Showing papers on "Relational sociology published in 2013"

Conceptualizing relational sociology : ontological and theoretical issues

Abstract: Introduction Francois Depelteau and Christopher Powell PART I: DEFINING THE PROJECT 1 Collective Reflexivity: A Relational Case for it Margaret Archer 2 Interactions and Juxtapositions: Conceptualizing 'Relations' in Relational Sociology Nick Crossley 3 From interactions between structures and actors to social transactions Francois Depelteau 4 Relational Sociology: A Paradigm from a Critical Realist Standpoint Pierpaolo Donati 5 Radical Relationism Christopher Powell PART II: RELATIONISM AND SOCIAL THEORY 6 Relational Sociology and Historical Materialism: Three Conversation Starters Ken Fish 7 Bourdieu's Relational Method in Theory and Practice John W Mohr 8 Feminist Preludes to Relational Sociology Sarah Redshaw 9 Critical Strategies for Implementing a Relational Sociological Paradigm: Elias, Bourdieu, and Uncivilized Sociological Theoretical Struggles Christopher Thorpe 10 Norbert Elias on Relations: Insights and Perspectives Charalambos Tsekeris PART III: PERMUTATIONS AND APPLICATIONS 11 Power from Switching Across Netdoms through Reflexive and Indexical Language Jorge Fontdevila and Harrison C White 12 Social Relationships between Communication, Network Structure, and Culture Jan Fuhse 13 Turning points are the rule rather than the exception: perspective on the different forms of uncertainty Harrison C White, Frederic C Godart, and Matthias Thiemann 14 Advancing Sociology Through a Focus on Relational Processes Debbie Kasper 15 Survival units as the point of departure for a relational sociology Lars Bo Kasperson 16 Human Transaction Mechanisms in Evolutionary Niches-a Methodological Relationalist Standpoint Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen 17 Objects, Agency and Relational Sociology Craig McFarlane 18 Connecting Network Methods to Social Science Research: How To Parsimoniously Use Dyadic Measures as Independent Variables Heather Price Relational Sociology, Social Psychology, and Social Neuroscience Stephen Quilley Conclusion Mustafa Emirbayer

What Is the Direction of the “Relational Turn”?

Abstract: There is no doubt that relational thinking has become an important intellectual tendency in human sciences and even beyond. If one types “relational” on amazon.com, for instance, he or she will find recent publications on “relational Judaism,” “relational theology,” “on the relational revolution in psychology,” the “relational theory and the practice of psychotherapy,” “relational concepts in psychoanalysis,” “relational child psychotherapy,” “relational suicide assessment,” “relational leading” in organizations, “relational reality,” “relational intelligence,” “relational masks,” “relational archeology,” “relational sociology” of course, and much more. The word “relational” is here, there, and everywhere these days. One could ask if there is really something common to all those texts beyond the use of the word “relational.” I will not do this exercise in this chapter. I will restrict myself to what I know better: social theory. Social theorists have played a key role in this “relational turn.” This intellectual tendency is usually founded on huge ambitions. Most if not all relational sociologists see relational sociology (RS in the rest of the chapter) as a new “paradigm.” This is clear with recent publications, such as the books of P. Donati (2011) and N. Crossley (2011). One can find a similar spirit with network analysts such as Barry Wellman and S. D. Berkowitz (see Wellman 1997, Wellman and Berkowitz 1997).

Applying relational sociology : relations, networks, and society

Abstract: 1. Relational Sociology and the Globalized Society Pierpaolo Donati 2. Spatial Relationality and the Fallacies of Methodological Nationalism: Theorizing Urban Space and Binational Sociality in Jewish-Arab 'Mixed Towns' Daniel Monterescu 3. Survival Units as the Point of Departure for a Relational Sociology Lars Bo Kaspersen and Norman Gabriel 4. Human Transaction Mechanisms in Evolutionary Niches - a Methodological Relationalist Standpoint Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen 5. Bourdieu's Relational Method in Theory and in Practice: From Fields and Capitals to Networks and Institutions (and Back Again) John W. Mohr 6. Turning Points are the Rule Rather than the Exception: A Relational Perspective on the Different Forms of Uncertainty Harrison C. White, Frederic C. Godart, and Matthias Thiemann, 7. Relational Power from Switching Across Netdoms through Reflexive and Indexical Language Jorge Fontdevila and Harrison C. White 8. Social Relationships between Communication, Network Structure, and Culture Jan Fuhse 9. Connecting Network Methods to Social Science Research: How to Parsimoniously Use Dyadic Measures as Independent Variables Heather Price

Interactions, Juxtapositions, and Tastes: Conceptualizing “Relations” in Relational Sociology

Abstract: The concept of “relations” is fundamental to relational sociology. Definitions vary, however, and there is a division in the literature between two in particular. On one side, in symbolic interactionism, social network analysis (SNA), and figurational sociology, “relations” are conceived as concrete ties between social actors. On the other, in the work of Bourdieu, relations are defined as juxtapositions in a “social space” constituted by the distribution of important social resources (forms of “capital”). My own work has tended to prioritize the former but both are important and reconciling them is a key task for relational sociology.

Comparing Elias and Bourdieu as Relational Thinkers

Abstract: I have been fascinated by the texts of Elias since I first read What Is Sociology? The reading of this book was a refreshing discovery for an uncomfortable social scientist like me who felt that too many social scientists perceived their objects in the wrong way. Elias helped me to define what I wished to see in sociology: people making various processes such as couples, families, states, nations, global economies, genocides, political dominations, exploitations by transacting with each other. So, Elias was a great discovery. However, I did not become an “Eliasian.” I have no interest in the emergence of one Eliasian paradigm or central theory. In fact, this chapter should be seen as being part of a broader intellectual current made by people who are developing a relational sociology (Crossley 2010; Donati 2011; Emirbayer 1997; Depelteau 2008a, 2008b). In fact, I am working on the construction of a transactional sociology where, in very brief, the social universe is made of complex and fluid fields of transactions involving various transactors (or interdependent actors). This is the main reason why I have been interested by the works of Bourdieu and Elias in the last years. Both of them have been associated with the emergence of relational sociology by many specialists such as Corcuff (2007), Dunning and Hughes (2013), Emirbayer (1997), Emirbayer and Goldberg (2005), and Emirbayer and Johnson (2008). By keeping this association in mind, I would like to compare the works of these two important sociologists. This comparison is founded on two general ideas: When we move beyond some apparent and somehow deceptive similarities, Elias appears to be more relational than Bourdieu, who is more deterministic or codeterministic. However, some aspects of Bourdieu’s work—especially his focus on social inequalities, domination, and symbolic violence—might help Elias’s approach to overcome some of its limits.

Bourdieu and urban politics: Conceptualizing a Bourdieusian relational framework for urban politics research

Abstract: This study purposes to build a generic theoretical framework of urban politics, drawing on Bourdieu’s relational sociology and theory of practice. Through a Bourdieusian relational mode of analysis, the study has conceptualized subfields of urban politics and the possible dimensions of politics among stakeholders in different subfields. In addition, the two conceptual spaces of positions and position-takings in the field of urban politics were hypothetically constructed with a methodological suggestion of Galois lattice analysis. The concepts of capital and habitus have also been related to develop the theoretical framework.

Social Relationships between Communication, Network Structure, and Culture

Abstract: Sociological network research and the recent advances in “relational sociology” view social relationships as the constituent elements of social structure. Considerations about what social relationships actually are, how they form and evolve, and how they connect to wider layers of the social (like culture or networks) remain curiously rare or even absent. Much network research abstracts from the concrete meaning embodied in social relationships, taking them and their empirical significance as given (Holland and Leinhardt, 1977, p. 387), and focusing exclusively on the structure of their connections. This perspective may have its merits, but it ignores that social structures are always symbolic constructions of expectations and thus filled with “culture” (Yeung, 2005, pp. 392ff). This interweaving of network relations and culture is the main concern of relational sociology, as advanced by Harrison White, Mustafa Emirbayer, Charles Tilly, Ann Mische, and others (Pachucki and Breiger, 2010; Mische, 2011). In spite of producing a number of studies on processes in social networks, relational sociology has not developed a thorough account of social relationships. Social psychological research on personal relationships, in contrast, offers numerous insights into the processes in ties. But it does not relate them systematically to the wider social context—to the level of culture and to the immediate network of relationships around alter and ego (Duck, 1997).

Relational Sociology as Fighting Words

Abstract: When I first encountered the term “relational thinking” back in the early 1990s, it had the quality of fighting words Established social thinkers such as Charles Tilly, Pierre Bourdieu, and Harrison White, not to mention younger scholars such as Margaret Somers and Peter Bearman, among others, were deploying it as a weapon against alternative approaches and schools of thought, including statistical regression-based approaches (such as those prominent in status attainment research); rational choice theory and other economistic perspectives; categorical approaches that highlighted shared attributes rather than location in relational settings or configurations; monological accounts (Bourdieu spoke of the “village monograph”) that failed to think in dialogical or field-theoretic terms; and any number of other conventional, dominant approaches to sociological inquiry All who called for a relational reorientation of sociology were crafting sharply worded critiques All regarded themselves as engaged in intellectual contestation All were concerned to do battle against intellectual opponents

Beyond "the Relationship between the Individual and Society": broadening and deepening relational thinking in group analysis

Abstract: The question of ‘the relationship between the individual and society’ has troubled group analysis since its inception. This paper offers a reading of Foulkes that highlights the emergent, yet evanescent, psychosocial ontology in his writings, and argues for the development of a truly psychosocial group analysis, which moves beyond the individual/society dualism. It argues for a shift towards a language of relationality, and proposes new theoretical resources for such a move from relational sociology, relational psychoanalysis and the ‘matrixial thinking’ of Bracha Ettinger which would broaden and deepen group analytic understandings of relationality.

Relational Sociology, Theoretical Inhumanism, and the Problem of the Nonhuman

Abstract: The development of relational sociology is a positive step forward for sociological theory through its emphasis on the key category of the relation and its refusal to engage in individualistic reductionism, central conflationism, or substantialist inflationism (Archer 1995, 2000, Crossley 2011, Donati 2011). Despite the move toward the concept of relation, relational sociology maintains a reactionary humanist social ontology acting as though social relations are limited to the relations that are obtained between humans and denying the existence of those relations that are obtained between humans and nonhumans such as animals, plants, and things. As a result, relational sociology brings us no closer to understanding what has been called the “missing masses” of social scientific explanation (Latour 1992). Relational sociology does nothing to advance the sociologist’s ability to study these “missing masses” and, more troubling, relational sociology denies that the sociologist should be interested in these “missing masses” at all. The goal of this chapter is to demonstrate that relational sociology must shed this residual reactionary humanism and embrace a concept of relation that extends beyond the arbitrary and artificial boundary of “the human” if it is to be at all useful for sociological analysis in the twenty-first century.

Norbert Elias on Relations: Insights and Perspectives

Abstract: The central argument of this chapter is that Norbert Elias’s figurational theory adds significant sharpness, rigor, and interdisciplinary impetus to relational sociology by carefully focusing on both the ontological and epistemological aspects of the concept of “relations.” Interestingly, Elias’s broad interdisciplinary concern with the long-term processes of the historical development of human society and the human condition substantially helps us define what social relations are and how we know them, as well as what relational sociology is and should be.

Social Engagement: The viewpoint of relational sociology

Abstract: Modernity understood ‘engagement’ in individual or collective terms. Weber and Marx offered the best-known and exemplary paradigms. Since then, a great deal of sociologists have tried to combine them and have seen engagement as a co-determination between agency and social structure. Everybody knows that engagement entails acting in and with social relations, but the intrinsically relational character of engagement has remained obscure, largely implicit and unexplored. Engagement has always been a social relation, but nowadays it is taken on an unprecedented morphogenetic connotation. The proposals for devising a new ‘relational sociology’ of engagement are on the increase. Yet these proposals are very different in their theoretical, methodological and applicative aspects. We have to clarify what ‘relational’ means. The author believes a distinction needs to be made between relational theories(based on critical and analytical realism) and (relation)istic theories (based on constructivist and relativistic assumptions). The latter perform serious central conflations between subjective and objective factors, between the individual input and the historical configuration of engagement. A new conceptual framework is put forward here in order to understand engagement as a relational reality operating through reflexivity forms, especially focussing on the meta-reflexive one as distinctive of after-modern society. Key words: Reflexivity, relational sociology, social engagement, after-modern society.

Relational Sociology and the Globalized Society

Abstract: The basic thesis of this contribution consists in claiming that globalization is bringing about a new “way of making society,”1 which needs a new sociology to be better understood and explained. Current sociology lacks a vision of how society can exceed itself.

Theorising Trust — Citizenship Dynamics Conceptualisation of the Relationship Between Trust and Children’s Participation and Citizenship in Globalised Societies

Abstract: This chapter explores how sociological theories of trust can contribute to a dynamic and critical understanding of children’s participation and citizenship within the new sociology of childhood paradigm. Critical is understood here as a dialectical approach which is attentive to power relations and that illuminates dynamics of discrimination, disciplining and exclusion. Using the concept of trust for this purpose might seem a bit peculiar, as many sociological approaches to trust are functionalist rather than critical, including Luhmann’s perspective which informs this chapter. However, in line with Harre (1999), I will argue that a functionalist concept of trust can underpin a critical agenda and that this can be further reinforced using Bourdieu’s relational sociology and Delanty’s theory of cultural citizenship.

Survival Units as the Point of Departure for a Relational Sociology

Abstract: European social theory has always been characterized by different dichotomous positions. Action-structure, subjectivism-objectivism, and methodological individualism-methodological holism are conflicting positions that have been competing throughout the history of European social theory. Each of these positions enables and constrains one’s framework for sociological analysis. With the rise of modern sociological theory in the late nineteenth century, a more explicit debate and contest between these different positions has taken place. The “Methodenstreit” in Germany in the late nineteenth century between historians and economists is one well-known example. Almost a century later we had “die Positivismus Streit” in Germany between critical rationalism (Karl Popper, Hans Albert) and the Frankfurt School (Theodor W. Adorno, Jurgen Habermas) in 1961. Another example is the conflict in sociology between Durkheimian methodological holism and Weberian methodological individualism. In almost any theoretical or methodological discussion, we have been faced with the problem of these “two sociologies” (Dawe, 1970). What position is to be preferred? What key concept is the most suitable to use as a point of departure? Action or structure, individual or society? What sort of ontological status do we assign our concepts?

Critical Strategies for Implementing a Relational Sociological Paradigm: Elias, Bourdieu, and Uncivilized Sociological Theoretical Struggles

Abstract: Rejecting the premise that social entities possess any “fixed” or “essential” meaning, relational sociological modes of reasoning instead conceive of social phenomena as “inseparable from the transactional contexts within which they are embedded” (Emirbayer 1997, 287). First elaborated in the work of sociology’s fourth-founding father, Georg Simmel,1 relational sociology has developed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries most notably at the hands of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu (Emirbayer 1997, Vandenberghe 1999). Following the development and application of relational concepts by these thinkers, as well as a bourgeoning cast of lesser but nonetheless influential scholars,2 relational sociology has carried forward into the twenty-first century a formidable array of thought tools capable of performing analytically sophisticated and penetrating readings of a range of contemporary global phenomena and processes. Indeed, as this collection of essays attests to, relational sociology stands at a critical juncture in its developmental trajectory and is now ready to instigate a move away from the peripheries to the center of the global sociological-theoretical field. Ostensibly, the greatest challenge faced by advocates of this shift derives from an outward-facing relationship: between the degree of fit—or “reality congruence” as Elias (1956) referred to it—of the theoretical concepts substantiating a relational paradigm and the empirical data—the social relations, processes, actors, and others—they are brought to bear upon.

Feminist Preludes to Relational Sociology

Abstract: Feminists have critiqued many of the dichotomies in Western thought such as nature and culture, mind and body, emotion and reason, public and private, and developed critiques of central notions such as individualism and abstract generalization. In this chapter, Nancy Chodorow’s relational individualism, Benhabib’s generalized and concrete other and Gilligan’s “different voice” are discussed, and their relevance to Crossley’s relational sociology is highlighted.

Relational Sociology and Historical Materialism: Three Conversation Starters

Abstract: Relational sociology (RS) (Emirbayer 1997, Depelteau 2008, Crossley 2011, Donati 2011) raises the question of the ontological foundation of sociology and seeks to shift our attention away from “structures” and “individuals” toward social relations as the primary object of our analyses. As this still nascent approach to understanding the social world strives to position itself as a “paradigm,” RS is challenging us to revisit questions that have been neglected since the “epistemological turn” ushered in by various forms of “postmodern” theorizing. In its recognition that “social theory … should reflect the reality of the social universe” (Depelteau 2008, 56), RS is part of the important “ontological turn” that is occurring in the social sciences more generally, and offers a set of conceptual tools to help navigate a path between the positivism characteristic of the social science of the past and contemporary forms of constructivism that deny that such a science can exist at all.

From Figuration to Coordination: An Analysis of Social Interdependence Mechanisms

Abstract: If there is a central concept in Norbert Elias’s thinking, a concept present in most if not all of his writings, it is figuration. In that one notion we are given both the orientation of his epistemological understanding and his firm intention to escape the dichotomies of classic sociology, first among them an opposition between individual and society in which the two seem posited as independent substances. Less familiar, perhaps, is Elias’s relational sociology. Here his reasoning in terms of related levels for which no ultimate positioning relative to each other can be determined was also, as he saw it, an invitation to construct a unified science of social beings situated at the intersection of the various human and social sciences.