TAMING CHANCE - SOCIAL-SCIENCE AND EVERYDAY NARRATIVES

Although the impacts of chance occurrences play an important role in s ome of our everyday narratives, they are rarely discussed in social sc ience accounts of the life cycle. The discrepancy between chance's rel ative significance in each of these portrayals is partly attributable to the highlighting of the unusual and unexpected in order to make our narratives interesting. The difference is also based in social scienc es' attempt to tame chance using stochastic models enriched by recent nonlinear dynamic systems approaches. A critical factor affecting our accounts, whether in everyday life or in the search for robust general laws of behavior, is our commitment to prediction and control.