Towards Relational Sociology

Nick Crossley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781134019359
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Towards Relational Sociology argues that social worlds comprise networks of interaction and relations. Crossley asserts that relations are lived trajectories of iterated interaction, built up through a history of interaction, but also entailing anticipation of future interaction. In addition, he demonstrates how networks comprise multiple dyadic relations which are mutually transformed through their combination. On this conceptual basis he builds a relational foundation for sociology.

Over the course of the book, three central sociological dichotomies are addressed - individualism/holism, structure/agency and micro/macro – and utilised as a foil against which to construct the case for relational sociology. Through this, Crossley is able to argue that neither individuals nor 'wholes' - in the traditional sociological sense - should take precedence in sociology. Rather sociologists should focus upon evolving and dynamic networks of interaction and relations.

The book covers many of the key concepts and concerns of contemporary sociology, including identity, power, exchange and meaning. As such it is an invaluable reference tool for postgraduate students and researchers alike.

1
Introduction

Society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction. This interaction always arises on the basis of certain drives or for the sake of certain purposes.

(Simmel 1971: 23)

Society has for its substratum the mass of associated individuals. The system which they form by uniting together, and which varies according to their geographical disposition and the nature and number of their channels of communication is the basis from which social life is raised. The representations which form the network of social life arise from the relations between individuals thus combined or the secondary groups that are between the individuals and the total society.

(Durkheim 1974: 24)

Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individual stand.

(Marx 1973: 265)

Mind can never find expression, and could never have come into existence at all, except in terms of … an organized set or pattern of social relations and interactions …

(Mead 1967: 223)

What is the proper unit of analysis for sociology? Should we be ‘atomists’, also known as ‘individualists’, and reduce the social world to the actors who compose it? Or should we be ‘holists’, treating societies as wholes greater than the sum of these individual parts, wholes with laws, a logic and telos independent of those of individual actors? The question will be familiar enough to anyone with even the remotest acquaintance with the discipline. The argument of this book is that both alternatives are equally problematic but that there is a third, much preferable option. The most appropriate analytic unit for the scientific study of social life is the network of social relations and interactions between actors (both human and corporate).

Networks of relations and interaction involve actors who interact and form relations. Actors collectively drive interactions and networks. But not qua individual atoms. They are entangled and precisely inter-act. Furthermore, interactions, relations and networks each manifest properties which are irreducible to the actors involved in them and, over (historical) time, generate further emergent properties, including such fundamentals as languages and moral systems, which are similarly irreducible. Even the actors involved in them, at least in the fully developed sense of ‘the actor’, emerge in and through processes of interaction. The key properties of social actors, as identified in much social science and philosophy, are not primordial properties of the biological organism but rather capacities and dispositions acquired in and sustained through interaction. Not only do moral and linguistic agency presuppose histories of networks of interaction that have generated the morals and languages in question, for example, they also presuppose interactions, usually in childhood, through which those structures have been acquired and mastered, along with a sense of self (Mead 1967), various identities (ibid.), body techniques (Mauss 1979; Crossley 1995; 2004a,b, 2005a, 2007) and many other forms of social competence. And they presuppose continued interaction through which these skills and dispositions are perpetuated, modified, transformed etc.

In addition, how actors act is shaped on various levels by the situations in which they find themselves, the others involved and the relations they enjoy with those others. Action is always oriented to other actions and events within the networks in which the actor is embedded. And how the actor responds to these actions and events is influenced by both their impact upon her and by the opportunities and constraints afforded her within her networks, networks comprising other actors. Even private contemplation is a process of ‘inner conversation’, an interaction which, as Mead (1967) notes, both presupposes a conversational competence acquired by way of interaction with others and engages with internalized representations of the perspectives of significant others. Our private worlds of thought are simulated interactions involving a virtual network of those who matter to us. And they are private only to the extent that we have acquired a sufficient level of interactional competence and social awareness to make them so, that we have mastered speech to the point that we can speak silently and ‘to ourselves’, for example, and have acquired a social sensibility sufficient to be aware of and bothered about the awareness that others have of us. Privacy is a practice which positions us in relation to others from whom we wish to keep things private. It is both impossible and meaningless in the absence of others.

Actors are important then but we are not self-contained, self-sufficient atoms. We are ‘movers’ in the social drama but not prime, unmoved movers. We are always agents-in-relation. There is no exception, no Robinson Crusoe¹ moment. In phylogenetic terms, our primate ancestors lived in groups and group life was amongst the environmental conditions that shaped their evolution into human beings (Hirst and Wooley 1982; Levins and Lewontin 1985; Lewontin 1993). The context of group life selected for certain qualities. It was an environmental condition to which those actors best ‘fit’ would have had a greater chance of survival. We were social before we were human and perhaps only ever became the type of organism that we now call ‘human’ because we were social.

In ontogenetic terms, we take shape within the womb of our mother, as a parasite upon her, and we are born helpless and incomplete, relying upon others to sustain and impart to us the dispositions and skills which will allow us to emerge as relatively autonomous actors within the networks of interdependence and interaction which comprise our social world. At a sociogenetic level, the dispositions and skills imparted to emergent actors vary across time and both geographical and social space, as an effect of networks and interactions. And the shape and demands of those interactions and networks vary similarly. Life in the networks and interactions of the feudal court, to take a well-documented example, was different to that in contemporary capitalism (Elias 1984). And it will be different again as the networks that constitute the ever-evolving fabric of social life, and the culture that grows within those networks, changes again, as indeed it is different for actors in the present who are positioned at different points in those networks.

Even the consciousness which, for some, defines human beings is, as I discuss in Chapter 5, best conceived in relational terms. Consciousness is not, as Descartes (1969) famously suggests, a ‘substance’. It is, at least in its primordial, perceptual form, a relation, a connection between a sensuous organism and objects within its environment. To be conscious is always necessarily to be conscious of something or other and thereby to be connected to it by way of a sensuous awareness (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1965; Mead 1967). As such, consciousness is not ‘in our heads’ but rather lies between, in the relation of a being who is conscious and the being of which they are conscious (ibid.). Consciousness is not a private theatre, an inner simulation of an outer world. It arises in the interaction between the organism and its environment and comprises the grasp which the former achieves upon the latter.

My point is not only that actors are formed within and inseparable from interactions and relations, however, but also, in a more methodological vein, that we can identify mechanisms within interaction, relations and networks which help to explain and understand events in the social world. That is, to borrow Hëdstrom’s definition of mechanisms, we can identify constellations ‘of entities and activities that are organized such that they regularly bring about a particular type of outcome’ (Hedström 2005: 25). There is a growing and important literature on mechanisms and the concept should, I believe, be central to relational sociology. Much of the existing literature derives from rational action theory (see Elster 2007; Hedström and Swedberg 1998; see Abbott 2007a,b for a critique), which is ‘methodologically individualistic’ and thus tends towards atomism (see Chapter 2). This is not true of all of it, however. Some is relational in orientation (e.g. Tilly 2002, 2006; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001). And even much of the supposedly ‘methodologically individualistic’ work, which is often focused upon patterns of interaction, is relational in focus or at least not irreconcilable with a relational approach² (especially Hedström 2005). We must claim ‘mechanisms’ for relational sociology and seek them out in the context of interactions, relations and networks.

To reiterate, however, networks of interaction do not enjoy the independence from agency, the independent telos and self-determinacy, which certain strands of holistic sociology, not least crude variants of functionalism and Marxism, have attributed to it. Versions of holism which explain what goes on within a society by reference to the determinate power and requirements of society itself or invariant laws of historical destiny, are no less flawed than the individualism which they oppose. The mantra of holism, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, is open to various interpretations. There is a sense in which it is correct but there are also many senses in which it is not. Specifically, it is correct in the respect that networks of interaction, as noted above, manifest irreducible properties and generate further emergent properties, including the very agents who interact within them. But it is deeply flawed if it is taken as a licence to invoke ‘society’ or its laws or needs as explanations of social activities and outcomes. There are social logics and mechanisms which steer (inter)action but these are logics and mechanisms of interaction, logics and mechanisms which refer us to historically situated agents-in-relation, not mysterious societal forces which compel agents, from behind their backs, to act in particular ways.

Relational sociology is not my idea, even if I do hope to advance its cause and put my own spin upon it. It is ‘in the air’ at the moment, circulating within sociological networks in a variety of forms, some of which are closer to what I am suggesting than others (e.g. Emirbayer 1997; White 1992, 2008; Tilly 2006; Gould 1993a, 1995; Abbott 1997, 2001, 2007a,b; Strauss 1993; Bourdieu 1998, 2000; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Elias 1978, 1984). Indeed, as the quotations at the start of this chapter indicate, one can identify approximations of it right back through the history of sociology to the founders. I am not calling for yet another revolution or ‘turn’ in sociology therefore. I am engaging with a current concern in the discipline and also returning to what I take to be certain basic and fundamental sociological ideas in an effort to revive and revise them. In doing so I will draw freely from those other relational sociologists whose version of relationalism is most similar to my own. The point is not to start afresh but rather to achieve some much needed clarity in relation to what some sociologists have, in my view, been striving for all along.

I begin to make my case, in Chapter 2, by way of closer examination of the individualism/holism dichotomy outlined briefly above. The book addresses three sociological dichotomies in total, the other two being the agency/structure (Chapter 8) and micro/macro (Chapter 10) dichotomies respectively, but the individualism/holism dichotomy is the most fundamental, as an ‘epistemological obstacle’ (Bachelard 2002), from the point of view of establishing a relational approach to sociology.

Having identified relationalism as a potential alternative to both individualism and holism, in Chapter 2, I seek in Chapter 3 to lay out some of the basic concepts of the relational approach. I begin with a reflection upon the concept of ‘relations’, which leads to a brief discussion of ‘interaction’ and then ‘networks’. These three concepts, ‘interaction’, ‘relations’ and ‘networks’, are in some respects the most fundamental to my approach. Any adequate discussion of them inevitably draws upon other key concepts, such as power, resources and conventions, however, and my conception of networks, whilst heavily indebted to the narrower and more technical version posited in social network analysis (e.g. Wasserman and Faust 1994; Scott 2000), seeks to build upon this basis, adding in a consideration of conventions, resources and overlapping interests, such that a ‘network’, as I understand it, is akin to what some symbolic interactionists refer to as ‘a social world’ (see also Crossley 2010a,b), that is to say, something broader than what the concept of ‘network’ might initially suggest.

Chapter 3 identifies a number of dimensions which are evident to varying degrees within most interactions and relations. Specifically, it identifies strategic, symbolic, affective, conventional (or institutionalized) and exchange dimensions. In Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 I draw these aspects out and analyse them in more detail. Chapter 4 takes ‘strategic interaction’ and game theory as its point of departure but quickly diverts into a discussion which incorporates many other key aspects of and possibilities within interaction, including cooperation, trust, duty and empathy. Chapters 5 and 6 pick up on the theme of intersubjectivity which is raised in this context and discuss it in some detail, elaborating upon the symbolic and affective aspects of interaction which often run parallel to and become entangled in strategic interaction. Chapter 7 concludes this part of the book with a discussion of exchange relations and the power which emerges within them.

The discussion in Chapters 4 through 7 repeatedly bangs up against the concepts ‘networks’, ‘conventions’ and ‘resources’. Chapters 8 through 10 build upon this, making these concepts central. This begins, in Chapters 8 and 9, with a discussion of the interpenetration of networks, conventions and resources in the context of ‘social worlds’. These concepts, it is argued, are crucial for a properly relational investigation of social life and, indeed, to an adequate conception of ‘social structure’. In this context the merits of ‘convention’ relative to ‘rules’ (Giddens 1984) and ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1992) are also discussed.

The much debated agency/structure dichotomy is also discussed in this context. I argue that, unlike individualism and holism, which constitute incompatible principles of reduction, agency and structure are effectively co-existing aspects of the social world which assume greater or lesser salience in different contexts. We cannot resolve this dichotomy because there is nothing to resolve or at least nothing that can be resolved in general. The job of sociology and especially relational sociology, I suggest, is to examine how, paraphrasing Marx, inter-actors make history (agency) but not in circumstances of their choosing (structure). There is not much else to be said regarding structure and agency than this.

Finally, I turn to the question of whether the position outlined in the book and the concepts invoked are sufficient to engage with the dynamics and structure of the social macro-cosm. I suggest that they are, seeking to demonstrate how different conceptions of ‘actors’, ‘relations’ and network structures map onto bigger objects of enquiry than might usually be assumed. Ironically it is sometimes more difficult to appreciate the relational configuration of the social macro-cosm than it is the micro-cosm, and to slip eithe...

Table of contents

• International Library of Sociology
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Individualism, holism and beyond
• 3 Mapping the territory
• 4 From strategy to empathy
• 5 Mind, meaning and intersubjectivity
• 6 I, me and the other
• 7 Exchange, sociability and power
• 8 Structure, agency and social worlds
• 9 Networks, conventions and resources
• 10 Big networks and small worlds
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index