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9781032209395

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The Dance of Innovation: Infrastructure, Social Oscillation, and the Evolution of Societies is unlike any book written in recent history in sociology. It advances a critical idea that is often lost in sociology - the central force of infrastructures. Human institutional systems and, indeed, all dimensions of the social and economic world do not exist nor function without viable infrastructures. Everything that humans do in building up societies is linked to technologies or knowledge about how to build infrastructures, that is, the sustaining foundations of human societies that allow their dynamic processes to operate and evolve. Another central idea is an old one but stated in a novel new way - the notion of oscillations around patterns of fission and fusion. Societies and, indeed, all social systems at all levels of human organization, are built up only to disintegrate at some point in time as nothing lasts forever. Such has always been true for human social evolution but has been particularly the case over the last 10,000 years where infrastructures have allowed humans to build large, complex societies filled with disintegrative tendencies, thus accelerating oscillation of patterns of social organization on a much more rapid and grand scale. This book is one of the most original contributions to sociological analysis in many decades; and even though it is highly theoretical, it is written in such an informal style that it is a pleasure to read. Alexandra Maryanski, Research Professor of the Graduate Division in Sociology, University of California, Riverside

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Kevin McCaffree is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. He is the author or co-author of three books, co-editor of Theoretical Sociology: The Future of a Disciplinary Foundation and series editor (with Jonathan H. Turner) of Evolutionary Analysis in the Social Sciences. In addition to these works, he has authored or co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and handbook chapters published on a variety of topics ranging from cultural evolution to criminology to the sociology of empathy.

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