Composition Theory: A Pragmatist Specification of the Mesosocial

Abstract

This article develops composition theory as a pragmatist specification of the mesosocial. Existing theories describe situated social life without adequately explaining the mechanisms that produce it. Recent pragmatist scholarship has established important foundations: Gross on mechanisms, Lizardo on habit, and Hallett on inhabited institutionalism. Yet the mechanisms themselves remain underspecified. Composition theory fills this gap through four sets of mechanisms: composition, engagement, sedimentation, and circulation. Together, these explain how problem responsive actors assemble formations, how formations become consequential as affordances meet capacities, how residues accumulate over time and how patterns extend across settings through movement and echoing. The article reinterprets Dewey's concept of situation as the flow of actors' transactions with and within their present place (relational, symbolic and material environment) while remaining cognizant of their direct and indirect experiences with other places. Place is the somewhere somewhen locatable environment that necessarily grounds each situation and social reality as such. The framework reconceptualizes microsocial, mesosocial, and macrosocial as a continuum of compositional complexity anchored in the mesosocial. It expands the range of theory-driven research questions by directing attention to processes within and across places of action rather than to the forces of abstract structural properties.