seemingly trivial social phenomena are ordered in highly predictable ways. This idea serves as an implicit motivation behind social sequence analysts' use of optimal matching, clustering, and related methods to identify common "classes" of sequences at all levels of social organization, a form of pattern search. This focus on regularized patterns of social action has become an increasingly influential framework for understanding microsocial interaction and contact sequences, or "microsequences." This is closely related to Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration, which holds that social actors' behaviors are predominantly structured by routines, and which in turn provides predictability and a sense of stability in an otherwise chaotic and rapidly moving social world. This idea is also echoed in Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, which emphasizes the emergence and influence of stable worldviews in guiding everyday action and thus produce predictable, orderly sequences of behavior. The resulting influence of routine as a structuring influence on social phenomena was first illustrated empirically by Pitirim Sorokin, who led a 1939 study that found that daily life is so routinized that a given person is able to predict with about 75% accuracy how much time they will spend doing certain things the following day. Talcott Parsons's argument that all social actors are mutually oriented to their larger social systems (for example, their family and larger community) through social roles also underlies social sequence analysts' interest in the linkages that exist between different social actors' schedules and ordered experiences, which has given rise to a considerable body of work on synchronization between social actors and their social contacts and larger communities. All of these theoretical orientations together warrant critiques of the general linear model of social reality, which as applied in most work implies that society is either static or that it is highly stochastic in a manner that conforms to Markov processes This concern inspired the initial framing of social sequence analysis as an antidote to general linear models. It has also motivated recent attempts to model sequences of activities or events in terms as elements that link social actors in non-linear network structures This work, in turn, is rooted in Georg Simmel's theory that experiencing similar activities, experiences, and statuses serves as a link between social actors. Demography and historical demography In demography and historical demography, from the 1980s the rapid appropriation of the life course perspective and methods was part of a substantive paradigmatic