Mike,
I always have difficult time to read the description like above.
My questions are as follows;
1. Micro-(meso)-macro dichotomy is really produtive?
For example, the analysis of 15 seconds social interaction
cannot be necessarily regarded as "micro" analysis.
"Micro" analysis often includes "macro" viewpoint although it
depends on what one analyses 15 seconds interaction.
So, it seems to me that we should radically reconsider what is micro,
macro, meso.
It is worth asking that the analysis of 15 seconds and of 1 year
are really different?
2. Is macro given?
I do not straightly understand the term such as "macro(meso)
social structure" and "large-scale processes".
Rather, always I would like to ask "macro or large-scale processes
is whose agenda?".
So, before discussing the affective relation among micro, macro,
meso, I am interested in how practioners and scientists
are making observable of "macro" or "large scale" by using various
resources or artifacts and in how "macro" or "large-scale processes"
is used and embedded in practice.
In this context, I can paraprase the following G. H. Mead's phrase.
'When one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into them as he then
was, without their relationship to what he has become; and if he could,
that is, if he could reproduce the experience as it then took place,
he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the present
within which that use must take place. A string of presents conceivably
existing as presents would not constitute a past.'(Mead, p.30)
Ueno's paraphrasing Mead is as follows;
'When one recalls his macro social structure or large scale
process, he cannot get into them as it then
was, without their relationship to what his present practice has become
; and if he could, that is, if he could reproduce the macro or large scale
as it then took place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not
being in the present practice within which that use must take place.
........................"
History is not like the given natural environment.
(of course the "given natural environment" is actually not given.)
Naoki Ueno
NIER, Tokyo