The opposite of harmonization is often conflict: car collisions, arguments about people’s places in line, obstruction of crowd flow, people jostling for a view. Conflicts of this sort require interwoven timespaces – pursuing the same ends, reacting to the same state of affairs, the same place-path layouts. Conflicts of this sort are occasions when harmonization does not obtain because adjustments within common and shared timespaces break down. Many cases of conflict are not like this, however. Conflict often arises due to incompatible timespaces. For instance, conflict can arise because the same arrangement of objects anchors incompatible place-path arrays for different groups of people (as in disputes between developers and preservationists); or, more fully, because people, acting in partly shared and partly conflicting spatialities, pursue incompatible futures fuelled by divergent pasts. An example is disputes between Jews and Arabs concerning Jerusalem. I cannot pursue this line of analysis at present. The basic idea, however, is that conflict often results from the divided, divergent and/or incompatible features of either individual timespaces or the common or shared timespaces of different groups.
The Aggregation of Practices (and Arrangements)
A second key feature of social life is the aggregation of practices. Coordination is already a form of aggregation since it is a joining of actions through which a result ensues (e.g. a meeting at the head of the stairs comes off, betting coexists with conviviality, horses are sold). By ‘the aggregation of practices’, however, I mean practices hanging together in the constitution of social phenomena. Recall my claim that a social phenomenon is either a bundle of practices and material arrangements or features of such bundles. This claim implies that a social phenomenon embraces interconnected practices (and arrangements). Consider the following examples of a social organization, a social event and a social phenomenon:
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Ted Schatzki