Page - (000141) - in Knowledge and Networks

134 networks therefore bring about changes, as opposed to mere consolidation, at each level. These changes may be great enough to reconfigure the multilevel system if they drive the creation of new organizational actors (new collectives). Culture plays a substantial part in these dynamics. No collective can be set up without the language needed to formulate the conditions under which “synergy” (Archer, 2013, p. 13) is achieved and without institutionalization of its rules. The major task of culture is thus to produce the language for creating relationships with heteroge- neous others and to strengthen the institutional dimension of organizations that emerge from this effort. The multilevel and cultural dimensions of collective action are the two sources of energy that coevolve with OMRT transformations and affect social processes such as collective learning. Why would individuals willingly incur the costs of adjustments and adaptation? Answers to this question abound. People may be coerced into accepting such behav- ior if they are the weakest parties in the system. They may want to increase their status. Or it may be culturally and symbolically rewarding to do so. From the per- spective of the individual actors, such movements (across places) and associated relational changes are part of the costs or benefits of reshaping opportunity struc- tures, if not opportunity-hoarding, in the organizational and class society. Saying that structure reflects both opportunity and constraint is equivalent to saying that individual actors eventually try to manage the constraints in order to reshape their opportunity structure in this organizational society. The opportunities include, for example, those of landing a job, obtaining funding for a project, arranging credit for an apartment, finding a place in a suitable kindergarten or school for the children, and maintaining a steady flow of business. Individuals trying to reshape their opportunity structure can be portrayed as stra- tegic, but interdependent, actors who seek contexts in which they can find and exchange these resources at low cost. Once in such contexts they can seek various forms of concentration of these resources—an initial dimension of power—and thereby enable themselves to define the terms of such exchanges, to determine the rules of the game. At the individual level this set of goals is the answer to the ques- tion about the source of the energy for rotations and movements across places: It comes from efforts to close the gap between levels of agency. It comes from the competition for status. This view calls for a contemporary definition of social class that is more complex than existing ones, for relatively invisible dimensions of opportunity structures are growing in significance at the intra- and interorganizational levels. Tilly (1998) offered such an organizational view of mechanisms that generate inequality. They are the organizational structures that allow for exploitation, entrench it, and make it seem natural. From this perspective contemporary social stratification also articu- lates exploitation (by the elites who hold many of the resources and much of the power in society) and opportunity-hoarding (by intermediary classes) as two com- plementary means for perpetuating inequality. Opportunity monopolists organize themselves legally and socially in ways far less conspicuous than the distinction E. Lazega