In an earlier posting I discussed the idea of the ‘social mind’ and the way in which such a collective consciousness’ must be understood as dispersed to and contained in the minds of the individual members of a society. This provides us with a way of understanding social structures, seen by Durkheim as external and constraining factors in social life. In my work on social structure I showed that the institutions and relations that comprise a social structure must be seen as ‘embodied structures’, but I did not properly specify how such individual phenomena relate to collective structures. In this posting I want to try to show that the structures of everyday life—Goffman’s ‘interaction order’—and the ‘macro’ structures of specialised economic and political activities can be understood as rooted in individual subjectivity yet act as real forces in shaping individual activity. The world of everyday life—the backdrop to all our activity—comprises the myriad locales and persons that ar