INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEWHow do moments add up to lives?How do our shared moments together add up to social life as such?Every human action, all human activity takes place on one or more characteristic timescales. A heartbeat, a breath, a step, a spoken word takes but a moment; a stroll, a conversation extends over many such moments; and an education or a relationship may be a lifetime project. The great cathedrals of Europe were built over many human lifetimes, and the languages and discourse patterns of our communities have developed over still longer times. And yet a conversation consists of many momentary utterances; a relationship may be built of many strolls and conversations together; a building or a social institution is erected by the sum of many individual actions in a community.How? How do actions or events on one timescale come to add up to more than just a series of isolated happenings? How does a language emerge from many utterances? How does a community emerge from many people-in-action? On how many different timescales is our social life organized? How does persistent organization on longer timescales constrain the likelihood of events on shorter timescales? How do organizational units and processes on shorter timescales make possible the emergent patternings we recognize on longer timescales?Why time? Our material world is organized on many scales: space, time, matter, energy, and information transfer. In many natural systems there is a strong correlation among these scales: the quick is also small and light and weak and simple; however, in more complex systems, especially those in which signs and meaning play a role in behavior and system dynamics, these simple correlations break down.Classical systems theory is rooted in spatial metaphors and the reductionist project: large systems are to be understood by analyzing them in terms of interactions among smaller component MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 7(4),[273][274][275][276][277][278][279][280][281][282][283][284][285][286][287][288][289][290]

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