Table Of ContentConceptualizing Relational Sociology
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Conceptualizing Relational Sociology
Ontological and Theoretical Issues
Edited by
Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau
CONCEPTUALIZING RELATIONAL sOCIOLOGY
Copyright © Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-37990-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-47902-3 ISBN 978-1-137-34265-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137342652
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Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Figures and Table vii
Introduction 1
Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau
1 Feminist Preludes to Relational Sociology 13
Sarah Redshaw
2 Relational Sociology and Historical Materialism:
Three Conversation Starters 27
Kenneth Fish
3 Relational Sociology, Theoretical Inhumanism, and
the Problem of the Nonhuman 45
Craig McFarlane
4 Advancing Sociology through a Focus on Dynamic Relations 67
Debbie Kasper
5 Norbert Elias on Relations: Insights and Perspectives 87
Charalambos Tsekeris
6 Critical Strategies for Implementing a Relational Sociological
Paradigm: Elias, Bourdieu, and Uncivilized Sociological
Theoretical Struggles 105
Christopher Thorpe
7 Interactions, Juxtapositions, and Tastes:
Conceptualizing “Relations” in Relational Sociology 123
Nick Crossley
8 Collective Reflexivity: A Relational Case for It 145
Margaret S. Archer
vi Contents
9 What Is the Direction of the “Relational Turn”? 163
François Dépelteau
10 Radical Relationism: A Proposal 187
Christopher Powell
11 Relational Sociology as Fighting Words 209
Mustafa Emirbayer
References 213
Notes on Contributors 231
Index 235
Figures and Table
Figures
4.1 S implified model of relations among disciplinary
subject matter 73
4.2 Model of sociology’s theory of dynamic relations 81
4.3 M odel of relational process theory, viewed over
time from “above.” 82
5.1 An initial mapping of a social network as imagined by
Elias (1978) 93
7.1 An illustrative network graph 126
7.2 Modelling social space 131
7.3 Bourdieu’s account of class formation 135
7.4 Mark’s model 140
8.1 Collective reflexivity as triadic 158
Table
10.1 Guidelines for a radical relationism 188
Introduction
Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau
What Is Relational Sociology?
What is relational sociology? At its broadest, relational sociology
investigates social life by studying social relations. Throughout the
history of the discipline of sociology, sociologists have defined their
work through a focus on one or another of various differing types of
objects. The list of these objects is long; the classical tradition gives
us social facts, social action, social classes, and social forms, and the
past century has added symbols, systems, interest groups, institutions,
ethnomethods, practices, identities, signs, discourses, and many oth-
ers. Each of these distinct objects of analysis has helped to define a
distinct project within sociology, projects like functionalism, conflict
theory, interactionism, ethnomethodology, critical theory, feminism,
cultural sociology, and so on. In one sense, relational sociology is
one more project like these, defined by its distinct object of analy-
sis and by the distinctive approaches used to study that object. In
another sense, it is a way of pursuing any one of these other projects.
Relational sociologists study social relations. But how they do so, and
what precisely they mean by “social relations,” varies considerably
from one relational sociologist to another. This volume and its com-
panion volume Applying Relational Sociology: Relations, Networks,
and Society provide a rough guide to the varying ways in which rela-
tional sociologists have defined what it is that they do.
Relational ideas in social theory go back at least as far as Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and feature prominently in the works of land-
mark theorists like Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer, Norbert
Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Seyla Benhabib, Bruno
Latour, and Nancy Chodorow, among others. As a self-conscious
2 Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau
project, however, relational sociology took shape in the 1990s, abetted
greatly by Mustafa Emirbayer’s germinal “Manifesto for a Relational
Sociology.” Participants in this project commonly define their work
in contrast with both holist and individualist thinking in the social
sciences. So, for instance, where Emile Durkheim, in “The Rules of
Sociological Method,” defined social facts as substantial “things,”
existing at a given moment in time, and having a reality separate from
individuals, relational sociologists treat social phenomena as processes,
constituted by flows of action or interaction, which operate imma-
nently to the life of individuals rather than on a separate order of real-
ity. Conversely, where Max Weber, in Economy and Society, defined
social qualities like class, status, and power in terms of attributes (like
“life chances”) attached to individuals, defined social relations them-
selves in individualistic terms (as the probability of individuals’ actions
being mutually reciprocally oriented), and proposed that all collective
phenomena including religion, ethnicity, and the state be understood
in terms of individuals’ subjectively meaningful motivated actions,
relational sociologists are more likely to emphasize how individuals
are always-already enmeshed in relations of interdependency with
others and cannot be understood, even theoretically, apart from their
relational contexts.
So, for instance, do we treat power as a kind of substance that
some people have more of and others less or none, and which can
therefore be present or absent in any given situation; or do we treat
it as the effect of a field of relations, as something that flows among
actors, and which therefore involves everyone (if unequally) and can
be found in every situation? Do we treat identity as an essence, a set
of defining characteristics that each individual carries around with
him or her, or do we treat it as an effect of the flow of practices of
identification and differentiation, always dynamic and fluid? Most
importantly, do we treat individuals and society as separate entities,
belonging to different orders of reality, or do the words “individual”
and “society” designate two distinguishable but inseparable aspects
of the ongoing flow of interdependent human action? These questions
help to define the distinctiveness of relational thinking in sociology.
Overcoming dualism has been especially important to many rela-
tional sociologists. When Durkheim enjoined sociologists to “treat
social facts as things,” he thereby sought to give sociology a distinct
object of investigation and so obtain for it a special place among
the sciences. But this gesture, which remains intuitively appealing
for many social scientists and which appears in everyday language
