Relational sociology: a well-defined sociological paradigm or a challenging ‘relational turn’ in sociology?

In this paper I present and summarize the theoretical proposals of four leading scholars of the so-called ‘relational sociology’. First of all I try to contextualize its emergence and developments in the increasingly globalized scientific system. From this particular (and international) point of view, relational sociology seems to develop through a peculiar scientific path opened and charted by well-identified actors and competitors, their invisible colleges, their global connections, cleavages, and coalitions. Whatever the structuring of this field, it accomplishes the criticism of classical individualistic and collectivistic sociological theories, a task strongly facilitated by the development of new methods and techniques of empirical research, and by the increasingly powerful computing capabilities. After this brief historical reconstruction, and following very strictly the contributions of the four scholars, I try to synthetize their theoretical designs, focusing the analysis on two scientific issues of great significance for the future of relational sociology: the specific ontology of ‘social relations’ and the methodologies used to observe it adequately. Finally, I wonder if we are facing a new sociological paradigm, already well structured and internationally established, or rather a ‘relational turn’ that probably will develop into a new ‘sociological field’ internally very differentiated and articulated.     

Relational sociology and culture: a preliminary framework

In this paper I outline a framework for a relational sociology of culture. I begin by briefly defining relational sociology and contrasting it with both individualistic and holistic alternatives. Culture, I suggest, is an inherently relational concept and needs to be theorised and analysed as such. This argument is briefly elaborated through a discussion of the generation and diffusion of culture by way of interaction and social networks. The respective contributions of Tarde, Durkheim, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein are given particular attention. In the final part of the paper I introduce and discuss Howard Becker's notion of ‘art worlds’, drawing out and elaborating upon its relational foundations whilst also further developing it through a more sustained reflection upon both the facilitative potential of social networks and their shaping, as hypothesised by Peter Blau (and developed by Miller McPherson and Noah Mark), by way of homophilic attraction in ‘social space’. The paper covers a lot of ground and is intended as a sketch which subsequent work will fill out.     

Sebastião Salgado and Visual Sociology

This paper links the work of Sebastião Salgado, recipient of the 2010 American Sociological Association (ASA) Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, with the discipline of sociology. I reflect on Salgado’s biography, method, and concerns in order to demonstrate how his work contributes to the awareness and understanding of social issues. Toward this end, I summarize sociology’s record of involvement with visual documentation. Prior to 1915, the American Journal of Sociology regularly included photographs that provided visual documentation of environments under study. However, as sociology moved away from social reform activities and toward scientific investigation, the regular publication of photographs ceased. During the 1930s and 1940s, photographic projects in disciplines and social movements beyond sociology developed a variety of methods that would prove useful to sociology. During the 1970s, sociologists once again began to use visual methods in their teaching, research, and publication, putting sociology in the position to both contribute to and benefit from insights and social commitments that have distinguished Sebastião Salgado as a globally significant photographer and social activist during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries.     

Exploring Social Aesthetics: Aesthetic Appreciation as a Method for Qualitative Sociology and Social Research

Social aesthetics can be regarded as an important addition to sociology and the social sciences. This article introduces the notion of aesthetic-experiential knowledge into qualitative sociology and social research. It also directs attention to the qualities of social life in their own right, paving the way for approaching the question of a good society in the aesthetic sense. In this article I make a brief exposition of social aesthetics as it has been developed in contemporary Japan. I begin with a discussion of contemporary aesthetics and its implications for social study by focusing on Yuriko Saito's everyday aesthetics. Then I offer reflections on aesthetic appreciation as an act of ajiwau (to taste, experience and appreciate). I show that the incorporation of the methodical act of ajiwau enriches our aesthetic appreciation as a qualitative method for knowing the world in general. Next I move on to the possibility of aesthetically appreciating the social world and offer a definition of social aesthetics as social inquiry through aesthetic appreciation. Based on the act of ajiwau the social, I present an aesthetic-experiential study of a micro-society as a field of human interactions. Finally, I examine the possibilities for promising dialogues between social aesthetics, on the one hand, and qualitative sociology and social research, on the other.     

Political Position and Social Knowledge1

The nature of social cognition—how we “know about” the social world—is one of the most deceptively obvious problems for sociology. Because we know what we know, we often think that we know how or why we know it. Here, we investigate one particular aspect of social cognition, namely, what we will call “political ideology”—that is, people’s self‐placement on a dimension on which persons can be arrayed from left to right. We focus on that understanding that is in some ways the “ur‐form” of social cognition—our sense of how we stand by others in an implicit social formation whose meaning is totally relational. At the same time, these self‐conceptions seem to be of the greatest importance for the development of the polity and of civil society itself. Our question is, when citizens develop such a “political ideology,” what does this mean, and what do they do with it? We examine what citizens gain from their subjective placement on the dimension from liberalism to conservatism by using the results of a survey experiment that alters aspects of a hypothetical policy.     

Network structures in cross-movement talk: Democracy Now!, 2003-2013

ABSTRACT

As organizers often remind us, we need to work across movements if we are to make substantive social change. Such talk is central to how we understand what social movements are and how we can work together. But how is that talk structured, and how might we theorize structural change over time as movements emerge and subside? This paper outlines several key considerations in the social construction of cross-movement relations between 2003 and 2013 on a daily independent broadcast news magazine program in the United States. Drawing on relational sociology and network studies, I offer a framework for understanding the changing structure of cross-movement talk as an interplay of a) the narrative clustering of movement labels, and b) the bridging of cross-cluster narrative divisions. Using positional network analysis, I first chart the movement canon – those movement labels that were used year after year for structuring the cross-movement field – and trace how key labels were used as bridging leaders during two periods of mass-mobilization. I then compare the narrative environment over time as it moved between more segmented and pluralistic structural characteristics, culminated in periods of narrative convergence in 2008 and 2011 around the Obama presidential election and the Occupy movement. By examining the overall structure of cross-movement talk in broadcast news programming, I illustrate how movement labels themselves are used by hosts and guests to facilitate the social construction of emergent movement clusters, and point to strategies for future application and analysis in cross-movement organizing.     

Social Capital in Korea: Relational Capital,Trust, and Transparency

This article starts by distinguishing two different types of social capital, that is, societal moral resource capital and relational capital. Social capital as a societal moral resource is best characterized in Putnam's works. Social capital as the relational mobilization of information and control is best conceptualized by Coleman. By contrasting these two aspects of social capital, and by contextualizing the peculiarity of social relations in East Asian countries, this article explores the characteristics of social capital in Korea. For that purpose, I focus on the working of relational capital, or inmaek, in the creation and reproduction of social inequality. Moreover, I calculate the macro-level transformation of Korean society in terms of the role of societal moral resources.     

Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries: Cultural Studies and Sociology

This essay proposes that sociology can learn from social theory developed in the humanities. In the face of recent challenges to sociological explanations of social outcomes (from rational choice and economic theory, cognitive psychological theories of intelligence, and communitarian social philosophy), social theory should specify the constitutive force of social signification. After identifying a key weakness in theoretical approaches currently available in sociology, the inadequacy of various conceptions of the social, I analyze three significant new works in cultural studies in order to sketch out alternative ways of defining and measuring the force of social signification. The essay concludes with an attempt to establish the basis of a dialogue between cultural studies and sociology.     

Manifesto for a critical realist relational sociology

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 surplus of society with respect to itself. Society increases (or decreases) its potential for surplus depending on processes of valorization (or devalorization) of social relations.     

Towards sociology from the arts: An epistemological turn

Over the past two decades, Howard Becker's Art Worlds and Pierre Bourdieu's The Rules of Art were guidelines for the dominant paradigms in sociology of art. Nevertheless, according to Bourdieu, sociology and art do not make a good match. To overcome this dilemma, the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich proposed a “sociology from art,” based on the uniqueness of artists and their works, but she neglected artworks as sociological subject. A realistic and persistent criticism against sociology from the arts claims that artworks are fictions created by artists, therefore epistemologically unacceptable as social realities. Is it possible the making of sociology from artworks? Through theoretical review and using the example of literature, I will argue in this paper that artworks are important heuristic resources and a legitimate subject of sociological research.     

Social Movement Audiences1

Audiences are important to social movements, but the relationships between social movements and their audiences are not well understood. This article uses scholarship from performance studies, especially ideas of audiences as constructed, meaningful, and influenced/influential, to explore two issues. First, how do social movements define their audiences? Second, how are social movement actions toward their audiences shaped by these definitions? Analysis of longitudinal data on two social movement groups in Pittsburgh from 2003 to 2007 shows that social movements variously interpret the nature and role of their audiences and that these interpretations affect their strategies and goals, sometimes quite radically. The conclusion explores how attention to audiences can augment scholarship on the relational, iterative, interpretive, and reflexive aspects of social movements.     

Banking on Families: How Families Generate and Distribute Social Capital

Before we can determine the relevance of social capital to the sociology of family and kinship, we must fill the gaps in our theoretical knowledge. For example, we still do not know how couples, parents, children, and groups generate, accumulate, manage, and deploy social capital. Neither do we know the consequences of social capital for the welfare of families and their individual members. To investigate these areas, we must replace the makeshift measures currently in use with measures that do not confuse social capital with the presumed consequences of access to same. With this attention to theoretical elaboration and careful measurement, we will discover whether the idea of social capital is fruitful or merely decorative.     

Social capital and the added value of social relations

Almost all empirical research reveals that social capital is a factor that enhances public goods, but scholars are divided into two strands of thought. According to the first strand, the enhancement of public goods does not need any network of social relations, while, according to the second, enhancement depends on the existence and good functioning of relational networks, to the point that it consists in the creation of social networks. Which one is right? In order to clarify the issue, one should ask: can a social relation have any added social value? If so, how can we conceive of the added social value of social relations, and how can we measure it? The author claims that the added social value of social relations can be observed in those processes through which social capital and public (relational) goods (re)generate or elide each other. These processes can be analyzed as morphogenetic cycles that work in temporal sequences and are not circular or recursive. By adopting this perspective, we can see and measure the added social value of social relations in primary and secondary networks, leading to the emergence of public goods. The relational approach can give abundant evidence as to how and why different public goods are produced and/or enhanced depending on the different added social value of the social relations that constitute them.     

Dwelling in epistemic disobedience: A reply to Go

In Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory, Julian Go continues his vital work on rethinking and redirecting the discipline of sociology. Go’s piece relates to his wider oeuvre of postcolonial sociology – found in works such as his Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016) as well as multiple journal articles on epistemic exclusion (Go 2020), Southern theory (Go 2016), metrocentrism (Go 2014), and the history of sociology (Go 2009). In this response article, my aim is to think alongside some of the central themes outlined in Go’s paper rather than offering a rebuttal of any sorts. In particular, I want to think through how the recent work on ‘decoloniality’ may play more of a central role in Go’s vision of sociology and social theory than he acknowledges. In doing so, I hope to engage in Go’s prodigious scholarship through centering discussions of the geopolitics of knowledge, double translation, and border thinking. Before proceeding to this discussion, I will offer a brief review of my reading of Go’s paper.     

Anticolonial thought,the sociological imagination,and social science: A reply to critics

Sociology was born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a project in, of, and for empire. This essay excavates a tradition of social thought that grew alongside metropolitan sociology but has been marginalized by it: anticolonial thought. Emerging from anticolonial movements, writers and thinkers, anticolonial thought in 19th and 20th centuries emerged from a variety of thinkers (from indigenous activists in the Americas to educated elites in the American, Francophone and British colonies). I argue that this body of thought offers distinct visions of society, social relations, and social structure, along with generative analytic approaches to the social self, social solidarity and global relations—among other themes. Anticolonial thought offers the basis for an alternative canon and corpus of sociological thinking to which we might turn as we seek to revitalize and decolonize sociology.     

Perceived Justice and Reactions to Coercive Computers1

Sociology and justice theories indicate that coercive behavior creates a sense of injustice, but what if a computer is the proximal source of this coercion? I argue that people attribute justice to computers, but do so differently than to humans—people may perceive computers’ behavior as unjust, but not as unjust as the same behavior by humans. Likewise, individuals resist and retaliate against coercive behavior, but do so less if the coercer is a computer. These hypotheses are extended from justice studies in social exchange. Specifically, I expand on Molm et al.’s (1993) laboratory experiment of coercion in social exchange, adding a human versus computer identity condition. I conduct a laboratory experiment (N = 121) that replicates Molm et al.’s study and supports the hypotheses on justice, resistance, and retaliation to coercive computers.     

Toward a political sociology of privatized punishment: Contestation,state structures,and stratification

Privatized punishment—in which nonstate actors carry out state-mandated criminal punishments—has developed into a common practice since its rise in the 1980s. Many disciplines, including criminology, political science, public administration, and economics, have examined its use over the past four decades. However, privatized punishment has not garnered much attention in sociology. This is surprising, as privatized punishment touches on the key themes in sociology, and in the political sociology in particular. In this paper, we attempt to insert privatized punishment into classic and contemporary discussions in political sociology. Below, we offer an overview of privatized punishment and provide a high-level review of how other social scientific disciplines have studied the phenomenon. Then we argue that political sociology provides a useful, if underutilized, lens for studying privatized punishment. In particular, we highlight three political sociological themes—contestation, state structures, and stratification—that can be fruitfully applied to the study of privatized punishment, and we sketch multiple lines of future research informed by these themes.     

For a postcolonial sociology

Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution.