The likelihood is that Part I has raised as many questions as it has answered. Perhaps for some readers this stems from our decision to introduce our concepts through ‘lifelike’ and recognizable subjects in fairly common situations. We hope that this worked, but it does not dispense with the need for conceptual precision. In fact, a consequence of choosing this mode of presentation is that the more vivid the characters used for exemplification, the greater the eventual need to discipline them conceptually. An anecdote used to circulate about Habits of the Heart, which excelled in pushing ‘recognizability’ much further than we have done with ‘David and Helen’. Colleagues would reply to ‘How are you?’ by saying ‘Oh, I'm having a very Brianish week’. All the same, no character vignette can replace the need to sharpen concepts into generalizable tools and to differentiate between a subject's circumstantial and particularistic features and those that pertain to the group or category that he or she is meant to exemplify. Conceptually, if one stands back from such vivid encounters (where the novel, film, and theatre outshine us), we sociologists are legitimately pressed to answer a range of issues about typicality, origins, historical specificity, causation, and so forth.

Our strategy in rounding out what is conceptually lacking is to condense these issues into a version of ‘frequently asked questions’ and responses to them. Because the issues themselves are complex and often require excursions into cognate areas, snappy answers are possible but not sufficient. In this Prologue to Part II, there are (at least) five FAQs arising from the previous text that the chapters constituting the second part of the book seek to answer. It may prove helpful to list them here and then to indicate briefly how they will be dealt with in Chapters 3–5.