The Sociology of Disruption, Disaster and Social Change Punctuated Cooperation

'This is sociological theory at its best: insightful, rigorous and readable. Vollmer does not merely draw our attention to the importance of disruption and repair, demonstrating that rules are constituted by exceptions, and not the other way around, but teases out regularities in the processes by which social order emerges and then is realized to have disappeared. Required reading.' John Levi Martin, University of Chicago, and author of The Explanation of Social Action 'A highly original approach to the often unnoticed 'bottom-up' mechanisms of social change. The range of applications includes organizational stress, disasters and warfare.' Uwe Schimank, University of Bremen