Do scale and size matter for culture and action?

How do people make choices about their actions? Broadly speaking, social scientific explanations tend to fall into two camps, emphasizing either individual decision-making or cultural/structural constraints. Scholars who examine organizational spheres offer a middle ground of sorts, focusing on the structure of relations among a set of actors and showing that individuals look to others in their organizational sphere to determine which actions lead to desirable outcomes. However, much of this work assumes that individuals operate within a single organizational sphere. Yet, in the contemporary world, many people are embedded in multiple spheres -- even within the same domain of activity -- each with distinct cultural and structural characteristics that shape how individuals obtain information about their cultural environment and make choices about their actions. This paper develops a theory of scalar variation in organizational spheres, arguing that spheres differ in both scale (from sub-national to supra-national) and size (from small to large), with significant consequences for how individuals navigate their social environments and make decisions. We propose a typology of organizational spheres based on these dimensions and explore how multi-scalar embeddedness influences action. By shifting the focus from fields as abstract structures to actors navigating organizational spheres with varying interpersonal dynamics, we build on and extend theories of fields to better account for how individuals make choices in complex social environments.