From its nineteenth-century origins, sociology has been faced with a foundational question: In what sense do social phenomena exist? Sociologists study social groups, collective behavior, institutions, social structures, social networks, and social dynamics, and after all, such social phenomena are only composed of the people that are in them. Thus, social phenomena seem to have no ontological status; and if not, sociology can ultimately be reduced to facts about individuals.

For this reason, the relationship between the individual and the collective is one of the most fundamental issues in sociological theory. This relationship was a central element in the theorizing of the nineteenth-century founders of sociology, including Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Marx, and was a central element, if implicit, in many twentieth-century sociological paradigms, including structural functionalism (Parsons [1937] 1949, 1951), exchange theory (Blau 1964; Homans 1958, 1961), and rational choice theory (Coleman 1990). In recent years, this relationship has become known as the “micro-macro link” (J. C. Alexander et al. 1987; Huber 1991; Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel 1981; Ritzer 2000).

Many accounts of the micro-macro link have explicitly used emergence to argue that collective phenomena are collaboratively created by individuals, yet are not reducible to individual action (Archer 1995; Bhaskar 1979, 1982; Blau 1981; Edel 1959; Kontopoulos 1993; Mihata 1997; Parsons [1937] 1949; Porpora 1993; T. S. Smith 1997; Sztompka 1991; Whitmeyer 1994; Wisdom 1970).