>Also, Doug, do you think that theory really makes our message to the
>carpenter next store that more understandable? I wonder, because my
>exeperience with people is that they have an aversion to theory and tend to
>gravitate to concrete nuts and bolts thinking.
That's often the problem - people understand things in either excessively immediate ways (the boss, some co-worker, the black family down the street who becomes a stand-in for all black people) or excessively abstract ways (it's all a Conspiracy, America's enemies are all part of an indistinguishable whole [Saddam = Osama]). They have little means for connecting their own experiences to the larger world, of how part fits with part or part fits into whole. That's what you need some kind of theory for.
Doug