Pierpaolo Donati

Bio: Pierpaolo Donati is an academic researcher from University of Bologna. The author has contributed to research in topics: Relational sociology & Social relation. The author has an hindex of 18, co-authored 145 publications receiving 1434 citations.

Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences

Abstract: Introduction: Prospects for a Relational Sociology Chapter 1. The Relational Paradigm its implications for the understanding and organization of Society Chapter 2. Society as a Relation Chapter 3. Critical Realism as viewed by Relational Sociology Chapter 4. Observing and Thinking Relationally: the premises of the relational theory of society Chapter 5. Social Change in the light of Relational Sociology Chapter 6. Reflexivity after Modernity: From the viewpoint of Relational Sociology Chapter 7. Doing Sociology in the Age of Globalisation

The Relational Subject

Abstract: Many social theorists now call themselves 'relational sociologists', but mean entirely different things by it. The majority endorse a 'flat ontology', dealing exclusively with dyadic relations. Consequently, they cannot explain the context in which relationships occur or their consequences, except as resultants of endless 'transactions'. This book adopts a different approach which regards 'the relation' itself as an emergent property, with internal causal effects upon its participants and external ones on others. The authors argue that most 'relationists' seem unaware that analytical philosophers, such as Searle, Gilbert and Tuomela, have spent years trying to conceptualize the 'We' as dependent upon shared intentionality. Donati and Archer change the focus away from 'We thinking' and argue that 'We-ness' derives from subjects' reflexive orientations towards the emergent relational 'goods' and 'evils' they themselves generate. Their approach could be called 'relational realism', though they suggest that realists, too, have failed to explore the 'relational subject'.

Manifesto for a critical realist relational sociology

Abstract: In recent years, many different versions of relational sociology have appeared. In this paper, I present a critical realist version developed since 1983, which is also called ‘relational theory of society’ (CRRS). It shares with the other relational sociologies the idea of avoiding both methodological individualism and holism. The main differences lie in the way social relations are defined, the kind of reality that is attributed to them, how they configure social formations, and the way in which their changes are conceived (morphogenesis and emergence). In particular, this approach is suitable to understand how the morphogenesis of society comes about through social relations, which are the connectors that mediate between agency and social structure. The generative mechanism that feeds social morphogenesis resides in the dynamic (that is, in their ways of operating) of the social relations networks that alter the social molecule constituting structures already in place. Social morphogenesis is a form of ...

Modernization and relational reflexivity

Abstract: This paper deals with the issue of reflexivity in the different spheres of society, affected by the processes of globalization. The author argues that each sub-system of society is more or less differentiating itself according to a (prevailing) code or register of reflexivity. Global contextualism changes the way people manage the distinction between the particular and the universal (i.e. their perceived ‘different identities’) according to a plurality of reflexive processes. A differentiating universalism emerges within the different spheres of society (the market, the political system, the associational or third-sector system, and the system of families and informal primary networks). In principle, within these spheres many different codes of reflexivity can be detected. The four types of reflexivity detected by M.S. Archer can be correlated with the different spheres/sub-systems of society in order to see how the latter change their operations and overall configuration. In conclusion, it is shown that ...

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Abstract: The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …