HOW SOCIETIES EVOLVE Four features are common in accounts of the world's many surges of societal growth: (1) the behaviour of the key actors is competitive, and consequently driven by a permanent search for improved productivity per unit of input, the rules for success in this context being usually set by market response;(2) there have been mechanisms and structures for the flow of information throughout each society to permit and encourage the creation, debate about, and spread of new knowledge and its use;(3) the societal structures and processes have themselves adjusted during the process so as to balance the competing interests involved;and (4) the spreading of empowerment down into the society, and then its use, leads to what becomes perceived by most citizens as a more legitimate – and energizing – form of domination than earlier forms By contrast, in the second superlinear process the strengths and utilities of social interaction, and the flows of information exchange, are greatest between the terminal units (eventually individuals) and these interflows systematically decrease up the hierarchy of group structures To consider a society's resilience it is then necessary to take account of both its macro policy at the state level, i e , the society's structure, and its day-to-day workings at the ground level, i e , its processes In these various adjustments Japan would create new social spaces, new social relations, new cultural activities, revisions of consciousness, but always reinforcing its basic conceptions of social order and the premises underlying its main institutions, the significance of which remained stable