A Cognitive-Structural Sociological Account of the Emergence of Novel Worlds

Abstract

This article proposes a cognitive structural account of the emergence of social worlds that organize the expectations of producers and audiences. The proposed model considers the emergence process in three stages: (1) the arrival of distinctive clusters of objects and their producer, (2) conceptualization of the labeled clusters in high-energy social structures that we call a “scene,” and (3) whether a scene’s coordinating concept becomes generally taken for granted. We first develop an ontology for analyzing these processes. We then analyze the role of social structure in these stages and define the emergence process in terms of hazards, that is, the event rates of each stage. The proposed account can explain the emergence of worlds in a variety of social contexts, including organizational forms in markets, genres in creative industries, disciplines in science, and forms of social protest.