From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale

＂In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that traces how, why, and with what effects interactions became ＂scaled.＂ Focusing on US-based sciences of interaction from 1930 to 1980, Lempert meticulously traces our efforts to study conversation microscopically and shows how scale-making has defined pioneering work in sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, and how its legacy lives on to this day. From talk therapy to personality studies, social psychology, management science, conversation analysis, ＂micropolitics,＂ and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences, and how new tools and technologies were developed to get to the heart of social life at its most granular. Ultimately, he argues that, by discovering how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them, and with each other, across disciplinary and ideological divides＂--

Michael Lempert is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, coauthor of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency, and coeditor of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life.