The Meso Level as Sociological Territory

Sociological analysis is often described through a two-level contrast: the micro level of face-to-face interaction, conversation, and individual experience; and the macro level of whole societies, national institutions, global systems. The contrast is useful for orientation but hides the scale at which most sociological work actually happens. Between the dyadic encounter and the national economy lies a large and heterogeneous plane of social forms — clubs, classrooms, friendship circles, kinship groups, project teams, hiring networks, churches, unions, firms, hospitals, political parties, movement coalitions. This plane is the meso level, and it is where a great deal of empirical sociology is conducted.

The meso matters not because it is a compromise between the other two levels but because it is where the mechanisms that link them operate. A national pattern of unemployment is not reproduced directly onto individual workers; it is transmitted through firms that lay off, networks that distribute information about new jobs, neighborhoods that shape whose labor-market contacts are strong and whose are thin. A cultural norm does not leap from the national stage to the individual mind; it is instantiated in the organizations a person encounters — schools, workplaces, religious congregations — each of which filters, adapts, and enforces it. When sociologists want to explain how a macro force touches a micro life, they almost always end up analyzing a meso-level structure (Hedström and Swedberg 1998, pp. 7-10; Coleman 1990, pp. 1-23).

Three interrelated but distinguishable forms compose the meso: groups, networks, and organizations. The distinction matters analytically, even though the forms overlap in practice.

A group is a set of people who share some awareness of common membership and who interact, at least occasionally, on the basis of that membership. Groups have boundaries, however fuzzy, and a sense of who is in and who is out. A family, a friendship circle, a seminar, a work crew, a book club, a street gang — all are groups in this sense. Group research in sociology focuses on the internal dynamics of such sets: how members coordinate, how status is distributed, how norms emerge and get enforced, how the group manages its boundary with non-members.

A network is a pattern of ties — friendships, contacts, exchanges, communications — among a set of actors. Network analysis does not require the actors to share group membership or awareness of each other as a collective. What matters is the structure of the ties: who is connected to whom, how densely, through what kinds of relationship, with what information or resources flowing across the links. A person's professional network, a city's web of philanthropic interconnections, a global system of scientific collaborations — each can be studied as a network regardless of whether the members recognize themselves as a group.

An organization, in the sense used in organizational sociology, is a formally structured entity with explicit goals, defined roles, rules for decision-making, and some persistence over time beyond any individual member. Firms, universities, hospitals, government agencies, and formally constituted non-profits are organizations in this sense. Organizations contain groups and are threaded through by networks, but their formal structure — hierarchies, procedures, written rules — gives them properties that neither groups nor networks alone possess (Scott 2003, pp. 20-27).

The three forms intersect constantly. A workplace is an organization; the people who eat lunch together form a group within it; the advice ties linking them to colleagues elsewhere form a network. The sociologist's question is usually which of these structures is doing the explanatory work. If the puzzle is why two firms of similar size and industry produce very different products, the answer may lie in their internal group cultures, or in the networks they are embedded in, or in their formal organizational design — and each answer leads to a different body of theory and evidence.

The chapters of this topic take the three forms in turn, show how they have been studied, and return to the integrative question: how do groups, networks, and organizations together constitute the meso level where most of sociology's empirical work gets done?