Infrastructure
Projects
Infrastructures are the bases on which social, economic, and political life rests. Some of the most important include transportation, communications, energy, water, and waste systems. Cities could not exist without them—nor could the large-scale and abstractly systemic webs of indirect social relations. But even directly interpersonal relations depend on infrastructures: sidewalks and front porches, places to meet, and ways to stay in touch with those who move.
Works in Progress
- “Missing Infrastructure” — An account of the relative absence of infrastructure from sociological theory and its implications.
- “Underneath the Social” (with Hillary Angelo) — An examination of the ways in which material and socio-technical infrastructure shapes social life.
Selected Publications
- 1987. Computer Technology, Large-Scale Social Integration and the Local Community, Urban Affairs Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 329–349.
- 1988. Populist Politics, Communications Media, and Large-Scale Social Integration, Sociological Theory, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 219–241.
- 1991. Indirect Relationships and Imagined Communities: Large Scale Social Integration and the Transformation of Everyday Life, in P. Bourdieu and J.S. Coleman (eds.), Social Theory for a Changing Society, Boulder, CO: Westview Press and New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 95–120.
- 1992. The Infrastructure of Modernity: Indirect Relationships, Information Technology, and Social Integration, in H. Haferkamp and N.J. Smelser (eds.), Social Change and Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 205–236.