Relational Sociology: Reflexive and Realist: Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer

1 Introduction
Relational Sociology: reflexive

and realist
pierpaolo donati and
margaret s. archer
The rationale for this book

Increasingly, theorists of many different persuasions are presenting
themselves as ‘Relational Sociologists’. Yet it is difficult to see how
there could be a sociological theory that was not concerned with rela-
tions in some sense of the term. The problem is that those appropri-
ating this adjective for their theorizing mean very different things by
it: ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically. When Rela-
tional Sociology is proclaimed as a ‘manifesto’, the expectation is that
its signatories will be endorsing at least the main planks of an ‘explana-
tory programme’; but even this is not the case. Moreover, ‘manifestos’
issued in any domain are promissory notes; what they promise is to
perform a task better than did their predecessors. The trouble here is
that the best known versions of ‘Relational Sociology’ – largely North
American – do not even address the scope of this enterprise as tradi-
tionally conceived in the discipline.
Sociology came into being to seek answers to four questions about
the social order: ‘Where have we come from?’, ‘What is it like now?’,
‘Where is it going?’, and ‘What is to be done?’ These are all realist
questions: there is a real social world with real properties inhabited by
real people who collectively made the past and whose causal powers
are already shaping the future. One way in which Weber expressed
the vocation of sociology was to discover why things are ‘so’ and not
‘otherwise’. In other words, the purpose of the discipline was explana-
tory. Both authors of this book situate themselves uncompromisingly in
this tradition and in their previous works have struggled to contribute
something to answering all four key questions. This distinguishes
us from nearly all of those today who term themselves ‘Relational
Sociologists’ and who retreat further and further from trying to
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4 Part I
explain anything. We can illustrate this most pungently by simply ask-

ing: ‘What do those proclaiming their approaches to be distinctively
“relational” contribute to our understanding of what is happening
today in our one global society?’ We are not exigently demanding
a grand theory, but more modestly asking for a statement of their
explanatory programme.
In our view, as the economic crisis of late modernity became
entrenched, it accentuated the incongruity between the cultural ‘ideal’
of Individualism and the structural influences that preceded, precip-
itated and prolonged this state of affairs in the economy, which are
irreducible to individualistic terms. The excesses of unregulated global
finance capitalism were met by an intensification of bureaucratic regu-
lation on the part of enfeebled nation states when implementing their
politics of austerity, which further accentuated the incongruity. This
is encapsulated in the generalized acceptance in the developed world
that structurally ‘there is no alternative’ to the financialized economy,
whilst simultaneously scapegoating particularly rapacious individuals
(bankers) for its damaging consequences. Hence, the old oscillation
between individualism and collectivism that had dogged modernity
re-presented itself in yet another guise. This is the backcloth to the
present book. We start from the assumption that behind the complex
interactions generating the current crisis, what is at issue is the central
nucleus of Western modernity: its characteristic compromise1 between
individualism, which ironically goes hand in hand with its character-
istic collectivism, as manifest in the ‘lib/lab’ nature of government and
governance that oscillate between the two.2
More pointedly the book is concerned with the way in which the
social sciences have reflected the same ambiguity and incorporated it
into their theorizing. Both authors, sometimes writing together, have
1
‘Compromise’ results from situations where incompatible cultural and
structural factors that are necessarily related to one another, i.e. representing a
‘constraining contradiction’ (Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The
Place of Culture in Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1988, pp. 148–153).
2
This peculiar combination of individualism and collectivism is at the basis of
the arrangement that in the following chapters will be called the lib/lab
configuration of modern society: see P. Donati, Relational Sociology. A New
Paradigm for the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 48; Sociologia
della riflessività. Come si entra nel dopo-moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011),
pp. 221–294.
Introduction: Relational Sociology: reflexive and realist 5
criticized interpretations of the intensified morphogenesis in the West-

ern world as a process of destructuring in which contingency, com-
plexity, uncertainty, and risk are captured by the trope of liquidity.3
We remain convinced that there are generative mechanisms that under-
lie the current state of affairs, but that is not our focus in this text.
Instead, we concentrate upon the parallel crisis in current social theo-
rizing, particularly as concerns the social subject – both singular and
collective.
In a nutshell, we regard the European shift towards political centrism
(where government and opposition are increasingly indistinguishable,
where the practice of politics is without conviction and the preoccupa-
tion is with tactics rather than strategy) as having its parallel in social
theory. Generically, this is the move towards ‘central conflation’,4 in
which the problems of Structure and Agency and of objectivism and
subjectivism are supposedly ‘transcended’; flows replace structures,
narratives displace culture, and human plasticity makes the fluidity of
our putative serial re-invention homological with the equally putative
liquidity of the social order.
What is the connection with the conceptualization of human sub-
jects, both singular and collective, that are central to this book? Not
so very long ago the conflicting claims of individualism and collec-
tivism dominated the philosophy of social science in the embattled
positions of methodological individualism versus holism. Until quite
recently homo economicus pursuing ‘his’ lone and individual pref-
erence schedule through instrumental rationality confronted homo
sociologicus as ‘organizational man’, the puppet of rule and role
requirements. Neither has become extinct despite postmodernism’s
proclamations of the ‘death of the subject’. Rather, the equiva-
lent of political centrism was again fostered. The ‘institutionalized
3
For our latest contributions see the three books edited by Margaret S. Archer
(Dordrecht: Springer): Social Morphogenesis (2013), vol. 1; Late Modernity:
Trajectories towards Morphogenic Society (2014), vol. 2; Generative
Mechanisms Transforming Late Modernity (2015), vol. 3.
4
Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency, chapters 2, 3, and 4, and Realist
Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), pp. 79–89. Bourdieu provided a clear statement of
central conflation in the first sentence of The Logic of Practice (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1990), p. 25 (italics added): ‘Of all the oppositions that artificially
divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous is the one
that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism.’
6 Part I
individualism’5 (of Ulrich Beck rather than that of Talcott Parsons) pre-
sented us with homo inconstantus, a subject freed from traditionalism’s
‘zombie categories’ of class and gender, now enmeshed in a plethora
of bureaucratic regulations yet free to embrace their self-reinvention,
change their identities, and rewrite their biographies according to cur-
rent whim and devoid of durable commitment, thus yielding provi-
sional men and pro tem women. With a handful of exceptions,6 the
human subject’s real, objective capacities for flourishing and liabilities
to suffering faded into sociological insignificance. What remained was
the ‘ability’ of fluid subjects to make what they would of social liq-
uidity. Such was the ‘transcendence’ of the central problems of social
theory in the hands of the central conflationists.
Breaching the theoretical tenet that every social phenomenon comes
in a SAC and can only be explained by unpacking its contents –
‘Structure’, ‘Culture’, and ‘Agency’ – and examining their interplay,
these main constituents of the social order were increasingly conflated
with one another.7 For the majority of social theorists, the result-
ing soup had one distinctive flavour: despite its colouring, the perva-
sive taste of the social – after all ingredients had been through the
Moulinex.8
Although this tendency fell short of homogenizing different theo-
retical approaches, it became an increasingly potent strand of think-
ing within them. With little exaggeration, this trend could be called
‘the socialization of everything personal’. The ‘Individual’ – who had
remained robust since the Enlightenment – was the obvious victim
and one whose demise we welcome. However, there is a crucial dif-
ference between insisting that the social order was not only ‘outside’
us but also ‘within’ us and the insidious assumption that the social
5
Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized
Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002).
6
Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985); Andrew Sayer, Why Things Matter to People: Social
Science, Values and Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011); Christian Smith, What Is a Person? (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2010).
7
D. V. Porpora, Restructuring Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 forthcoming).
8
Colin Campbell (in The Myth of Social Action, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996) had traced precisely the same misguided transformation
of all ‘action’ into ‘social action’.
infiltrated every nook and cranny of the human person, thus reduced
to zombie status. Most sociologists could agree that thinking in terms
of the ‘Individual and Society’ – as many teaching modules used to be
entitled – implied a highly misleading separation of the two. Neverthe-
less, some of us resisted the steady encroachment of the social upon
human personhood and the progressive reduction of personal prop-
erties and powers that it implied. Our resistance was just as strong
towards the parallel implications for ‘structure’ and ‘culture’ entailed
by this tendency to endorse central conflation. These similarly under-
went the erosion of their distinctive properties and powers, which were
reduced to the products of ‘interaction’ among (over-) social agents. In
turn, this subtracted sui generis constraints, enablements, and sources
of motivation from structure and culture alike, as these became the
plasticine of interaction. Pushed to the extreme – and not all were such
extremists – the result was a sociology of ‘actants’ and their networks
making up a social world with a completely flat social ontology.
Certainly, there are ‘old’ representatives of this position (interpre-
tivists) and ‘new’ ones (actor-network theorists), but we are more
concerned by the less articulated and generally rather diffuse creeping
forward of this tendency. Let us consider some of its indicative traits
before we come to the growing popularity of the label ‘Relational
Sociology’.
To begin with, we note the grounding of ‘Relational Sociology’ in
the revival of George Herbert Mead, especially his view that selfhood is
completely derived from the social order and subsequently regulated by
the ‘generalized other’. However, in the nascent globalized world that
he detected, early in the twentieth century, Mead also feared that the
‘generalized other’ could not survive the loss of familiar geo-localism.9
In addition, note that Mead was a theorist who fully endorsed ‘emer-
gence’, although this is rarely mentioned by those rediscovering him.
After all, the defence of emergent properties and powers is subjected
to widespread hostility, in part at least, because this concept is the
9
Mead admits that ‘the community in its size may transcend the social
organization, may go beyond the social organization which makes such
identification possible. The most striking illustration of that is the economic
community. This includes everybody with whom one can trade in any
circumstances, but it represents a whole in which it would be next to impossible
for all to enter into the attitudes of others’ (George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self
and Society, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1934, pp. 326–327; italics
added).
8 Part I
strongest bulwark against those denying the relative autonomy, tem-

poral priority, and causal powers of Structure and Culture in relation
to Agency. In equal part, this is because the relations between human
agents are also denied the power to generate emergent relational phe-
nomena themselves. In this connection, Part II of this book is devoted
to how the capacities and liabilities of human persons are affected
by the structural and cultural contexts into which we are ineluctably
born and that we necessarily have to confront. Part III examines our
ineradicable human powers to transform these unavoidable, inherited
aspects of our natal contexts.
Neo-liberalism, centricism, and central conflation

North-American ‘Relational Sociology’ is marked by two distinct
responses to the liberalism of modernity and the neo-liberalism of late-
modernity: virulent antagonism towards the Individualist patrimony of
pre-twentieth century social thought and uncritical receptivity towards
the destructured portrayal of late modernity as fluid flows and form-
less complexity, which does sterling service in muting the critique of
mutating capitalism.
First, its refusal to tackle the macro-level at all and its failure to rec-
ognize any distinctive properties and powers of emergent social struc-
tures (which it shares with the revival of neo-pragmatism)10 means that
the machinations of financialized banking, multinational corporations,
digital technology, climate change, warfare, and so on are subjected to
silence, as are associated failures in health care delivery11 and growing
differentials in income distribution. Of course, the studied absence of
these major politico-economic features of the USA’s social landscape
makes the endorsement of ‘destructuration’ considerably easier.
Second, and more directly relevant to this book, is the conceptual-
ization of the social ‘relationship’ – or rather its absence. People do
not stand in close relations with one another – as friends, parents, fel-
low workers, team players or supporters, members of the same church
10
See Neil Gross, who deals with this problem by invoking the (supposed)
homology between the three ‘levels’: N. Gross, ‘A Pragmatist Theory of Social
Mechanisms’, American Sociological Review, 74 (2009), 358–379.
11
The world’s most expensive, yet the mortality rates for children are the highest
in the developed world. Doug Porpora, Restructuring Sociology: The Critical
Realist Approach.
or voluntary association, and so forth. Instead of warmth, caring,

and commitment, which motivate their actions, generating ‘relational
goods’12 and promoting social integration, they feature as nodes in net-
works of connectivity or represent its ‘holes’. There is no coalescence
into groups, significant to the subjects involved; no social movements
committed to any cause and hostile to their opponents, and no parties
or interest groups with social agendas. In place of personal concerns
and collective conflicts, social relations are merely the site of an infi-
nite series of ‘transactions’. What a transaction is remains without
definition and is as indefinite as ‘everything’. As a portmanteau term,
it certainly steers clear of the foundational imagery of the exchange of
equivalents – of apples for bananas – in classical economics but fails
to reveal when a transaction is successful (or a failure) and under what
conditions and with what consequences. In all the approving refer-
ences to transactional relations, without love or hate or even instru-
mental indifference, we find an overzealous reaction formation against
the heritage of modernity’s individualism. Persons are shorn of their
intrinsic personal powers, but the social relations that now subsume
those previously attributed to the individual in no sense generate recog-
nizable human relationships. Instead, we are increasingly encouraged
to become anti-humanists.
The connection between neo-liberalism and individualism is well-
known in the history and philosophy of political economy, dating
back to the utilitarians and philosophes13 and constantly receiving
new shots in the arm throughout the twentieth century. This needs
no rehearsing. Neither does its percolation into social theorizing as
the philosophical individualism that accounted for the resilience of
methodological individualism. Specifically, rational choice theory and
rational action theory are its fully fledged representatives. The perni-
cious irony was that intensified attacks upon the individual and upon
emergence left millennial forms of Relational Sociology without the
conceptual resources to mount a critique upon the damaging conse-
quences of neo-liberalism.
12
P. Donati, ‘Capitale sociale e beni relazionali: una lettura sociologica delle reti
associative a carattere cooperativo’, in V. Pelligra (ed.), Imprese sociali. Scelte
individuali e interessi comuni (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2008), pp. 135–153.
13
C. Gide and C. Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines (London: G. Harrap,
1932 [1915]).
10 Part I
An important forerunner as to where this version of Relational

Sociology would end was Giddens’ ‘structuration theory’, as the
acme of ‘central conflationism’.14 The bridge was that ‘structure’ and
‘agency’ were systematically elided and held to be even analytically
inseparable, as each necessarily drew upon the other in the concep-
tion, conduct, and consequences of any action. This was followed by
Giddens’ work on ‘self and society’ in late modernity developing his
notion of the ‘pure relationship’, which remained a relation only as
long as the two participants derived personal satisfaction from it.15 All
the same, some kind of subject remained, if the capacity for subjective
‘personal satisfaction’ did, just as some kind of virtual structure
and culture did, if they were elements that could be drawn upon.
As a theoretical backcloth, structuration theory might have been
more prominently foregrounded in relational sociology were it not
contaminated by Giddens’ venture into realpolitik in publishing his
Third Way.
Instead, the same assumptions were taken from other sources, most
importantly Bourdieu – after his works arrived in translation. Even
Beck’s version retained too much of the human subject because he
stressed progressive ‘individualization’. The latter was induced by
the free flow of information and media representation, meaning that
‘traditional’ categories guiding self-direction, such as class and status
or norms and values, were superseded by new notions of ‘living a life
of one’s own’, serial personal reinvention, familial experimentation,
and kaleidoscopic biographical revision.16 This preoccupation with
the individualized ‘life of one’s own’, negotiated and renegotiated
among our new ‘precarious freedoms’, was held to underpin various
contributions to the major loss in social solidarity: the attenuation of
intergenerational social solidarity, the demise of the durable family,
the reduced salience of class (now a ‘zombie category’), indifference
to party politics, and the vanishing of normative consensus. For the
Becks, ‘the human being who aspires to be the author of his or her life,
the creator of an individual identity, is the central character of our
14
Margaret S. Archer, ‘Morphogenesis versus Structuration’, British Journal of
Sociology, 33 (1982), 455–483; Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic
Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
15
A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern
Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
16
J. Beck and E. Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization (London: Sage, 2002).
time.’17 Thus ‘institutionalized individualism’18 was held to be ‘becom-

ing the social structure of second modern society itself.’19 Even this
was a step too far in allowing the human being the personal power to
‘make a life’ and to remain the ‘central character’ in the social drama.
Somewhat surprising, given his ‘adoption’ as their founding father
within Relational Sociology, is the stance of Norbert Elias towards
individualism. He himself chose to sum up his fifty years of theorizing
under the title The Society of Individuals.20 In it, his thought piv-
ots on the ‘we-I’ balance and its shift from the hegemony of the ‘we’
in tribal and classical civilizations towards the ‘I’ of late modernity
(the last essay is dated 1987).21 What is surprising is that in 1987
Elias still looked forward to increased system integration and in his
last years foresaw, ‘before the process of integration into a tightly
knit worldwide network of states has fully begun, a greater chance of
individualization’.22 The result was an upbeat interpretation of ‘net-
worked individualism’, whose hallmark ‘is that people function more
as connected individuals and less as embedded group members’.23 This
‘is the era of free agents and the spirit of personal agency’.24 We have
no reservations about the existence of a general association between
liberal market economics and individualism; indeed, Archer has under-
lined that modernity is closely linked to ‘Autonomous Reflexivity’ as
the dominant mode practised and that its practitioners are instrumental
rationalists who come close to resembling Rational Man.25 However,
there is a very important caveat.
17
Ibid., pp. 22–23, italics added.
18 19
Ibid., ‘Preface’, p. xxi. Ibid., p. xxii.
20
Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
21
‘Whereas previously people had belonged . . . to a certain group for ever, so
that their I-identity was permanently bound to their we-identity and often
overshadowed by it, in the course of time the pendulum swung to the opposite
extreme. The we-identity of people, though it certainly always remained
present, was now often overshadowed or concealed in consciousness by their
I-identity’. Ibid., p. 197.
22
Ibid., p. 169. The thinking is very similar to Mead’s at the end of Mind, Self
and Society; whilst Mead’s hopes were pinned on the League of Nations, Elias
dreams of world government. The difference is that whilst Mead saw the
growth of international trade as terminal for the reach of the ‘generalized
other’, Elias seems to hope for the development of a global humanistic ‘we’.
23 24
Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 19.
25
Margaret S. Archer, Making Our Way Through the World: Human Reflexivity
and Social Mobility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chapter 5.
12 Part I
That was only the case until towards the end of the twentieth cen-
tury. It was only the case whilst ever the remnants of ‘mutual regu-
lation’ between system and society lasted, underwriting some degree
of overall integration. It ceased to be the case when multinational and
finance capitalism broke free of national bounds and cast off the shack-
les of geo-local restraint: of the unions, of accountability to parliament,
of the law of ‘the land’ and of normative regulation. The unfettered
pursuit of the situational logic of competition intensified as the last
bonds were shed that had tied national institutions together into an
imperfect form of system integration, but sufficient to have produced
the post–Second World war ‘golden years’.
Ironically, for all its covenantal Meadianism and its celebration of
Elias, North American Relational Sociology was distancing itself fur-
ther and further from neo-liberalism’s ‘individual’, eventually produc-
ing yet another version of the ‘death of the Subject’. With it, certain
questions were struck off the sociological agenda: ‘What is a per-
son?’, what makes for being human and human well-being? in what do
human suffering and flourishing consist, beyond the bio-physical level?
This ‘missing person’, capable of initiating and sustaining human rela-
tionships and generating relational goods (and evils), means the price
they paid was an inability to account for ‘who’ entered into their myr-
iad ‘transactions’, ‘why’ they did so, and with ‘what’ consequences. In
other words, the ‘flat ontology’ of North American Relational Soci-
ology in the new millennium had effectively eliminated the Subject
(by its anti-humanism) and the ‘social structure’ (through its so-called
anti-substantialism). Consequently, they had disabled themselves from
producing an account of the current economic crisis in terms of ‘dyadic,
transactional networks between actants’.
These considerations have been introduced because they inflect
much of what styles itself as ‘relational social theory’, one that
goes with the flow, plunging deep into embracing social liquidity.
Differences within this relatively new camp will be touched upon
as this introduction proceeds, but it is important to underline what
distinguishes our approach from that whole camp.26 We believe
26
One that rarely recognizes Donati’s foundational work which predated them
all. See: Donati, Introduzione alla sociologia relazionale (Milan: FrancoAngeli,
1983) and Teoria relazionale della società (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1991).
that this is distinctive in the following ways, ones that justify our
Relational Sociology being qualified as both Reflexive and Realist.
What distinguishes our contribution from other versions of

Relational Sociology?
1. We acknowledge that robust singular selves – not individuals – are
necessary preconditions for subjects to form relations and thus, to
the Relational Subject and Relational Sociology.
2. We advance distinctive concepts of what counts as a ‘Relational
Subject’ and what constitutes relationality, according an important
role to Collective Reflexivity in both.
3. We endorse a stratified ontology of the ‘Relational Subject’: as an ‘I’
with a Lockean continuous sense of self; a ‘Me’ whose natal social
placement is involuntary and who accrues further objective social
characteristics through the positions assumed as the life course pro-
ceeds; and a ‘We’ deriving from voluntary relations with others, a
relationality that has sui generis properties and powers, irreducible
to although continuously dependent upon those of others.
4. We defend an emergentist conception of relationality, which gener-
ates real and causally efficacious – but not ‘substantialist’ – emergent
properties that unite this approach with Critical Realism. (Hence-
forth, those who reject emergence will be referred to as Relationists.)
5. We work at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels, instead of placing
a Big Etcetera after our dyadic analyses. Moreover, we do not view
these levels as homological, precisely because they are distinguished
by the existence of distinctive properties and powers.
6. We are overtly engaged as critics of late modernity because it is hos-
tile to the flourishing of the ‘Relational Subject’, be he/she uniquely
singular or constituting a collective subject at any of the three levels.
Conversely, Relationists turn their backs upon Eudemonia at any
level.
Western culture continues to purvey the myth that ‘where there is a
will, there is a way’27 and is regularly updated with exemplars from
27
Where There Is a Will, There Is a Way is a didactic book published in 1869 by
Michele Lessona, modelled on the work Self-Help by the British writer Samuel
Smiles well before F. Nietzsche theorized the superman’s will to power.
14 Part I
entertainment and business. Currently, it is the ‘Steve Jobs cultural

model’; the paradigmatic example of an individual who prevails against
the cut-throat competition of the global market because he believes in
his own capacities and talents; he does not have to answer to anyone,
other than to himself and his own objectives, accepts risks against all
odds, and achieves phenomenal success and celebrity. The movie of
this American dream, as realized in Silicon Valley is paralleled by the
East Coast film version of Mark Zuckerberg’s lone rise to fame and
fortune, with both reflecting the anthropology that the human being
is self-determined, whatever the conditions of society in which he/she
lives.
Late-modern society is replete with images and messages that sys-
tematically repress any idea of our relations with ‘others’ being decisive
for the purposes of our individual existence. In cultural representations
of our behaviour, the part played by other people is usually portrayed
as merely contingent and random. In other words, relations do not
have their own existence; they are not the object of care and consider-
ation in and of themselves. Consider those using public transport, and
we become aware that relations with others are to be carefully avoided
or choreographed by Goffmanesque strategies. Encounters should not
only be brief but impersonal; that is one role of political correctness.
The idea that my space/place in the world depends on relations with
others is not perceived as a support and frequently a resource, but is
essentially considered to be an intrusion from which I must free myself
as quickly as possible.
Late modern society is systematically based on immunization against
social relations and leads to the repression of social relations. The
inability of individuals to acknowledge social relations has become
the illness of the century (the endemic disease of self-referentiality).
This absence of social relations ‘retaliates’ by causing distress and
disorientation for the self, which increasingly experiences isolation,
poverty (in a vital sense), and a lack of support in everyday life. To
emerge out of loneliness becomes an enormous enterprise – and often
a hopeless one.
When we become aware of all of this, social change can begin. New
processes aimed at re-evaluating relations with others emerge. One
discovers that working in a team is more efficacious and gives more
satisfaction, on condition that the task is not coercively imposed or
that one’s collaboration with others is not exploitative. We rediscover
family and friendship bonds as relations that, despite constituting obli-

gations, nevertheless give a meaning to one’s life that no other relation
can supply. A growing number of people are realizing that they can
achieve their goals only through new forms of association and new
social movements. Justice and social solidarity require a vision that
puts the needs and rights of all members of a community in relation
with one another. We discover, in short, that we are all profoundly
interdependent. The decisions, choices, and actions of each of us are
not purely individual acts, but are arrived at in relation to and with
others. It is unrealistic to think of them as the simple expressions of
an autonomous Self. We realize that, in reality, each of us lives in a
condition of dependence and interdependence with many other people
without whom we could not be what we are and desire to become.
Each individual’s biography is to be found enmeshed in relations
with significant others and with the nonsocial world. The human per-
son is not a self-sufficient entity: he/she is a ‘subject-in-relation,’ where
social relations are partly constitutive of personhood, whilst allowing
that they are not exclusively so (see chapter 3).
However, in the social sphere, we are all in the same boat, in the
sense that we depend on one another. And so the question becomes:
how is this boat constituted? We call it the We-relation, but how is this
relation generated? How should the relation be constituted in order to
be fulfilling rather than alienating for those involved?
Our answer to the question about how the social relation that
humanizes the person should be construed and conceptualized is the
following: such social relations should be an expression of the Self as a
‘Relational Subject’.28 We want to explore the idea that a valid answer
to the increasingly unbound morphogenesis of Western society29 con-
sists in being able to recognize and to foster the emergence of social
subjects who no longer correspond to the ideal types of individualistic
or collectivistic modernity.
In the social sciences, there has always been an abundance of lit-
erature that addresses the fact that ‘the individual’ in him/herself is a
28
A formal definition comes later.
29
Archer (2007), ‘The Ontological status of subjectivity: the missing link
between structure and agency’, in Clive Lawson, John Latsis, and Nuno
Martins, Contributions to Social Ontology (London: Routledge, 2007); Archer
(ed.), Social Morphogenesis; Archer (ed.), Late Modernity. Trajectories
towards Morphogenic Society (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014).
16 Part I
problematic entity. The individual’s sociality as an intrinsically social

animal has been affirmed since Aristotle. Nevertheless, during the long
history of human thought, the social character of human individu-
ality was often lost, as Horkheimer and Adorno observed.30 With
modernity, the nature of this sociality increasingly became a problem
in itself. In brief, modernity has called natural sociality into question
and replaced it with an artificial sociality. On the one hand, some
have considered the individual to be hypersocialized by social and cul-
tural structures, that is, an overestimation of sociality (methodological
holism). On the other hand, some have thought of the individual as a
hyposocialized, autonomous subject, which is to say, an underestima-
tion of sociality (methodological individualism).
From the advent of modernity onwards, the individual has become
the object of increasingly complex and contradictory conceptualiza-
tions: at times, the individual has been considered as completely
autonomous and, at other times, as completely dependent; at times,
he or she has been treated as ens realissimum and, at other times, as a
phantasm; in the end, the individual became a mere ‘point of reference
for communication’.31
It is banal to point out that individuals exist because there is a social
context that generates them and supplies their means of subsistence.
No human individual is a monad because each person is in relation with
other persons. But modern thought has not produced a sociological
paradigm capable of adequately expressing the relationality to which
we refer. In short, the notion of a ‘social subject’ has oscillated between
individualism and collectivism.32
Our collaboration dates back over two decades, but because its
products have appeared at least as frequently in Italian as in English,
it is not surprising that only a few have fully appreciated its rela-
tional effects! We can summarize these as our development of the syn-
ergy between Donati’s pioneering statement of Relational Sociology
30
M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, ‘Individual’, in id., Aspects of Sociology
(Boston: Beacon, 1973), chapter 3.
31
Niklas Luhmann, ’Sozialsystem Familie’, System Familie, 1 (1988), 75–91.
32
An emblematic author, in this connection, is Alain Touraine, who began by
exalting the role of collective subjects in the 1960s, later to emphasize the
return of the individual with a study on the Self. See A. Touraine and F.
Khosrokhavar, La recherche de soi. Dialogue sur le sujet (Paris : Fayard, 2000).
and Archer’s morphogenetic framework for social realism.33 In 1991,

Donati, talking about the so-called ‘postmodern era’, wrote: ‘what
happens is understandable as social morphogenesis under conditions of
high complexity’.34 He suggested discarding the grand narratives of the
past and restarting from the very basic concept of social relation and,
soon after, linked this to a two-way exploration of social morphogen-
esis. The latter offered a dynamic without which theorists simply listed
a taxonomy of successive social formations without (excepting Marx)
providing robust explanations of what accounted for these transitions.
The explanatory paradigm of social morphogenesis35 appeared to
be particularly suited to providing a way out of these difficulties in that
it is better able than other approaches to give an account of how the
objective and subjective factors, internal or external to a given society,
combine and interact with one another so as to generate a society (or
sector of it) that is different from the preceding one. As is well known,
the morphogenetic approach was conceived as an explanatory frame-
work for the transformation of social and cultural structures as a pro-
cess that is continuously mediated by human agency, with agents them-
selves becoming transformed in the course of social transformation.
From Archer’s point of view, one initially honed on David
Lockwood’s36 distinction between system and social integration, it
had become increasingly clear that social integration entailed much
more than the presence or absence, the promotion and defence of
vested interests, their articulation, organization, and confrontation
(i.e. conflict theory). Donati’s introduction of Relational Sociology37
33
We would like to note that both of these were first formulated throughout the
1980s and not at the much later dates usually cited by commentators. Donati’s
work suffers from its appearance in Italian (as is still evident in that
Relationists only cite his 2011 book in English). Archer’s suffers from
wrongfully making her a ‘disciple’ of Roy Bhaskar, when in fact the first
statements of both their approaches appeared simultaneously in 1979.
34
Donati, Teoria relazionale della società, p. 11.
35
Margaret S. Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems (London: Sage,
1979); ‘Morphogenesis versus Structuration’, British Journal of Sociology, 33
(1982), 455–483; Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (1995).
36
D. Lockwood, ‘Social Integration and System Integration’, in G. K. Zollschan
and W. Hirsch (eds.), Explorations in Social Change (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1964), pp. 244–257.
37
P. Donati, Introduzione alla sociologia relazionale (1983) and Teoria
relazionale della società (1991).
18 Part I
offered a much richer resource for answering the question of what,

in fact, bound people together than did any ‘third person account’38
imposed by the sociologist. This issue became even more important as
Archer explored and advanced Subjective Reflexivity as the element
linking ‘Structure and Agency’. In shorthand, further planks strength-
ening the bridge making for our collaboration include ‘Relational
Reflexivity’, our shared preoccupation with the Common Good, and
more recently our theoretical interrogation of the conditions under
which a ‘morphogenic’ social formation might realize it.
The present contribution seeks to deepen the analysis of the process
of social morphogenesis in the light of a generalized theory of the social
relations that mediate between the initial phase (at time T1) and the
final phase (at time T4) of each morphogenetic cycle. Another way of
putting this is that the present text focusses firmly upon the T2–T3
stage and understanding it more comprehensively than in terms of the
manifest cut and thrust between groups pursuing or defending their
objective interests (both material and ideational) as subjectively defined
under their own descriptions.
‘Being in relation’ is an ontological expression that has three ana-
lytical meanings: (i) it says that, between two (or more) entities there
is a certain distance which, at the same time, distinguishes and con-
nects them; (ii) it says that any such relation exists, that is, it is real
in itself, irreducible to its progenitors, and possesses its own proper-
ties and causal powers; and (iii) it says that such a reality has its own
modus essendi (the modality of the beings who are inside the rela-
tion which refers to the internal structure of the social relation and its
dynamics) and is responsible for its emergent properties, that is, rela-
tional goods and evils. These three meanings are analytical, because –
from an empirical viewpoint – every relation contains all these aspects,
which are closely interlinked.
The fundamental thesis of this work is that the morphogenesis of
society comes about through social relations, which are connectors
that mediate between agency and social structure. The generative
mechanism that feeds social morphogenesis resides in the dynamics
of social relations. However, in order to capture this phenomenon
adequately, it is necessary to invoke a general theory of social
38
and Social Mobility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
relations, which is presented here from the point of view of Relational

Sociology.
Donati’s relational theory of society came into being in order to
critique not only methodological individualism and methodological
holism but also the failures of formalist approaches in the field of
social network analysis.39 These failures have been pointed out by
many other authors, including White40 and Azarian.41 With respect to
these authors, his approach is characterized by its attempt to deepen
understanding of the change in social relations as a process that takes
place within social morphogenesis and which Archer terms ‘the double
morphogenesis’42 (an integral part of the process but one rarely accen-
tuated by readers). This we now call the ‘relational order of reality.’
The differences between ‘Relationism’ and our European

approach to relations
The difference between our theory, as advanced in this book, and that
of other authors lies in the fact that, contrary to radical construction-
ism, we maintain that there are close links between the social relation
as responsible for weaving the social fabric and as the expression of
human nature – in potentia – that develops in a biophysical environ-
ment as well as a social one. The majority of authors who expound
a Relational Sociology – such as, for example, Emirbayer,43 White,44
and Crossley45 – reduce the relation to a transaction, to a narrative
(the telling of stories), or to a network effect, and so forth. These are
interrelated; thus, following Emirbayer and White, Crossley argues
that social worlds ‘comprise’ networks of interaction and relations. It
39
Donati, Teoria relazionale della società, chapter 2.
40
H. White, Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge (Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008 [1992]).
41
R. Azarian, ‘Social Ties: Elements of a Substantive Conceptualization’, Acta
Sociologica, 53 (2010), 323–338.
42
The ‘double morphogenesis’ refers to the fact that by engaging in actions to
bring about social transformation, agents are themselves changed in the
process (e.g. becoming regrouped, occupying new roles, having different
positions upon society’s distributions of scarce resources, and pursuing
different goals from in the past and usually from one another).
43
M. Emirbayer, ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’, American Journal of
Sociology, 103 (1997), 281–317.
44
H. White, Identity and Control.
45
N. Crossley, Towards Relational Sociology (London: Routledge, 2011).
20 Part I
seems that society is like a ‘space’ where relations happen over time.
He asserts that relations are lived trajectories of iterated interaction,
built up through a history of interaction, but also entailing anticipation
of future interaction. To him, sociologists should focus upon evolving
and dynamic networks of interaction and relations conceived as trans-
actions. In our opinion, this approach avoids any analysis from within
social relations, their own internal constitution, and ultimately does
not deal properly with the ‘nature’ of social relations.
Conversely, we treat social relations as a reality that interweaves ele-
ments deriving from nature (both the nature that is internal to human
beings and that which is external, biophysical nature and material
culture)46 with effects deriving from the structural and cultural con-
texts and networks linking agent/actors.
In recent years, Relational Sociology has received increasing atten-
tion at the international level. Generally speaking, scholars have built
upon the previous theories of White and/or Emirbayer. In the first
case, Relational Sociology has been elided with structuralist network
analysis.47 In the second case, scholars have denied the emergent
character of social relations, reproducing the misapprehension con-
tained in Emirbayer’s “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology” (1997)
that speaks of a ‘transactional’ (not properly relational) sociology.
We leave aside the ‘figurational sociology’ developed by Norbert
Elias not because of its irrelevance, but because it does not provide
a specific ontological and epistemological theory of social relations as
such, despite Elias having explored many social phenomena as social
relations.
Nevertheless, there are some important overlaps between these two
lines of development from which we dissociate our approach.
(a) Neither ‘connectivity’ (in networks) nor ‘transactions’ (between

people) necessarily entail social relations. Anyone can be ‘con-
nected’ to some source (for instance, a journal, a retail outlet,
or a charity) simply by being placed on a distribution list, which
are frequently sold between enterprises and therefore indicate no
46
See Peter Dickens, Society and Nature. Towards a Green Social Theory (New
York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).
47
See for instance Reza Azarian, The General Sociology of Harrison White, Dept.
of Sociology, Stockholm University, 2003; R. Azarian, ‘Social Ties: Elements
of a Substantive Conceptualization’, Acta Sociologica, 53 (2010), 323–338.
wish to belong on the part of recipients or interest in the contents

received. ‘Cold calling’ is an even more blatant practice and exam-
ple. There are no social relations at all between the population
of recipients and that of senders. Relationally, such ‘connectiv-
ity’ is no greater than that between the aggregate of people who
have been confronted by the same advertising hoarding. Similarly,
‘transactions’ is also a polysemic term which does not necessarily
invoke or depend upon social relations. Its first dictionary referent
(from the Latin transactio, transactor being a broker) is to ‘a piece
of commercial business done; a deal’ (OED). Here, again, someone
can buy and sell stocks and shares online, transacting without any
contact with another at all. Similarly, if a public speaker convinces
us that his/her argument is good, in what sense is this a transac-
tion when even our acceptance remains unknown? At the other
extreme, when a couple confesses their love for one another, this
is relational, but what has been transacted? Equally, when peo-
ple join a voluntary association (for a variety of motives), what is
the deal? Ontologically, we need to give more attention to the rela-
tionship itself rather than subsuming all relations under an abstract
noun such as ‘transactions’.
(b) Network analysis in general enables the detection of patterns, often
of practical utility – from the identification of isolates in the school
playground to the movement of populations within an area, region,
or state. But, to be so, some cause or generative mechanism has to
be invoked in explanation of the pattern.48 The same is the case
for Emirbayer, whose ‘Manifesto’ contains multiple references to
‘patterns’ and ‘patterning’. Both types of usage are confined to
the level of the event and, in avoiding a stratified ontology that
seeks for what causes the event (including actual aspects of it that
defy experiencing), they are glaringly empiricist.49 White himself
later came to realize that network analysis can be an important
tool to study how social ties among nodes can produce different
48
Margaret S. Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms Transforming Late
Modernity, Dordrecht, Springer, 2015.
49
See Douglas Porpora on structures construed as patterns: ‘Four Concepts of
Social Structure’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 19 (1989),
195–212, and ‘Why Don’t Things Change? The Matter of Morphostasis’, in
Margaret S. Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms Transforming Late
Modernity (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), pp. 172–193.
22 Part I
structural outcomes, but he omits the cultural and agential dimen-

sions of social relations. That is why, subsequently, Fuhse and
others50 have turned to a different approach that tries to free net-
work analysis from these limitations, in order to detail some of
the basic mechanisms of network formation such as the building
up of relational expectations. In doing so, Fuhse has come to treat
social relations according to Luhmann’s view of relations as mere
communications,51 which, as another form of reductionism, does
not change the approach to social relations in which networks
remain linkages between nodes instead of networks of relations.
(c) Both transactions and ‘snapshots’ of networks in Relational Soci-
ology are usually weak on interactive processes and how change
over time is produced.52 Especially when the issue is not geograph-
ically confined, such as ‘inequality’, the flat ontology leads some
like Emirbayer simply to assert that repeated transactions result
in practices that ‘crystallize’ into equalities or inequalities. Dis-
cussing immigrants, he maintains that the recently arrived acquire
control over a valuable resource (e.g. information about employ-
ment opportunities), hoard their access to it (e.g. by sharing it only
with others in their personal networks), and develop practices that
perpetuate this restricted access (e.g. by staying in touch with their
places of origin through frequent correspondence and visits home).
Hard, durable differences in advantages and disadvantages then
crystallize around such practices. Unfolding transactions, and not
preconstituted attributes, are thus what most effectively explain
equality and inequality.53 Is this present-tense account plausible?
Do ‘preconstituted attributes’, such as having a degree or a trans-
ferable skill, a job waiting for the migrant, or a friendship group
of those well established in the host country, make no difference?
Can any group of immigrants be treated as objectively homoge-
neous? All cannot visit ‘home’ and subjectively all do not think of it
50
Jan Fuhse and Sophie Mützel (Hrsg.), Relationale Soziologie. Zur kulturellen
Wende der Netzwerkforschung (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für
Sozialwissenschaften, Springer Fachmedien, 2010).
51
Jan Fuhse, ‘The Communicative Construction of Actors in Networks’, Soziale
Systeme: Zeitschrift für soziologische Theorie, 15 (2009), 85–105.
52
This need not be the case; Nick Crossley, for example, tracked network
changes over time and supplemented this methodology with ethnographies of
subjects (Towards Relational Sociology, London: Routledge, 2011, chapter 9).
53
M. Emirbayer, ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’, 293, italics added.
as such, and neither may have anything to do with their ‘unfolding

transactions’.
Powell and Dépelteau,54 leaning on Emirbayer’s theory, have pro-
posed a sort of handbook of the many different versions of Relational
Sociology that the latter calls ‘fighting words’ whose defence requires
‘epistemological vigilance’.55 In fact it reads as a frenzied rhetoric for
‘radical relationality’, without coherence or consistency. The rhetoric
behind this theoretical jihad simply corrals any past contributions –
from Barnes and Bloors’ ‘strong programme’, Marx, Foucault, Bour-
dieu, Garfinkle, Dorothy Smith, and Latour – that might increase the
decibels of the clarion call. This is more like ‘product placement’ than
serious theorizing; most of the above have been strenuously critiqued
by those they have opposed, but theirs is a book of assertions rather
than arguments.
In their introduction, Powell and Dépelteau certainly recognize that
‘relational sociologists are more likely to emphasize how individu-
als are always-already enmeshed in relations of interdependency with
others and cannot be understood, even theoretically, apart from their
relational contexts.’56 But they strongly argue against the emergent
character of social relations, claiming that the latter do not possess
any sui generis reality and therefore any causal properties of their
own. They maintain that social relations are ‘nothing more than pat-
terns in the actions of individuals, patterns in the ways that individ-
uals are constrained by each other’s actions and are therefore depen-
dent on one another.’ Dépelteau ‘advocates a single-level ontology in
which relations are simply the transactions between interdependent
individuals’.57 Powell takes a subversive position by proposing a ‘rad-
ical relationism’ according to which ‘all phenomena, including indi-
viduals themselves, be understood as composed of relations’. Rather
54
Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau (eds.), Relational Sociology.
Ontological and Theoretical Issues (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013);
François Dépelteau and Christopher Powell (eds.), Applying Relational
Sociology. Relations, Networks, and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013).
55
M. Emirbayer, ‘Relational Sociology as Fighting Words’, in C. Powell and F.
Dépelteau (eds.), Relational Sociology. Ontological and Theoretical Issues,
p. 211.
56
C. Powell and F. Dépelteau, Introduction to Relational Sociology. Ontological
and Theoretical Issues, p. 2.
57
Ibid, p. 9.
24 Part I
than relations being emergent from human action, humans themselves,

social structures, and indeed non-human actors and forces all emerge
from relations. Thus, human beings and all other phenomena are fig-
urations. Relations are processes that can best be conceptualized as
work, that is as transformative action. ‘In this nonhumanist frame-
work, the distinction between “social” and “natural” phenomena is
arbitrary and anthropocentric; all social relations are also natural and
vice versa. Structure and Agency appear not as two distinct types of
phenomena but as two complementary and ultimately equivalent epis-
temological frameworks for understanding the same phenomena. This
framework abolishes subject-object dualism and therefore employs
reflexivity rather than objectivity as the standard of validation for
truth claims.’58 Anti-substantialism and anti-humanism are the tracks
along which Powell launches his project of a new radical ‘Relational
Sociology’.
These editors state that their aims are epistemological but, in fact, are
more often ontological. This boils down to the fundamentalist claim
that everything is relational in some sense (which is uncontentious)
to the mightily contentious claim that this consequently makes every-
thing social. Ontological differences between ‘Structure and Agency’
(as bearers of different properties and powers) are (again) transcended,
this time by the extravagant oxymoron that ‘any given phenomenon
is entirely, completely structured, and at the same time entirely, com-
pletely agential’.59 All distinctions are fundamentally invalid, including
those necessary to (any definition of) causal analysis, to be replaced
by the play ‘of what we call cause and effect, without requiring the
separation entailed by these concepts’.60 As intentionality, commit-
ment, validation, worth and truth itself are rudely brushed off, the
‘flat monism of radical relationality’61 brings us back to the primitive
post-modernism where the academic merely ‘plays with the pieces’
(Baudrillard).62 Ultimately, the key to all this self-indulgent relativism
58
Ibid, p. 10.
59
C. Powell, ‘Radical Relationism’, in C. Powell and F. Dépelteau (eds.),
Relational Sociology. Ontological and Theoretical Issues, p. 198.
60
Ibid., p. 196.
61
Ibid., p. 202. Powell has been the focus above, since Dépelteau simply engages
in a distasteful personalization, flailing around without concern for accuracy
even in his quotations (see p. 173, where we are even told the citation is ‘word
for word’!).
62
J. Baudrillard, ‘On Nihilism’, On the Beach, 6 (1984), 24–5.
is that at no point do these editors ever engage with an empirical

problem in an attempt to explain it; the real world and perhaps espe-
cially the relations (very varied in kind and importance) making for
the current crisis or for climate change or for practices such as human
trafficking impose no discipline upon the intellectual posing of these
rebels without a cause or a conscience.
In the end, Powell and Dépelteau recognize that they have not been
able to define an ontological and epistemological framework for a
coherent and readily identifiable Relational Sociology, since they have
only been able to juxtapose various theories. They conclude by saying
that Relational Sociology should be understood as a ‘language game’.63
The relativist conclusion of this self-proclaimed handbook reveals its
profound weaknesses. It seeks to persuade social scientists to regard the
social relation in conflationary terms, and as an indeterminate notion.
Moreover, the eschaton (ultimate reality) of a society loses its human
qualities, in particular human freedom and intentionality, because the
subject who bears them is lost, not as a casualty but through the
militant anti-humanism of these editors. On the contrary, we claim
that the human subject, as dependent on social relations as s/he might
be, is or at least can be the proper subject of personal and Relational
Reflexivity on objective reality.64 The Relational Subject is able to
distinguish her/himself from the objective and objectified social forms
that are generated in social processes.
The morphogenesis of society and the role played by

relational forms
What are ‘social relations’?

For Donati’s Relational Sociology, society does not ‘have’ relations
but ‘is’ relations.65 Society is the product of associative and dissocia-
tive relations that arise from societal structures and cultures and how
63
‘It is a handbook to the language games we are playing, and an invitation to
join in’: C. Powell and F. Dépelteau, Introduction to Relational Sociology.
Ontological and Theoretical Issues, p. 12.
64
See Andrew Collier, Being and Worth (London: Routledge, 1999) and In
Defence of Objectivity (London: Routledge, 2003).
65
P. Donati, Teoria relazionale della società, pp. 80–86; Relational Sociology. A
New Paradigm for the Social Sciences, pp. 3–7.
26 Part I
human action continuously alters them. It is a matter of understanding

how the structural dynamic of relations creates a relatively enduring
social formation that is different from others because the generative
dynamics of the relations that characterize it are different. The ultimate
objective is to understand and explain the links that exist between the
social morphogenesis of the relations that make for a given society or
social form and the emergent structures that qualify a concrete society
or social form as different from others.66 First, however, it is necessary
to get ‘inside’ the social relation.
If we conceptualize the social relation as reciprocal actions between
Ego and Alter in a social context, the relation can be regarded either
from the subjective side (of Ego and Alter, respectively) or as an objec-
tive reality existing between the two.
A) From the subjective point of view, Max Weber’s definition has

remained classic and is the origin of all action or ‘actionistic’ soci-
ologies: the ‘social relation is to be understood as a behaviour of
more than one individual reciprocally established according to its
content of meaning and oriented in conformity. The social rela-
tion therefore consists exclusively in the possibility that one acts
socially in a given way (endowed with meaning), whatever the
basis on which this possibility rests.’67 Note that Weber does not
attribute its own reality to the relation. What he stresses are two
individuals and their actions, which conform to one another in cer-
tain ways by giving meaning to the action. For him, the meaning
of the relation resides in the individual and does not have a causal
relation with its object.68 The social relation with others does not
have its own meaning; it is only a subjectively understood symbolic
reference (refero) for those involved.
66
See Archer (Social Origins of Educational Systems, 1979, new edition 2013)
for a morphogenetic analysis of how state educational systems came about
with emergent centralized and decentralized relational organizations and what
difference this made to processes of educational change in the next cycle of
morphogenesis.
67
Max Weber, Economia e società (Milan: Comunità, 1968), vol. I, pp. 23–24.
68
For Weber’s followers, meaning is a complex form of ideation that is
elaborated by the subject him/herself, taking into account his/her life
experiences. It is thus a relation that a subject has with a ‘subjectively
understood’ object; for this reason, no causal relation exists between subject
and object.
B) From the objective point of view, the relation is understood as a

bond, connection or reciprocal tie between Ego and Alter. In this
case, the relation is seen as the product of the objective condition-
ing that ‘ties’ Ego and Alter together. This bond (the religo) was
analyzed by Emile Durkheim, in particular, who distinguished two
main forms of it: mechanical solidarity (due to uniformity of con-
sciousness given a low division of labour) and organic solidarity
(the greater individualization of consciousness and strong interde-
pendencies, in the wake of an intensified division of labour). In
contrast to Weber, individual subjectivity does not feature as other
than a resultant.
C) Here it is proposed to connect the refero and the religo, that is,
to see them as interwoven dimensions giving rise to an emergent
effect: the relation as the ‘effect of reciprocity’,69 which is held to
be a generative mechanism that operates through a combinatory
mode (i.e. as ‘combined provisions’70 or, if preferred, as ‘internal
relations’) of the symbolic-psychological axis (the Weberian refero)
and of the instrumental-normative axis (the Durkheimian religo).71
In short, from analysis of the classical sociologists the following

three semantics of the social relation are derived:
(i) the semantics of the relation as refero, that is, as a symbolic refer-
ence starting from a motivation to understand meanings;72
(ii) the semantics of the relation as religo, that is, as a bond, deriving
from the structural connection constituted by norms and means;73
(iii) the generative semantics of the relation as an emergent phe-
nomenon (relational effect). Here the relation between Ego and
Alter is understood as an effect of reciprocity that produces a
69
Georg Simmel (The Philosophy of Money, London and New York: Routledge,
2014 [1907]) uses the term Wechselwirkung, which is usually translated into
English with the terms ‘interaction, correlation, reciprocity, interdependency,
interplay, reciprocation, reciprocal action’.
70
‘Combined provisions’ is a juridical expression indicating that two norms must
be interpreted and applied together in that the one is necessarily combined
with the other.
71
P. Donati, Teoria relazionale della società, chapter 4.
72
Here the entire sociology of Max Weber is decisive (in particular, his research
on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism).
73
Here the entire sociology of Emile Durkheim is decisive (in particular, his
theory of the division of labour).
28 Part I
form (its own reality) endowed with its own properties and causal
powers,74 which requires making reference to the specific social
context in which these interactions take place. Interactions always
take place in a relational context (but it must be noted that,
although relations themselves also always take place in a structural
and cultural context, that context cannot be reduced to relations,
in the same way that a relation cannot be reduced to its commu-
nicative content, since the former is the context of the latter). The
context can define the social relation as a simple event (for exam-
ple, a person asks for a beer in any pub, pays, and leaves), or as
a bond created through multiple reiterations over time (for exam-
ple, the relation between a patient and his long-standing doctor),
or a bond that derives from ascriptive factors (for example, the
relation between parents and children).
The relation as generative mechanism

Social morphogenesis begins within relations, and it is through rela-
tions that new social forms are generated. It is through social relations
that contradictions and complementarities between the elements that
compose the relation are, or are not, realized in varying ways and
degrees.75
Morphostasis results when reciprocal action in social relations has a
reproductive character based on negative feedback and usually reliant
upon ‘Communicative Reflexivity’.76 Conversely, morphogenesis
comes about when the relation involves the reflexivity of subjects, in
either the autonomous or meta-reflexive mode, and entails positive
feedback, in particular, relational feedbacks. A relational feedback
differs from individual positive feedback (which is a personal variation
introduced by Ego into the relationship with Alter), because it has
transformatory consequences – however small – for the relational
structure of the participants’ network. It operates when the subjects
perceive that their relational structure is a reality that influences
74
Here the entire sociology of Georg Simmel is decisive (in particular, in his
works on the philosophy of money and social differentiation).
75
Margaret S. Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems, and Culture and
Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, pp. 219–226 and 258–273.
76
Margaret S. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
them for good or for evil as Relational Subjects. It is thus not simply
activity-dependent, as must necessarily be the case, but also has to
be subjectively (though fallibly) recognized as such. Then, the agents
can attempt to reproduce or modify the relational structure of their
network. They can stabilize it, change it, or destroy it, depending on
the kind of reflexivity that governs the feedbacks, and providing of
course reflexivity is not fractured or merely expressive.
As such, the relation has properties and powers that generically sur-
pass ‘social interactions’ (which have an événenemental character: they
are pure ‘events’). Among various properties and powers of relations
to be accentuated are at least two that are connected to one another.
First, the social relation is intrinsically reflexive, in the sense that it
‘is always bent back’ on to the subjects that are in the relation. How-
ever, reflexivity can be minimal, impeded, distorted, or fractured and
in that case so, too, will be the relationality between the agents/actors.
Precisely because they ‘are (i.e. they exist, from the Latin ‘ex-sistere’,
which means being out of themselves) in relation’, agents/actors must
think and act into the relation between them. The structure of the
relation is reflexive in that the axis of the refero (as discussed earlier)
is not only a symbolic reference to the goal that Ego and Alter intend
to realize (since they ‘are in relation’), but is also a bending back of
what emerged from the interactions based upon the prior motivations
of the participants, followed by deliberation about some new course
of action to be undertaken. It is in this process that the ethical value of
the relation resides, in as much as the relation demands a ‘response’
(responsibility), that is, as part and parcel of being accountable to one-
self and to others for the outcomes of interactions. To say that relations
have an ethical dimension, simply means that relations – as actions –
have a moral value because what they mean to the subjects is a good
or an evil or a mixture of both (besides its objective consequences).
Second, and in parallel, this means that the social relation can
never work purely mechanically because it has a ternary, not binary,
structure. Automatic mechanisms are binary (stimulus-response) and
do not have their own purposes (intentionality), whereas the social
relation – if and insofar as its configuration constitutes a generative
mechanism – contains a human finalism – one that may or may not be
realized because of other countervailing mechanisms that are at play.
Obviously, qua relationship it is not a given that the relation’s finalism
corresponds to the ends of the singular subjects who are in a given
30 Part I
relationship, even when they are in agreement. On the contrary, it is

highly probable that the outcome caused by the relation is distanced
from the particular goals (wishes, expectations, etc.) of the singular
subjects involved, precisely because it is an emergent effect that medi-
ates between subjects. Nevertheless, in order for subjects to sustain a
generative relation, they must acknowledge a finalistic dimension to
their relation. That finality may simply be to continue enjoying the
products of their relationships (e.g. on-going friendship or to hone a
team’s performance with the aim of winning the sport’s top trophy).
The tasks of Part I

Part I answers the question: what is a Relational Subject? As yet, a for-
mal definition has not been given because we fully acknowledge that
this concept is hard to grasp, precisely because it involves something
quite different from the notions embedded in Western individualism
or collectivism (both politically and philosophically). However, we are
certainly not the first academics to have wanted something different
from both that is not some kind of compromise between them. In
advance of us, certain distinguished analytical philosophers sought to
achieve the same task with the notion of the ‘Plural Subject’, a con-
cept intended to meet the same desiderata and one we do not dismiss
as a ‘Third Way’. We respect their efforts and have to engage with
them, otherwise there is no justification for introducing yet another
concept – that of the Relational Subject. However, as will be seen in
the next chapter, our main reservations about the Plural Subject con-
cern the absence of emergence in the form of ‘relational goods and
evils’, the absence of reflexivity about the conduct of joint action, and
the final absence of any conception of the morphogenesis of how rela-
tions begin, the course they take, and the effects of the outcomes to
which they give rise. These three features are central to our concept
of the Relational Subject. Thus we hope that the critique that follows
of the Plural Subject also usefully serves to enable readers to gain a
realistic sense of what the Relational Subject is, in a way that formal
definitions cannot do. We also have a debt towards these philosophers
because the three whose work we examine quite closely – John Searle,77
77
J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1995).
Margaret Gilbert,78 and Raimo Tuomela79 – all exemplify the power

of everyday examples to speak more directly to any reader than does
lengthy exegesis. It is no accident that we have tried to take this leaf
out of their books and articles. However, for those who also require
formal definitions we present ours:
The term ‘Relational Subject’ refers to individual and collective social sub-
jects in that they are ‘relationally constituted’, that is, in as much as they gen-
erate emergent properties and powers through their social relations. These
relational goods and evils have internal effects upon the subjects themselves
and external effects upon their social environments.
To all five of us, joint action – when entailing collaboration, co-

operation, or joint commitment – are not satisfactorily explained in
individualist terms, namely as aggregates of the ‘like-minded’ (those
sharing the same personal beliefs, aims, concerns and so forth) who
somehow come together. The response of these three philosophers is to
work upon the commonly used expression, ‘We think’, and to maintain
that, in one way or another, this is an expression of shared intention-
ality. The subjects involved intend to engage in the same action (joint
action) without this deriving from some putative collective entity such
as a ‘group mind’. Thus, how collective intentionality can be con-
ceptualized as underpinning ‘We-thinking’, without appealing to such
dubious entities, is the task they all address.
We tackle this generic problem quite differently, by focussing upon
the shared orientation of the subjects involved to the emergent conse-
quences that they themselves generate through their relationship. They
can produce both ‘relational goods’ and ‘relational evils’, and their
shared orientation is towards extending the former and eradicating
the latter, without any guarantee that they will be successful or that
their relation will not break down in the process. For the participants
to be orientated towards a particular emergent good or evil does not
assume that they have the same thoughts in their heads or any version
of ‘We-thinking’ because their personal intentions will be singular and
can diverge in terms of intentionality. As will be seen, this is where both
realism and reflexivity come into play in our account of the Relational
Subject; realism because the subjects in relation are oriented to the
78
M. Gilbert, On Social Facts (London-New York: Routledge, 1989).
79
R. Tuomela, Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
32 Part I
emergent products generated by their relation; reflexivity because each

participant exercises the mental ability of all normal people to con-
sider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa.80
In our argument that follows, we circumscribe this basic definition to
refer only to those elaborated features of the agents’ contexts that their
relationship has been responsible for generating.
We recognize that the notion of the Relational Subject could be prob-
lematic for most of today’s social sciences, which continue to oscillate
between methodological individualism and holism. This book indi-
cates another path that is not situated midway between the individual
(the Self) and the whole (the social system), nor is it a mixture or a
bridge between the two, but is located on another stratum of reality.
This plane is the ‘relational order of reality.’ Our basic thesis is that
the subject is social in that he/she is relational. To maintain that the
subject is relational means that he/she is part of a ‘We’ that is not a
super-ordinate entity but is, instead, a relation.
80
and Social Mobility, p. 4.

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What is the central argument of the book?

What is the central argument of the book?

How do the authors define the 'Relational Subject'?

How do the authors define the 'Relational Subject'?

1 Introduction

Relational Sociology: reflexive

The rationale for this book

explain anything. We can illustrate this most pungently by simply ask-

criticized interpretations of the intensified morphogenesis in the West-

strongest bulwark against those denying the relative autonomy, tem-

Neo-liberalism, centricism, and central conflation

or voluntary association, and so forth. Instead of warmth, caring,

An important forerunner as to where this version of Relational

time.’17 Thus ‘institutionalized individualism’18 was held to be ‘becom-

What distinguishes our contribution from other versions of

entertainment and business. Currently, it is the ‘Steve Jobs cultural

family and friendship bonds as relations that, despite constituting obli-

problematic entity. The individual’s sociality as an intrinsically social

and Archer’s morphogenetic framework for social realism.33 In 1991,

offered a much richer resource for answering the question of what,

relations, which is presented here from the point of view of Relational

The differences between ‘Relationism’ and our European

(a) Neither ‘connectivity’ (in networks) nor ‘transactions’ (between

wish to belong on the part of recipients or interest in the contents

structural outcomes, but he omits the cultural and agential dimen-

as such, and neither may have anything to do with their ‘unfolding

than relations being emergent from human action, humans themselves,

is that at no point do these editors ever engage with an empirical

The morphogenesis of society and the role played by

What are ‘social relations’?

human action continuously alters them. It is a matter of understanding

A) From the subjective point of view, Max Weber’s definition has

B) From the objective point of view, the relation is understood as a

In short, from analysis of the classical sociologists the following

The relation as generative mechanism

relationship, even when they are in agreement. On the contrary, it is

The tasks of Part I

Margaret Gilbert,78 and Raimo Tuomela79 – all exemplify the power

To all five of us, joint action – when entailing collaboration, co-

emergent products generated by their relation; reflexivity because each

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