ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book examines Pyyhtinen's assertion that sociology tends to overlook things, focusing instead on actors and their communities, practices and personae, or at a more philosophical level, on conceptual abstraction, linguistic categories and meta-theory. Tsatsaroni and Cooper contrast Bernstein's unproblematic treatment of the social as a separate domain with Latour's rejection of the purification that divides natural and social. Pyyhtinen also draws on Latour, claiming that despite Simmel's recognition of the interdependence of social and material phenomena, he retained an asymmetric priorization of the social. Sociological theories are rarely settled empirically or by consensus. They retain their indeterminate status and do not become facts, and consequently, they remain susceptible to transformation in transit. In the opening chapter Cooper, under the heading geosociology, transformations in the flow of information and changed strategies of governance.
