ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a series of forays into that landscape. It examines the significance of several prominent phenomena that social theories have claimed determine or explain social changes. The chapter also examines Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar, and Matt Watson’s claim that practices form complexes through relations of dependence. It suggests that dependence relations obtain among two practices when the chains of actions through which the one practice can feasibly obtain something it needs all pass through the other practice. The chapter attempts to analyze everything relationally should be dropped and replaced by a more ecumenical approach that recognizes a plurality of categories of entity—substances, events, structures, and processes—in addition to relations. Dependence, coevolution, and power feature widely in contemporary theories of social change. Social phenomena are slices or aspects of the plenum of practices, of the bundles and constellations of practices and material arrangements that compose the plenum.
