"Most of the time, our daily lives are governed by structures that seem determined from above: laws that dictate our behavior, companies that pay our wages, even climate patterns that determine what we eat or where we live. And though these forces may seem beyond our individual grasp, we often come together to try to change the circumstances that would otherwise completely flatten us. In The Hinge, Gary Alan Fine sets out to give due consideration to the collectives that bridge our individual interest and the larger structures that influence our lives, or meso-level forms of social interaction. He describes these meso-level social collectives as "hinges": groups that come together to pursue a shared social goal, bridging the distance between the individual and the broader society. Fine argues that understanding these hinges is crucial to explaining how societies function, creating links between the micro-and macro-orders of society. Fine turns to historical cases and fieldwork to illustrate how these hinges work and how to describe them. In The Hinge, Fine has given us new theoretical tools for understanding an essential part of our social worlds"--

Gary Alan Fine is the James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. He has written many books, including, most recently Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture and Players and Pawns: How Chess Builds Community and Culture, both published by the University of Chicago Press.