Theory and formalization: Some reflections on experience

I describe in this paper some of my efforts in developing formal theories o f social processes. These include work on models of occupational mobility, on models to describe the emergence of expectations out of performance eval uations, and on the graph theory formulation of the Status Characteristics theory Not all models have been equally significant in developing theory. H owever, the graph theory formulation has played a central role in the growt h of the Expectation States program. It has been involved in the generaliza tion of theories, the integration of theories, and in the construction of h ighly sensitive tests of theories that would be impossible without the infe rential capacities of formalization.