ABSTRACT

Macro phenomena are created locally in concrete situations, in which linking these situations through specific media with other situations is successful. Macro phenomena such as 'capitalism' are no longer 'above' micro situations, but are to be reconstructed from other specific social situations, which are located on a same socio-ontological level. It depends on seeing where mediated 'thin' interaction situations allow the logic of the gift only incompletely and where organizations also hedge the power of the gift with their role expectations as interdependence breakers. All thought about macro social phenomena is based initially on a simple sociological intuition: in every concrete action situation, we experience that our situation is preshaped by 'things' outside the situation. Thereby, micro- and macro phenomena are not located on qualitatively different levels; it is more a matter of gradual thus quantitative differences: namely, one can assume with Randall Collins that macro phenomena capture more people, expand farther spatially, and have a longer duration.