Relational Sociology and Research on Schools, Colleges, and Universities

William G. Tierney, Suneal Kolluri, William G. Tierney, Suneal Kolluri

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438478241, 9781438478234
• eBook ISBN: 9781438478258
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Brings relational sociology to bear on educational research.

Relational sociology was conceived by theorists frustrated by what they viewed as an incomplete accounting of social reality. Torn between notions of structural rigidity, on the one hand, and rational choice individualism, on the other, relational sociologists have sought new units of analysis. Social reality, they have argued, is manufactured through relationships. People are who they are, and society is what it is, not because of some individual or collective "essence" but because of the networks that social beings build among one another.

Relational Sociology and Research on Schools, Colleges, and Universities demonstrates the value of introducing new relational methods and epistemologies in educational research. The contributors examine the roles and significance of ongoing transactions among connected social actors-students, peers, families, teachers-in a variety of institutional contexts. The book explores various uses and applications of relational sociology in education, while highlighting its promise to provide fresh insight into intractable problems of inequity in US schools.

Chapter 1

Toward a Relational Sociology of Education

SUNEAL KOLLURI AND WILLIAM G. TIERNEY

The social nature of humankind was a central theme of early modernist thought. For Karl Marx, what men and women produce for others is what sets them apart from animals. “An animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally” (Marx 1844, 4). Emile Durkheim emphasized the nature of people to collectively define norms and beliefs in moments of shared “effervescence” (1995). Similar to Marx, Durkheim argued that humanity’s cooperative social capacity distinguished “man” and animal. For these foundational thinkers, social norms and structures determined social reality. Interpersonal relationships within the larger structures were mostly overlooked. Individual people, defined by their position in society, operated according to externally determined norms of interaction.

Much modern sociology has pushed back against social determinism by emphasizing the individual or at least incorporating human agency within the idea of structure. Methodological individualism and its logical extension, rational choice theory, for example, emphasize the individual as the unit of analysis. Social realities are thus assumed to be the product of individual decision making aimed at utility maximization (Tan 2014). Breaking from seminal thinkers such as Marx and Durkheim, scholars of methodological individualism and rational choice theory have emphasized the individual over the collective.

Over the past three decades, a branch of sociology has developed to think in a different manner from both of these perspectives. Relational sociology was conceived by scholars frustrated with what they viewed as an incomplete accounting of social reality. Torn between structural rigidity on one hand and methodological individualism on the other, relational sociologists have sought new units of analysis that prioritize neither a self-maintaining social structure nor an individual rationality of Homo economicus. Instead, they have argued, social reality is manufactured through relationships. People are who they are, and society is what it is because of the networks that social beings build among themselves. This framework formed the basis for a relational sociology that challenged traditional approaches to the study of social questions. The resulting body of work has provided the sociological literature with innovative perspectives on important social challenges (e.g., Desmond 2014; Tilly 1998).

Despite a robust movement in sociology toward a relational approach, no parallel body of work has arisen in the field of education. Our purpose here is to apply a relational lens to educational research and suggest how such a perspective might be useful to the field. We offer an outline of a theory of relational sociology and consider how it might challenge existing theoretical frameworks in education. We then consider how research methodologies in education might adopt relational principles. We argue that educational research has much to benefit from explicitly adopting the tenets of relational sociology, and in many respects, the field of education is a particularly robust arena for using these concepts.

The Theory of Relational Sociology

Relational sociology entails three core tenets: (1) a rejection of essentialist analyses of social realities that are static and detached from socio-temporal contexts, (2) a transcendence of dualities of sociological thought, and (3) a theoretical commitment to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “field” which, as we elaborate, takes into account the idea of agency.

A Rejection of Essentialism

Relational sociologists define essentialism as an association of social phenomena with fixed characteristics. Such characteristics might inhere in individuals or social institutions. Essentialism presents “a vision of the world as a vast collection of isolated entities stacked side by side like so many jarred specimens on laboratory shelves” (Desmond 2014, 551). In “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” Mustafa Emirbayer (1997) persuasively argues for a transactional approach to sociological research. Transactions are joint activities between people that cannot be separated into component parts without losing meaning inherent in the transaction.

Whereas relational theory rejects an emphasis on individual characteristics, it does not completely eschew categories. Categories are necessary, but they are malleable and sociotemporally defined. Emirbayer (1997) calls on relational approaches to “unfreeze static, substantialist categories that deny the fluidity of figurational patternings. … Essentialist modes of thinking all too often see individuals and collectivities as possessing singular, unitary ‘identities’ rooted in race, class, gender, or sexuality” (308). Relational thinking does not seek to diminish the importance of categories to the construction of social meaning but recasts them as a function of relationships and transactions in society.

Relational tenets apply to characteristics of individual people and social phenomena. At an individual level, one’s identity is not an innate characteristic manifested in appearance, personality, or cultural beliefs but is selected from a “bundle” of selves given past experiences and present social networks (White 1992). Identities are in constant flux, constructed from relationships, as opposed to a person holding intrinsic characteristics. Relational sociologists also view social phenomena as relational processes. For example, Charles Tilly (1998) conceptualizes inequality as a societal process as opposed to a state of being. Inequality results from a deliberate set of actions made possible by enduring social structures. All of this conveys a world where a particular societal or individual characteristic is more verb than adjective.

Relational sociologists differentiate transactional approaches from “variable-centered” interactional analyses. They argue that researchers too often attribute social reality to the interacting characteristics of people rather than the relationships among them. Emirbayer (1997) explains that in relational sociology, “a dynamic, unfolding process, becomes the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves” (287). In quantitative analyses, researchers often study how variables “interact” to produce social outcomes. For relational sociologists, variables do not necessarily drive causal relationships. Instead, variables change. Societies are constructed of people situated in webs of social networks continually affecting one another. An essentialist sociological inquiry might study how people’s personal characteristics affect their social realities; a relational sociologist more likely will address how people’s social networks shape their personal characteristics. While positivist sociologists view the world in terms of causal arrows, relational sociologists view it in terms of messy, mutually reinforcing webs of interpersonal relationships.

Many of the concepts of relational sociology were built on foundations laid by John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley. Emirbayer’s “Manifesto” relies heavily on a little-known correspondence between Dewey and Bentley, “The Knowing and the Known” (1960). Like Emirbayer, they argue for the primacy of “transaction” over essentialist variables in sociological inquiry by considering the following example:

If we watch a hunter with his gun go into a field where he sees a small animal already known to him by name as a rabbit, then, within the framework of half an hour and an acre of land, it is easy … to report the shooting that follows in an interactional form in which rabbit and hunter and gun enter as separates and come together by way of cause and effect. If, however, we take enough of the earth and enough thousands of years, and watch the identification of rabbit gradually taking place, arising first in the sub-naming processes of gesture, cry, and attentive movement, wherein both rabbit and hunter participate, and continuing on various levels of description and naming, we shall soon see the transaction account as the one that best covers the ground. (141)

A rabbit and hunter do not exist by nature of physical, static attributes. Rather, a process of relational configurations and transactions has constructed the social relationship in which they are wholly engaged. Social reality is thus conceived as a process of transactions that take place between people and among societies.

Importantly for the purposes of our argument on the value of relational sociology in schools, Dewey also contributed to educational theory. In Democracy in Education (1916), he frames learning as a profoundly relational endeavor. “Not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates … A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning” (Dewey 1916, 5). As such, Dewey contends, schools must reflect social realities and ground themselves in the authentic experiences of students, empowering them to interpret and engage meaningfully with their social worlds. He defines education as the “reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (1916, 49). The learning process described by Dewey, more than forty years before his correspondence with Bentley, foreshadows a transactional approach to understanding education. Learning is a series of social interactions designed to better understand reality, which is itself a series of social interactions. Thus, Dewey, one of the earliest and most prominent theorists of education, adopted a distinctly relational perspective.

Indeed, a vast amount of essentialist approaches to educational thinking seems to have sidestepped the relational tone of Dewey’s analysis. Instead, essential characteristics of students and schools dominate as explanatory variables of phenomena. If a student cannot succeed, it is because they have been assigned any number of variables—they lack motivation, they hail from a single-parent household, or they have too few books at home. Teachers suffer from poor preparation, large class sizes, or implicit bias. Schools fail because they are poorly organized, they are under-resourced, or they adhere to capitalist ideologies. Students, teachers, and schools are defined by their essential characteristics, not as the dynamic social entities envisioned by Dewey, Bentley, and modern relational sociologists. Educational theory and practice, often undergirded by essentialism, are well positioned for a transactional turn.

A Transcendence of Dualities of Sociological Thought

Relational sociology circumvents many of the central debates of sociological thought. First, from an ontological perspective, a relational approach takes the stance that reality inheres in relationships, wherein objective and socially constructed realities interact. On one hand, individuals exist in an objective social network in which one’s social position and connections determine possibilities for action. On the other hand, members construct intersubjective meanings within those networks that shape their realities. Tilly (2002) conceives of “relational realism,” which accepts transactions and social networks as “real and observable,” but permits researchers to determine the extent to which socially constructed, symbolic meanings frame social reality. Thus, relational sociology provides a paradigmatic venue through which scholars might “transcend the realist-constructivist divide” (Mische 2014).

Second, although sociologists have long debated whether agency or social structure controls human action, relational sociology merges the two viewpoints. Relational sociologists suggest a mutual causality of macro- and micro-social realities. Randall Collins (1981), a social theorist who laid some of the cornerstones of relational sociology, argues in “On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology” that human action is not indelibly confined by an unchanging social structure. Rather, a person’s social interactions construct a life path that informs their future behavior. Interpersonal transactions construct a social ecology, and that ecology, in turn, influences future transactions. Mische (2014) adds that although structural conditions allow access to some networks and restrict access to others, individual agents can strategically select which of their networks to activate to achieve particular purposes. This conception mirrors White’s (1992) vision of identity, wherein one constructs a self via the “netdoms”—networks within particular social domains—in which they are situated. As Mische notes, relational thinking is a way to “overcome stale antinomies between structure and agency through a focus on the dynamics of social interactions in different kinds of social settings” (2011, 1).

The realist-constructionist and structure-agency debates occur within the confines of essentialism. Realism posits that realities are predetermined and operate independently of individual or collective meaning making. Constructionism meanwhile suggests that individual interpretations (“typifications”) guide understanding and action in the social world (Berger & Luckmann 1989). Whether social realities inhere inside or outside of the human mind, they are portrayed by realists and constructionists as inert essences of human experience. Analyses that highlight structure or agency are also grounded in essentialism. If social problems are structural, groups and individuals are statically positioned within a social hierarchy. If social problems relate to individual agency, people are often assigned static attributes that determine how they shape their own social realities.1 Instead, in its unyielding emphasis on transactional social bonds, relational sociology asserts their necessarily structural and agentic nature. As people engage in transactions, they operate within an objective social structure and actively construct social realities with others in their social networks.

As such, relational theory borrows from Marxist structuralism as well as symbolic interactionism, but accepts neither as complete. To relational theorists, structures objectively determine an actor’s social position, and his or her social position determines the potential for particular relational transactions. Unlike Marx, relational theorists are not entirely systemic. They do not define individuals solely by their social positions (Emirbayer 1997). Instead, cultural meaning making takes place at the micro level, and relational processes are informed by the dispositions of individual actors. Borrowing from Erving Goffman (1959), dynamic processes unfold in face-to-face interactions defined by ongoing social performance (Emirbayer 1997). However, Desmond (2014) suggests that Goffman’s adherents might get too bogged down in the particular nuances of individual interactions, neglecting the social and historical structures that have shaped them. While structural and symbolic interactionist frameworks offer important insights to relational theory, relational sociologists represent themselves as a “third approach” that holds neither to a completely “systemic” nor to a “dispositional” framework (Desmond 2014).

Educational research, much like social science research more generally, has struggled to emerge from the debates that relational approaches aim to overcome. Ontological and epistemological differences are often viewed as irreconcilable. Positivist and constructionist educational researchers remain entrenched in their ivory towers. Indeed, paradigmatic controversies between qualitative and quantitative scholars have spanned decades (e.g., Guba & Lincoln 2005; Lincoln & Guba 1985). In addition, much research on schools has been stuck on either side of the agency-structure divide. From the agency perspective, early American theorist Horace Mann’s conception of education as “the great equalizer” (Mann 1848) remains salient today, even finding its way into a 2011 speech by recent Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (Rhode, Cooke, & Himanshu-Ojha 2012). However, many social reproduction theorists deny the existence of educational agency. Bowles and Gintis (1976) suggest that schools work to ensure social reproduction, and individual students can do little if anything to alter their social standing in the face of repressive academic institutions. Bourdieu (1973, 1986) conceives of distinct forms of capital—social and cultural—as subtle means by which dominant groups reify their social position. The scholarly cacophony surrounding realism, constructivism, structure, and agency represents for educational theorist Henry Giroux (1983) “a failure that has plagued educational research and practice for decades” (7). Educational research could benefit from a “relational realism” that adopts a flexible ontology and remains sensitive to the interplay of social structures and human agency.

A Theoretical Commitment to Bourdieu’s Concept of Field

Although Bourdieu’s work has frequently been used in analyzing educational issues, his concept of field is an often overlooked element of his theoretical framework, but it is central to relational sociology. A field is a network of individuals and institutions governed by particular power dynamics and rules of practice (Musoba & Baez 2009...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Education, Equity, and the Promise of Seeing Relationally
• Chapter 1 Toward a Relational Sociology of Education
• Chapter 2 Embedding Networks in Fields: Toward an Expanded Model of Relational Analysis in Education
• Chapter 3 Which Truths Shall We Speak to Power? Relational Sociology in Qualitative Research on Educational Stratification
• Chapter 4 Relational Sociology and Race Relations: Pushing the Conversation in Higher Education
• Chapter 5 Reconsidering the Role of College Advisors as Key Relationship Brokers in High School Networks
• Chapter 6 Why Study with Friends? A Relational Analysis of Students’ Strategies to Integrate Social and Academic Life
• Chapter 7 What Can Relational Sociology Reveal about College Writing and Remediation?
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover