A Brief Introduction to Civic Analysis
Civic Analysis (CA) is a theory and set of methods for ‘civic science’ — or civic sociology — one of two sides of the emerging, interdisciplinary ‘Civic Arts & Sciences’ or more simply called: ‘Civics’.[1]
CA involves study of three related things:
- Civic Ecologies (CE)
- Civic Actions (CX)
- Civic Processes (CP)
What makes these things ‘civic’ is that these occur in ‘places’ — accordingly, CA is ultimately a place-based theory and method.
Places here are understood to be any spatially-, socially- and temporally- bounded system.[2]
Civics: More than ‘Local’
It is an analytic choice whether the relevant ‘place’ is a neighbourhood, a nation-state, a city-region, the globe — the ‘boundary’ is, thus, sensible, recognisable and rooted in reality and lived experiences, but could often-enough also be defined differently, particularly when dealing with ecologies, actions and processes that extend beyond the civic boundaries at hand.
For example, CA could be done on ‘Manchester’ — which immediately offers the choice of Manchester’s urban core, consisting of Manchester and Salford city councils and, in fact, only parts of each of these formal territories. Or ‘Manchester’ could extend to Greater Manchester and even areas beyond in Derbyshire, Cheshire, Lancashire and so on.
Ultimately, the research question or puzzle will largely determine which boundaries makes analytic sense and are relevant. Marking a clear civic boundary allows us to identify the relevant CEs, CXs, CPs and so on — meaning those ecologies, actions, processes that occur in that specified place.
Of course, no ecologies, actions and processes will in fact be wholly contained within one place — so we must clarify that ‘civic’ does not mean ‘local’ — for CPs occurring in a given place will always be linked to regional, national, international and global processes, all with multiple interlocking histories, social groupings, institutional and organisational forms, communication networks and so forth.
For this reason, the civic sociologist Patrick Geddes’ maxim, ‘Think Global, Act Local!’, remains central to our reconstructed Civics. Yet, just as in Geddes’ original scholarly programme, ‘thinking globally’ does not mean merely adopting an easy cosmopolitan ethics before doing feel-good philanthropic work nearby. Rather, classical Civicists[3] developed an entire intellectual infrastructure in order to systematically think globally/nationally/regionally/locally and so on; they then acted locally together with communities, municipalities, professionals, businesses and so on. They co-developed appropriate and well-informed generative civic actions to produce long-term, systemic change. Many of their interventions are still with us today, particularly evident in their legacies latent in the postwar welfare state, United Nations, social housing schemes and so on. Civicists, however, did not wait for the state to act — often enough, they invented and tested new ways of intervening in and improving local areas, provided evidence of best practice that could inform similar actions in other localities. Thus civic analysis and civic action were reciprocally and reflexively related to one another, with knowledge of civic ecologies informing action and vice-versa across one or more civic processes.
The civic approach to social research and public engagement accordingly differs from more linear social scientific and policy approaches to ‘impact’ that tend to treat places as objects of study to be analysed from a ‘spectator’ point of view; one that conforms with generalisable ‘evidence’ and ‘data’, usually of a bureaucratic ‘measurable’ kind. This evidence is presented for grants, peer review, publication and other time-consuming, quality control and gatekeeping rituals, resulting in considerable lags between data collection and intervention. Once the ‘proven’ facts are in hand, a scholar might then ‘apply’ their findings as a specific policy intervention or they might work with (or, often enough, on) a community to demonstrate impact in similarly auditable ways. Such bureaucratic rituals supposedly ensure ‘value-for-money’ — but, from a civic point of view these represent only one highly limited form of enquiry and impact since only a small fraction of social processes work in such a linear and sequential fashion.
Civic Processes
Civic processes (CPs) are structured power relations moving and changing through time. Building on the processual ontology of Andrew Abbott, Norbert Elias, A.N. Whitehead, G.H. Mead and others we might note that ‘all is change’ and it is, in fact, stability and durability than needs to be explained.[4]
Apparently stable things could also be called ‘entities’ or ‘organisms’ or ‘events’ — a human being, for example, is a durable organism with a particular lifespan lasting on average 73 years, that is: a 73-year-long event. Other organisms, like planet Earth, are predicted to be a 7.79 billion year event, which we are presently in the middle of. Because many natural processes are changing so slowly — many since the Big Bang — from the point of view of human relevance, these can be treated as fixed, natural ‘laws’.
We can usually treat long-term natural laws, and many material entities — e.g. trees, mountains, even certain human-made road networks and water systems — as relatively stable or ‘given’ in CA. However, depending on the research question, we could always note that our material environment is changing ever more rapidly due to human interventions as denoted in the ‘Anthropocene’ temporalisation of our post-industrial Earth.
Alongside these material processes, sociological processes can often take several generations, as Elias (2000) highlighted in his long-term study of evolving table manners amongst elite French and Francophile court societies. Similarly, discursive processes and cultural changes occur across a few decades, particularly when new media technologies prevent state and social control of information exchange — that is, when the artificial stability maintained by censorship, propaganda and standardised educational curricula break down. Meanwhile, our pragmatic experience of the world occurs in the immediate present, with the past and future encoded in our day-to-day experiences and actions.
Civic actions (CXs) are social actions by human individuals, families, communities, non-humans, organisations and other entities that occur in a given place. CXs are complex and contingent — meaning they could be otherwise — but usually CXs are predictable and patterned events within multiple overlapping processes unfolding across a range of different temporalities — some immediate responses to the moment, for example, remembering to bring a lunchbox to school or conducting a science experiment (pragmatic); some involving the relative fixed natural laws of the universe or the built environment, which we tend to treat as ‘given’ (material); others involving sociological changes to relational power structures including class and gender hierarchies, regional demographics, uneven opportunities and access to jobs, education, food and so on (sociological); and then changes to way we culturally give and understand the meaning to these events, actions and the world around us (discursive).
We can visualise this processual ontology as in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1 — Civic Actions in Civic Processes
Whilst this ontology lies behind CA, it is difficult to access these multiple temporalities directly. Our analysis needs to move between the concrete particulars of actions to the abstract relations between observed events and broader, longer-term processes. Typically, in the social sciences we rely on durable categories, like ‘cities’, ‘nations’, ‘ethnicities’, ‘genders’, ‘democracy’, ‘inequalities’, and so on. These are related to lay categories but are often more technically rigid to allow generalisation and comparison within scientific establishments. However, as Foucault, Kuhn and others note, both lay and expert categories can change over time as the discursive constellations of meaning configure and reconfigure themselves.
Following Whitehead, we cannot access processual reality without moving between these three equally valid levels of reality, which are also equally incomplete without the others:
- Concrete Particulars
- Categories
- Abstraction
CA thus involves a deployment of categories applicable to certain types of places — that is, certain bounded spaces, societies and places — to better understand the civic actions in those places. These comparisons are necessary to grasp the similarity between processes occurring in e.g. most seaside towns or neighbourhoods in global cities. But each specific place will have a different set of particularities — like every human individual, every place is unique despite every human having in common nervous and digestive systems, for example; every city will similarly have road networks and dwellings to sleep in.
Classic Ecologies
On a synchronic level, the predictability of these overlapping processes produces a genuine, if contingent, structure termed ‘ecologies’. Ecologies can be mapped and interrogated with the aid of expert categories whilst moving between the abstractions of theory and the realities of contingent lived experience. Social events cannot be adequately understood without reference to contexts — temporal contexts (processes) and socio-spatial contexts (ecologies) — neither of which are directly accessible to us as individuals. We therefore require a ‘science’ in the German sense of Wissenschaft, meaning an organised body of knowledge that can accumulate collectively amongst practitioners using shared terminology, theory and methods.[5]
Like the processual sociologist, Norbert Elias, CA considers knowledge to be a collective, social fund we are born into, learn from and adapt to as individuals. Knowledge provides us with ‘means of orientation’ to enable more intelligent and reflective action. Accordingly, we can have ‘better’ or ‘worse’ knowledge and not all knowledge is arbitrary. At the same time, science and religion can be seen to exist on a continuum insofar as each provides humans with orientations to tackle social problems. Organised science may provide more collective power to pursue complex actions through deployment of specialised and integrated technologies, particularly in STEMM disciplines. However, religions and ideologies also have this capacity, and may well be more effective at coordinating the more complex links between human processes, ecologies and actions via provision of simple behavioural rules, which are, in turn, linked to morals, values and ethics. Science seems generally incapable of providing these values, which are nonetheless necessary for human life.
Building on Abbott’s ‘linked ecologies’ analysis,[6] which, in turn, builds upon the lineage of the Chicago School and related ecological theories,[7] we have ready-to-hand much of the core resources necessary to develop CA as a ‘Science’. Civic Ecologies (CEs) are overlapping fields, networks, systems, figurations — whatever your preferred terminology[8] — that are occurring in a specified place, like ‘Manchester’, meaning here ‘Greater Manchester’ as contained in the map below.
Figure 2 — Greater Manchester
Within this place, represented abstractly via the map, a multiplicity of material, sociological, discursive and pragmatic processes are occurring at all times, much of which is inaccessible in the present let alone passed down to the present from the past in the form of material artefacts and symbolic resources like archives, buildings, culture and knowledge. Abbott uses the term ‘historicality’ to denote these corporeal, memorial and substantive means of encoding the past in the present through ‘lineages’ woven out of contingent actions with greater or lesser degrees of uncertainty.
Ecological analysis differs from social theories and methods that assume social action is either atomistic (meso- and macro-level patterns being aggregates of individual actions) or mechanistic/organismic (micro- and meso-level actions are functions of the whole). The former is typical of neoliberal economics and the latter is typical of many critical theories in both the humanities and social sciences — any theory that assumes one’s social group position necessarily results in certain actions and beliefs in individuals. A Civicist (or processualist, or ecologist, as these terms can be deemed interchangeable hereafter) would see these contexts as special cases that are the result of extensive (and rare) institutionalisation processes (of markets in the former case, or endemic racism/sexism/classism, etc. in the latter case). The vast majority of civic actions, however, would be assumed to be more ecological — that is, consisting of interactions between elements that are neither fully constrained and automatic, nor fully independent — a middle ground between the two poles as in Figure 3 below.
Figure 3 — Assumed Relationships between Structures and Action
Abbott (2016, 34) provides one definition of ecologies as being ‘the present system of adjacencies and relationships that is the momentary social structure, providing the localities, facilities and constraints that shape the possible actions of the moment’. His initial analysis of professions was more or less classically ecological, that is, Chicagoan, in that he explored ‘professions’ and ‘work’ in relation to contextual competitions between professions over jurisdiction.[9]
Classically, ecologies have 3 components:
1.) Actors (A)
2.) Locations (L)
3.) Relations linking these two (Ligations) (R)
Ecology (E) = Actors (A) + Locations (L) + Ligations (R)[10]
For Abbott’s ‘System of Professions’ (E) these are A.) Professions; T.) Controlled Tasks; R.) Jurisdictional claims and competition. Importantly, R analytically and ontologically precedes A and L insofar as the actors and locations emerge as entities through relational interaction rather than the other way around. There is no pre-existing Cartesian empty social space wherein, for example, therapists and mental illness existed prior to jurisdictional efforts to make each of these actors and locations discrete things.
It is worth noted here that ‘locations’ in the classical ecological tradition are not the same as geographic location in space. Rather we are referring here to social space, which has multiple dimensions as indicated in figure 1 above. Geographical space, such as that contained within our map of Manchester, largely exists in the material dimension consisting of the rivers Irwell, Roch, Mersey and so on, with Pennine peaks to the North and East bounding an area on which any number of buildings, railroads, canals, internet cables, schoolhouses, factories, churches, shopping malls, power grids, farms, woodlands and so on have been socially constructed over centuries. Much, but not all, of our actions tend to treat all this material as ‘fixed’ in that we don’t assume them to change overnight. But these are not the only processes we tend to assume to be fixed day-to-day. The social class system, our incomes, our positions in our workplace, our family structure and composition, etc. are also not structures we assume will change suddenly. Only a tiny fraction of the vast synchronic (or ‘horizontal’) present can be deemed ‘relevant’ to any particular action. And, yet, these are held together via a complex web of historicality, lineages and systems; systems that, according to Niklas Luhmann are organised to a lesser or greater degree through assumption of certain types of actors, locations and actions being recurrent (and excluding or mitigating the effects of actors, locations and actions that fail to conform). In other words, social systems often treat actors as their ‘environment’ even when ostensibly organised to serve them.
Accordingly, we need to denote ‘Civic Ecologies’ as being those ecologies (actors, locations, ligations) occurring within a particular place. Places, recall, consist of any ‘spatially-, socially- and temporally- bounded system’ (see p. 1 above). The term ‘location’ is, thus, used in the ecological sense, with geographical location being reintroduced through the term ‘Civic’.
Linked Ecologies
Having analysed the ‘system of professions’ in a classical ecological way, Abbott realised he made a mistake in treating the audiences professions addressed when establishing jurisdictions (The State, The Public, Coworkers, Colleagues, etc.) as external and ‘fixed’.[11] In reality, each of these ‘external’ entities (governments, public, etc.) were themselves dynamic ecologies. This recognition of linkage — that is, of ‘linked ecologies’ — adds another layer of contingency and makes both internal and external ecological dynamics even more complex.
From this understanding of multiple ecologies occurring as the dynamic contexts for one another, we shift our analytic attention: from action as such, to where linkages occur, why and for how long. Abbott explains the essential element to look for are ‘Alliances’, generally between a subgroup in one ecology forming an alliance with a subgrouping in one or more other ecologies. ‘Successful’ strategies and outcomes within one ecology need to provide results for allies in an adjacent one. A solution or strategy thus solves multiple problems, often very different problems for different groups in different ecologies for very different reasons. Those issues that provide these dual rewards are called ‘Hinges’ as in Figure 4 below.
Figure 4 — Ecologies, Alliances and Hinges
When ecologies come into contact with one another, alliances between subgroups can emerge. Some of the factors contributing to these ‘openings’ include similarities and differences in the actors’ size (common or varying?), distribution (one, two or many ‘big’ players’?), and exclusiveness/covering patterns — that is, do some actors perform roles in multiple, overlapping ecologies? When ecologies are similar, simple sets tend to emerge, in more complex ecologies the alliances can be more ephemeral. Locational variability is similarly important in constituting openings and alliances and can be analysed in terms of their patterns (exclusive or overlapping?), size and relative homomorphism. Ligations further vary in terms of exclusivity, intensity, differentiation, legal standing, external recognition and so on.
Relative homology between neighbouring ecologies can affect the possibilities for alliances as can the temporal rhythms and cycles of actors and locations. Political coalitions over issues, for example, change more rapidly and often than both universities organised around interdisciplinary ‘settlements’ and professional jurisdictions claiming certain kinds of work. Abbott (2016, 49) explains, ‘synchronic and diachronic patterns within and between ecologies create possibilities for alliances between actors & locations across the borders of ecologies’. Most of these possibilities never come to anything, but the opportunities are constantly being probed and explored informally through whisperings, negotiations, gossip, networking, news and so on.[12]
Those hinge issues that enable a successful conversion of an opening into an alliance can change the events and structures within each ecologies as well as the relations between them. More precisely(since the processual view is ‘all is change’ and stability needs to be explained): an emergent alliance reconfigures existing processes resulting in new ecological patterns.
An important discussion could and should be had in terms of the ways actors can ‘lead’ such social change, and it is evident that many individual ‘leaders’ take credit when such changes are positive. Conversely, these same leaders lay blame, scapegoat others and/or ignore events when interventions go badly. Any such assessment of ‘leadership’ should considered from a multi-dimensional view as outlined in figure 1 above. Some individuals’ actions (often in response to interpersonal problems) occur alongside culture, relational and material processes. , More often than not, actual events are the result of unplanned and unintended consequences of actions, especially those that cut across multiple ecologies. It is an empirical question as to whether any one individual (or their ‘team’) can justifiably claim to change an ecology on their own.
A more useful line of inquiry can be found in exploring the creative dimensions of pragmatic actions — that is socially generative action. Consideration of actions vis-à-vis potential becomes most relevant within the realm of the Civic ‘Arts’, that is, when our scientific knowledge of CE patterns can contribute to better collective action, including interventions in civic processes. However, a number of complicated normative issues are immediately raised, and modern ‘science’ is not well positioned to settle matters of ‘values’, ‘morals’, ‘ethics’, etc. The Civic view is that such values are immanent in practice — that is, they are ‘internal goods’ in the sense articulated by MacIntyre. Guhin and others. The path to obtaining better outcomes in places is therefore through active coproduction with others — that is, through actually solving local problems with the aid of general knowledge.
Civic Analysis
We are now in a position to return to the original conceptualisation of ‘Civic Ecologies’ as being those ecologies occurring within a place. The place-boundedness of our analysis does not merely imply we want to study some ‘local’ place over more general and abstract knowledge. Much of our discussion thus far consists of abstract theory and specification of technical categories, both of which are necessary for our ‘science’ to accumulate beyond the experience of one individual at a time. But, places — any and all places — are ontologically complex and contingent, with multiple overlapping ecologies and processes occurring within whatever boundaries we specify.
De facto — that is, independently of our investigation — multiple civic ecologies exist in places. At a general level we can begin with the following set of six depicted in Figure 5 below:
Figure 5 — Six Civic Ecologies
These six ecologies contain any number of identifiable sub-sets including:
1.) MATERIAL
a. Energy systems
b. Technology
c. Built Environment
d. Biological Systems (including human bodies/health)
e. […]
2.) CULTURAL
a. Religion
b. Media
c. Art and Heritage
d. Intangible Culture
e. […]
3.) POLITICAL (REGULATORY)
a. Local
b. Regional
c. National
d. Legal/Juridical
e. Coercive
f. […]
4.) WORK
a. Professional
b. Craft
c. Foundational
d. Unpaid
e. […]
5.) FUNDING
a. Private — Investment
b. Private — Commerce
c. Public
d. Philanthropic
e. […]
6.) LEARNING
a. Universities
b. Colleges
c. Training
d. Informal Learning
e. […]
Abbott’s theory of linked ecologies demonstrates the complexity of just three ecologies interacting with one another: Professions, Universities and States.[13] Note, however, that even these are lower-order subsets of the six higher-order categories — professions being a type of work (generally abstract knowledge-based); universities being an institution of (higher) learning; and ‘the State’ being, in fact, two different things in Abbott’s analysis of 19th century medical licensing — his American case was New York City; and his British case was the entire national ecology. Such was the nature of the relevant ‘State’ for his research questions. Interestingly, the more ‘local’ case of New York was more complex, contingent and ‘ecological’ as captured in this description:
In 1866 the state legislature directed the taxes, debts, building codes, and public health of the city. The state governor named the commissioners of police, of health, of fire, and of immigration, while the city’s mayor named the commissioners of streets and of the aqueduct, and the electorate chose the mayor, the council, the aldermen, the commissioners of education and the controller, who in turn named the commissioners of the city’s hospitals and of the city’s prisons.
As this recitation makes clear, the actors in the New York political ecology were numerous and diverse. These actors included political parties, which were in turn constituted of clubs, firefighting companies, commercial interests, and “patronage swamps” — specific areas of government work under party control. There was also an extensive corps (actually, several competing administrative corps, some of them in Albany, sometimes dominated by the city’s Tammany Hall, sometimes by the upstate Republican machine. There was the Board of Regents, a council of notables named for life (by whatever political party controlled the state at the moment of vacancy) and charged with supervising all the public and private educational establishments in New York. Throughout the century there were also recognized groups representing private interests: for example, the elite reformers who governed the state behind the scenes in the 1870s and 1880s. (Abbott 2016, 52–53)
Such a description captures New York’s political civic ecology quite effectively, and demonstrates, on the one hand, why it is right to assume a multiplicity of ecologies and sub-ecologies exist in any place; indeed, we might assume that more, not less, complexity is revealed as we ‘zoom in’ to a particular locale.[14]
Our six CA categories should be understood to be abstract, but useful heuristic simplifications — they do not tell us what we will find, but rather what we might want to look for.
Some CEs will have universities, others will not. Some will have funding systems dominated by public sources rather than private sources. Each ecology, sub-ecology and the inter-ecological alliances and potential actions will be differently patterned depending on any of these variations. Again, mapping is the relevant art, and our aim is to provide adequate means of orientation. The six core ecologies are accordingly relatively abstract elements to be added to our place-based analyses just as we would want to include lines of latitude, longitude and scale on a globe.
A shared terminology will allow our science and knowledge of places to accumulate. The above introduction only outlines the starting point for this collective endeavour in developing civic analysis as a science.
Next steps
In future texts, I will elaborate how this could translate into practice — that is, Civic Arts. This reflects two ( in fact) three kinds of knowledge:
A.) Science (Theoria)
B.) Practice (Praxis)
C.) Skills (Techne)
The introduction above provides only an initial outline of the first (a). Further texts will develop B + C, though it is worth noting that both can be better developed beyond the constraints of text and written language (which imposes an artificial linearity on experience and learning)
In the meantime, the reader interested in further understanding Civic Action and ‘How it Works’ might wish to consult the aptly titled book ‘How Civic Action Works’ by Paul Lichterman.[15]
April 2023
[1] Civic sociology was founded as an approach to sociology that seeks to reorient the academic discipline of sociology toward local and regional problems through professional practice and normative reflection. This was a reconstruction of the original approach sociologists developed in the 19th and early 20th century when sociology was an interdisciplinary field encompassing much of what we today would call the ‘social sciences’, including history, geography, anthropology, political economy, cultural and area studies and so on; it would also include the professional fields associated with this knowledge including law, business, social work, theology, psychology, criminology and so on. The new title ‘Civic Arts and Sciences’ is intended to highlight this interdisciplinary and interprofessional character of the original ‘civic sociology’ project.
[2] Ontologically, CA considers processes/events/organisms to be the entities that really ‘exist’, but these can only analysed through epistemic systems — thus, systems are a chosen way of observing processes in particular ways.
[3] These classical Civicists — including Geddes, Jane Addams, W.E.B. DuBois, William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, etc. — were generally working during the turn of the 20th century +/- 20–30 years — for ease, we can call this period ‘Edwardian’ as architectural historians characterise the accumulated styles present by the end of the long Victorian period and before the First World War. Similarly, following cultural historians like Peter Gay who denote a transnational ‘Victorian’ era, the term ‘Edwardian’ should also not imply an exclusiveness to England or Britain — neither should this imply valorisation of Empire or the related evils that led to fascism, racism, sexism and war that remain with us today. However, neither should we abandon the very progressive and effective ways in which social reformers, scientists and artists tried to change their worlds for the better both locally and globally.
[4] (Abbott 2001, 2016; Elias 2000; Lybeck 2019, 2020; Mead 1932; Whitehead 1925, 1930)
[5] In recent centuries, humans have amassed a considerably large body of knowledge that is growing rapidly via specialisation. However, ignorance grows concurrently as individuals lose their capacity to orient themselves to what is going on. This applies as much to the ‘uneducated’ worker in the post-industrial town as it does to the scientist who cannot understand what his colleagues in the humanities are teaching. Information overload can produce both more knowledge and more ignorance at the same time. The Civic Arproblem of ignorance — that is, better knowledge related to better civic actions. Implicit in this aim is recognition that our current educational systems are, at best, inadequate for this task, and, more likely, are a key source of mass ignorance due to the irrational faith in standardization and examination-based learning at the expense of art, craft and practical learning.
[6] (Abbott 2005)
[7] (Abbott 1997, 1999; Bulmer 1986; Cortese 1995)
[8] CA is non-exclusive and encourages translation in and out of other paradigms/theories/frameworks.
[9] (Abbott 1988)
[10] R, as in, ‘Relation’
[11] (Abbott 2005)
[12] See also (Elias and Scotson 2008) on the importance of ‘gossip’ in maintaining social structures.
[13] (Abbott 2005)
[14] That said, it is ultimately an empirical question whether 19th century New York or Britain was more or less stable and for how long.
[15] (Lichterman 2020; Lichterman and Eliasoph 2014)
References
Abbott, Andrew. 1988. The System of Professions: Essay on the Division of Expert Labour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Time Matters: On Theory and Method. 1st ed. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Abbott, Andrew. 2005. ‘Linked Ecologies: States and Universities as Environments for Professions*’. Sociological Theory 23(3):245–74. doi: 10.1111/j.0735–2751.2005.00253.x.
Abbott, Andrew. 2016. Processual Sociology. University of Chicago Press.
Elias, Norbert. 2000. The Civilizing Process : Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. edited by E. Dunning, J. Goudsblom, and S. Mennell. Oxford ; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.
Elias, Norbert, and John L. Scotson. 2008. The Established and the Outsiders: V. 4. 3rd edition. edited by C. Wouters. Dublin, Ireland: University College Dublin Press.
Lichterman, Paul. 2020. How Civic Action Works: Fighting for Housing in Los Angeles (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology): 9. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Lichterman, Paul, and Nina Eliasoph. 2014. ‘Civic Action’. American Journal of Sociology 120(3):798–863. doi: 10.1086/679189.
Lybeck, Eric. 2019. Nobert Elias and the Sociology of Education. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Lybeck, Eric. 2020. The University Revolution: The Academization Process and the Emergence of Modern Higher Education since 1800. London: Routledge.
Mead, George Hebert. 1932. The Philosophy Of The Present. The Open Court Company.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1925. Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925. MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1930. Process and Reality,: An Essay in Cosmology; Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh during the Session 1927–28,. Macmillan.
