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Relational Thinking in Sociology: Relevance, Concurrence and Dissonance

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Abstract

This chapter explains the relevance of relational sociology as a sociology of relations based on core ideas such as processual thinking, the idea of interdependency, the principle of co-production and the rejection of the idea that social phenomena should be seen as social ‘substances’. Key issues such as the existence of the causal powers of social structures, the importance of non-human interactants and the principle of emergency are also presented. The relational turn is connected to similar ideas one can find with relational thinking in other disciplines such as psychology, psychoanalysis, process-relational philosophy and archeology. The relational turn in sociology is promoted as a promising intellectual movement questioning fundamental principles and ideas in the discipline.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rather than ‘agents’, it is probably better to talk about ‘transactants’ (Dépelteau 2015) or ‘interactants’ (Burkitt 2016), by which I mean transacting or interacting ‘entities’ with ‘agency’, i.e. with the power or the capacity to make things happen (Latour 2005). We will see later that there is no consensus on what are the right ‘interactants’ one should find in relational explanations. For example, some relational sociologists include non-human ‘interactants’ while others reject them. Another example: critical realists insist on the crucial role of social structures as forces self-acting on or interacting with individuals and groups, while other relational sociologists reject this idea. But once more, and in spite of these significant disagreements, the notion of ‘relations’ is a central one.

  2. 2.

    The same tendency—or need—has been affirmed in two recent publications announcing a ‘processual’ sociology (see Abbott 2016; Pyyhtinen 2016).

  3. 3.

    ‘The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s culture’ (Geertz 1984, 126).

  4. 4.

    J. Spiegel (1971) made similar proposals in his ‘transactional’ approach.

  5. 5.

    Once again, N. Elias (1978) made similar comments when he distinguished his figurational approach from sociological explanations based on the ‘egocentric perspective’.

  6. 6.

    When asked, Osmo and Tero told me it is ‘a metaphysical question that methodological relationalism has no standing on it’, and for them it is ‘irrelevant for sociological research’.

  7. 7.

    Comment shared by C. Demetriou on Tilly (by email): ‘He was unclear about the mind–world dualism, but there is an argument to be made that he leaned a little bit towards positions that could be thought as monist.’

  8. 8.

    Another comment shared by Chares (Demetriou): ‘I would also stress, along with Eitan (Alimi), that he took an anti-structural perspective in his later years. His idea of causal powers relates to mechanisms but not to structures.’

  9. 9.

    Some competent readers would argue that Elias gave some causal powers to figurations . The general answer is not so clear, if it exists. I still think it is a ‘No’, especially if we keep in mind the first pages of What is Sociology?

  10. 10.

    From Jean-Sebastien (Guy) on N. Luhmann: ‘There is interdependency between Ego and Alter as the psychic systems participating in the process of communication. There may be structural couplings between social systems, but each of them remains autopoietic and therefore autonomous.’

  11. 11.

    J.-S. Guy on Luhmann: ‘Luhmann rejects modernist dualisms like individual/society and yet he continues to talk about distinctions and the need to make distinctions as essential to observing as system operation.’

  12. 12.

    J.-S. Guy: ‘For Luhmann, social structures are structures of expectations arising in the course of communication. These structures are real and yet they do not rigorously constraint human beings. Human beings are constrained by themselves and by other human beings as they all attempt at coordinating themselves with each other. Communication is precisely to process of coordination.’

  13. 13.

    Frédéric’s (Vandenberghe) comment: ‘All substances can be dissolved into relations and processes, but that does not mean that substances do not exist.’

  14. 14.

    F. Vandenberghe commented: ‘At some level yes, but it is only part of the story.’

  15. 15.

    F. Vandenberghe commented: ‘Yes, but it depends on reality. If the dualisms are institutionalized, they have to be analyzed as such.’

  16. 16.

    F. Vandenberghe : ‘Social structures as forces—it’s not that simple. In the social universe, only actors have efficient causality. But structures have formal causality.’

  17. 17.

    F. Vandenberghe : ‘Principle of emergence—Sure! But this has nothing to with relational sociology, but rather with some proximity to critical theory.’

  18. 18.

    This answer would probably be contested by what E. Erikson (2013) called the ‘relationist’ readers of Simmel, or some of them at least (FD).

  19. 19.

    Jan’s (Fuhse) comment to complete his answer ‘No’: ‘I wouldn’t be able to say anything meaningful about these interactions.’

  20. 20.

    Jan Fuhse again, commenting on his answer ‘Some’: ‘I would reject some of them, but open up others—mainly because without conceptual distinctions (like communication/psychic processes) we cannot really do anything in theories.’

  21. 21.

    It can be argued that Mead produced some deterministic explanations, but I do not have the space to discuss this issue.

  22. 22.

    This distinction is also useful, to keep in mind that some of what E. Erikson calls the ‘relationists’ have been influenced by the reading of G. Simmel, and they contest the ‘formalist’ interpretation of Simmel (O. Pyyhtinen is a good example).

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  1. Laurentian University, Sudbury, ON, Canada

    François Dépelteau

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    François Dépelteau

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Dépelteau, F. (2018). Relational Thinking in Sociology: Relevance, Concurrence and Dissonance. In: Dépelteau, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_1

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