licensing, the first in 19th-century New York and the second in 19th-century England. For the avatar concept, the article analyzes four less detailed cases linking the professional and university ecologies: computer science, criminal justice, clinical psychology, and applied economics.
A long-standing debate pits individualist against emergentist accounts of social systems. For the individualists, social systems are the additive results of individual phenomena, aggregated through simple structures like markets. For the emergentists, social systems constitute an independent level whose fully social structures coerce individual phenomena. Between these radically opposed accounts have long existed a number of intermediate views. In these intermediate accounts, individuals make their own histories, but-to modify the Marxian dictum-in that making they produce larger structures that in turn render them unable to make those histories under conditions of their own choosing.
In this article, I extend what is perhaps the best known of those intermediate conceptions, the idea of ecology. Ecological argument is familiar in sociology. The Chicago School applied it everywhere-in the study of occupations (Hughes 1971), of interaction (Goffman 1963), and, most famously, in the study of urban phenomena from mental illness to marketing (Park, Burgess, and Mackenzie 1925). Ecological thinking remains important in urban studies, where the repeated announcements of its death-from Alihan (1938) to Castells (1968) and Dear (2002)-bear unwilling witness to its vitality, as does the recent emergence of hierarchical models of community effects (Bryk and Raudenbush 1992). Ecological arguments have also been extended from physical urban spaces to abstract social spaces. Wallerstein's (1976) celebrated "world system" is essentially an ecological conception, and Hannan and Freeman's (1977) population ecology approach to organizational...