>The conspiracy theorist will believe that institutions can be understood completely as the result of conscious design; and as collectives, he usually ascribes to them a kind of group-personality, treating them as conspiring agents, just as if they were individual men. As opposed to this view, the social theorist should recognize that the persistence of institutions and collectives creates a problem to be solved in terms of an analysis of individual social actions and their unintended (and often unwanted) social consequences, as well as their intended ones.

and in between is the systems theorist who observes the emergent behavior (which is nor "conspiring" (despite sometimes displaying intelligence-like elements), nor generally directly reducible to the "individual actions") of the systems.