Without vision, social action consists in small historical repetitions. Their aggregate the amounts merely to an extension of the status quo. To force change through social construction, people often concentrate on a binary opposition between given actualities and new possibilities. This opposition frees people from the weight of historical inertia. As diverse people in diverse circumstances choose to act in pursuit of a clear-cut departure from the norm, they reinforce each other and enable themselves to develop more and better, concrete innovations in specific situations.
Revolutions are clearest as they take place simplistically on the level of guiding principles.
Continuity asserts itself as people engage the obdurate details of life. The social construction of historical change comes about as many people in many situations develop similar understandings of the potentialities inherent in an historical situation. Development of the telephone system exemplified this process. Efforts to reduce the harm to health from smoking or poor diet do too. Even the simple but excruciatingly complicated process of replacing Anglo-American weights and measures with the metric system provide an example, one that may prove to be an historic failure, so complicated is the change.