If you consult the Oxford English Dictionary, you will find that there are twenty-seven different headings for the word style, none of which corresponds to the way it has been used in recent sociolinguistic investigation. Accordingly, I looked elsewhere and I found two statements that seemed to me to provide a possibly fruitful starting-place for our discussion. The first is from notes of something Greg Guy said at an NWAVE meeting. This may not be what Greg said, but it is what I have written down:

The second comes from Greg Urban's book A Discourse-centered Approach to Culture:

I interpret these statements to be near the extremes of what I will refer to as “The Greg Scale,” with Guy at one end and Urban at the other. Another way of putting it, which may be a distortion of either Greg's position, is that the scale ranges from dealing with those variables that are relatively easy to identify, measure, and quantify to variables that it may be very hard to define operationally and quantify, but which may turn out to be more interesting, if we can find a way to deal with them.