We will have to come back to the variables fitted into our equation but for now we stick with our re-entry-levels. True, how to understand "communication", "organization", or "network", let alone "behavior" and "society", all deserve a chapter of its own, yet the spirit of the model, so to speak, is revealed by looking at the re-entry-levels. If you feel familiar with these, with what they mean, I mean, not necessarily already with how they work, a sense of the understanding of the variables will develop all of its own.
So "tying" is next. What do we mean by this? Of course, it is the next step as soon as you gained some ground with respect to "gaming". Having made your game, or being hit as the game of somebody else, the next thing is to make sure that you may be able to rely and build on that. Tying comes from networks. Ties are the links between the nodes of a network. We speak of "ties", however, not of "links", because we adhere to a sociological notion of network, as the one admirably proposed by Harrison C. White in his book on "Identity and Control" (1992). Links are connections of any kind, without any hint to how they came about and may stick there for a while. Ties, by contrast, are made by the nodes tied by them, and depend for that on the identities the nodes are able to put on, and the control between them, they manage to maintain. In order to tie somebody or something, or so network theory is in full compliance with the cybernetics of control, you first of all have to tie yourself, if only to the purpose you are about to venture in.
So tying is far from evident. Tying, for us, means to enter network links and network stories into the organization in order to make it respond to demands both inside and outside it. Tying means that you have to be explicit about the professional aims, the career paths, the future of other projects, the money you are about to invest, and so on, in order to make clear what is possibly at stake. Only then some others, bound by communication and nothing else, may align with you and/or your project (you'll never know with what exactly), tying themselves, for the time being, to what you tied yourself to. Organization and society are littered, as White likes to hint at, with failed projects of tying. All stories we like to tell us, have their point, if not their punch-line, in the failing as well as succeeding of ties. White even conjectures that it is the point of stories to deal with failed ties, since working ties, you better keep with you.
Jon Elster wrote a marvellous book, "Ulysses Unbound: Studies on Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints" (2000; it is in fact a revision of, and expansion on, his earlier "Ulysses and the Sirens", 1979), on what I would prefer to call a tie, consisting, as it is, not only of precommitments in order to be able to constrain oneself or others, but of a parallel exploration of which constraints may work with whom and when. Tying is about setting frames, and about indicating both at the inside of the frame and its advantages, and at the outside of the frame and its disadvantages. That makes the notion of tying akin to Michel Crozier's and Erhard Friedberg's notion of playing in organizations (as presented in "L'acteur et le système", 1977), and akin to Niklas Luhmann's notion of power (as presented in "Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft", 1997), as in both the general idea is that you gain in action only if you succeed in block it. White has similar ideas on that in the context of his conjectures on general management.
So tying does not come all by itself, but is the product of a careful selection of which networks, and in what guise, to use in order to select what kind of organization to make sure which choices are possible. Tying is about power, but a power conceived of endogeneously. It is you who is having your part to play even in structures of power you feel to be completely subjugated to. Tying is done on both sides of the tie. It relies on communication, yet it has to anchor itself to both organization and networks, thereby determining the respective value of these variables.
Because there is no identity without attempts to control both itself and other elements it relies on – while making sure, of course, that it gets the control (i.e., respect, attention, recognition), which it tries to merit.