ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes social dynamics, that is, directional motion, or more generally, change in social life. Social changes consist in significant configurations of differences in bundles. As a result, the basic components of bundles underwrite a typology of ingredients of change. Social changes usually embrace configurations, often complex configurations, of these. Boiled down to basics, the central kind of event bound up with social change is human activity: human activity is the principal generator of difference and change in social life. Many activity-events, including many interventions in the world, are reactions. People’s activities react, for example, to others’ remarks or actions, to events in the circumjacent setting, to changes in social affairs, to new opportunities, and to natural events. Latour’s opposition to the notions of actor and doing rests on an overly substantial, even causal sense of source, starting point, and initiative.
