…[I]t is a basic mistake to identify time and social change, and we can now pursue this further by looking more closely at temporal aspects of the constitution of social systems. In the context of doing so, I want to lodge a further claim, which is that most forms of social theory have failed to take seriously enough not only the temporality of social conduct but also its spatial attributes. At first sight, nothing seems more banal and uninstructive than to assert that social activity occurs in time and in space. But neither time nor space have been incorporated into the centre of social theory; rather, they are ordinarily treated more as "environments' in which social conduct is enacted. In regard of time, this is primarily because of the influence of synchrony/diachrony differentiations: the assimilation of time and change has the consequence that time can be treated as a sort of "boundary" to stable social orders, or at any rate as a phenomenon of secondary importance¹ The suppression of space in social theory derives from different origins, probably in some part from the anxiety of sociological authors to remove from their works any hint of geographical determinism.