I am very slowly reading and enjoying Charles Tilly’s Durable Inequality. It is a diffucult, very academic, read. He is facinating, though.

At one point he writes: “I claim that an account of how transactions clump into social ties, social ties concatenate into networks, and existing networks constrain solutions to organizational problems clarifies the the creation, maintenance, and change of categorical inequality.”

Golly a single sentence goes a long way toward both explaining power-law distributions and as an added bonus providing a basis for a very functional theory how and why organizations emerge and persist. Something subtlely different than Coarse.