ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the aspects of the contextuality of social life and institutions. Regional geography and, more generally, human geography have become more human and more contextual in the wake of structuration theory. Context is one of the key concepts in geographical research that connects the most intimate and detailed components of interaction to much broader properties of the institutionalization of social life. Social scientists should be concerned with the structure and evolution of society in time and space. These insights are gradually undermining the deeply rooted presupposition that principles of spatial ordering are at the basis of the spatial arrangement of mundane, regional, and local societies. It is becoming increasingly clear that nation-states, cities, municipalities, and so on are social categories which are based on principles of social ordering. Social theory has been enriched with a new perspective in which the dialectical relation between societal structures and individual human agents is the central issue.
