FACTA UNIVERSITATIS

Series: Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology and History Vol. 9, No1, 2010, pp. 139 - 148

RELATIONALISM IN SOCIOLOGY:
THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ELABORATIONS
UDC 316.2

Charalambos Tsekeris

Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Department of Psychology

Athens, Greece
E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract. Relationalism, as opposed to substantialism and as a critique of the various

essentialist and reificatory ways of doing science, has been always very pervasive in
classical, modern and postmodern sociological thought. The principal aim of this
paper is to investigate, define and demonstrate this profound pervasiveness with reference
to specific influential epistemic issues and dilemmas in contemporary social/sociological
theory and methodology. It thus comprehensively provides a critical overview of the
relationalist mode of thinking about the crucial notions of performativity, reflexivity and
the self, as well as about social network research, which is at the very heart of
American sociology.
Key words: relational sociology, epistemology, social networks, methodology,
reflexivity, performativity, social research.

1. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

Philosophically, the analytic emphasis upon the primacy on relations can be traced
back to the ancient times (Heraclitus). To begin with, what is actually meant by the term
"relationalism"?
In classical epistemology, "relationalism", or the so-called "relationalist mode of
thinking", often implies that "the scientific concepts no longer appear as imitations of
thing-like existences, but as symbols representing orders and functional links within real-
ity" (Cassirer 1906/1971: 3).
In systemic epistemology, it is openly acknowledged and celebrated the very fact that
we all "reflect on a world that is not made, but found, and yet it is also our structure that
enables us to reflect upon this world. Thus in reflection we find ourselves in a circle: we
are in a world that seems to be there before reflection begins, but that world is not sepa-
rate from us" (Varela/Thompson/Rosch 1991: 3).

Received August 23, 2010

140 C. TSEKERIS

Truth itself is rather relational; it does not signify "something absolute (this truth is the
truth) or relative (you have your truth and I have mine). Truth [is] something lived in the
moment and expressive of an individual's connection to the whole… and responding au-
thentically to the present" (Briggs and Peat 1999: 20-21).
In modern sociology, furthermore, "relationalism" usually defines social human prac-
tices as ceaselessly re-constituted, re-shaped and re-organized by the on-going flow of the
very structure of their reciprocal relations, and not merely by their respective personalities
or identities (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 224-235). This subsequently resolves old
theoretical dualisms and dichotomies, in so far as "the relation between the social agent and
the world is not that between a subject (or a consciousness) and an object, but a relation of
"ontological complicity – or mutual possession" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 20).
In relationalism, according to Stephan Fuchs, "things are what they are because of
their location and movement in a network or system of forces; they do not assume a fixed
and constant position in the network because of their essential properties. A network is a
field of relationships between nodes that vary with their relationships. A cell becomes part
of the liver, not the brain, not because its inherent nature is to become a part of the liver,
but because a complex interaction between the selective activation of its DNA, and the
network of other cells to which it becomes linked, makes it so" (Fuchs 2001: 16).
In the obsolete substantialist framework, social reality is preferably described as, or un-
critically reduced to, a dense and seamless constellation of things (reification) or essences
(essentialism), which allegedly possesses a very wide range of "intrinsic" or "natural" prop-
erties – something that perfectly corresponds to (naive) everyday experience (that is, the ex-
perience of the daily life-worlds).
On the contrary, sociological relationalism is primarily informed by the so-called "anti-
categorical imperative" (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994: 1414), which actively rejects ex-
planations of "social behavior as the result of individuals' common possession of attrib-
utes and norms rather than as the result of their involvement in structural social relations"
(Wellman 1983: 165).

2. RELATIONAL THEORETICAL THEMATIZATIONS

Social reality (or social truth) is thus both real and constructed; it is an uncertain, mu-
table and contingent relational effect produced in real-time local arrangements generated
in daily social activities and social science (see Law 2004). Actually, this turns our ana-
lytic attention into the issue of performativity. Performativity is generally defined as a
useful mode of theorizing and practicing the multiple ways in which social reality comes
into being (Tsekeris 2007).
It fundamentally lies in the widely accepted (post-structuralist) linguistic emphasis on
meaning and the well-known "social constructionist" premise that acquiring knowledge
(or truth) does not involve an accurate mimetic reflection (re-presentation) of the world,
but is associated with a relationally embedded human activity, which substantially alters
the contingent, fragile and interconnected "nature" of reality itself (see e.g. Gergen 1994).
Knowledge is subsequently the uncertain (and unpredictable) product of the individual's
relationships, in communication with others in the fluid and precariously negotiated world
(Kiros 1998).
 Relationalism in Sociology: Theoretical and Methodological Elaborations 141

In direct contrast to the received structuralist model of communication, which sharply

distinguishes between words and action, or between talking and doing/performance, any
language-use, including science, can radically change the situation itself: "we as research-
ers construct that which we claim to 'find'" (Steier 1991: 1). As ethnomethodologists
might simply put it, to describe a situation is to constitute it1. Therefore, all social scien-
tific statements, propositions and theories are performative, in the clear-cut sense that they
have effects, they do things, and they make differences.
Accordingly, for John Law and John Urry (2004), research methods in the social sci-
ences do not simply describe or explain the world as it is, but also contingently enact it, in a
wide range of locations. They actually help to bring into being what they also discover and
they co-produce the objects they are supposed to objectively analyze. That is, the making of
what we know in-here goes hand in hand with the making of what there is out-there2.
The idea of performative reality-making, partially inspired by Austinian speech act
theory, the Thomas/Merton theorem of the self-fulfilling prophecy, dramaturgical meta-
phors (Goffman, Searle, Turner, Schechner, and Schieffelin) and the poststructuralist in-
separability of factual and value judgments in performative speech, strongly emphasizes
the communicative powers of social research and the "natural" involvement of an "audi-
ence" (e.g., peers, students, readers, a physical audience or a cyber audience).
Of course, the definitively reflexive history of performativity, as both an essential lin-
guistic capacity and a critical (genealogical) method of revealing hidden structures of op-
pression, or imagining the exciting possibility of "unsuspected modes of being" (Diamond
1996) and "innovative agency" (Carlson 1996), is yet to be written (see Tsekeris 2007).
In some sense, sociological relationalism can be perceived as especially inspired and
illumined by Karl Marx's materialistic method, which conceptually grasps "relations" as
the very ontology of all beings and systematically locates concrete individuals within
definite material and social relations (Laclau and Mouffe 1987). Concepts, symbols and
ideas do not therefore constitute a closed, self-contained and self-referential world; in-
stead, they are firmly rooted in the ensemble of the material conditions of society.
Sociological relationalism further asserted itself through Saussurean linguistics and se-
miotic theory, Lewinian field psychology, anthropological structuralism, and Mannheim's
sociology of knowledge (or social epistemology). The "systemic", "configurational", and
"generative" sociological perspectives of Niklas Luhmann, Norbert Elias, and Pierre

1
Performativity explicitly champions the early ethnomethodological relational conception of "constitutive" or
"radical" reflexivity, originally inspired by Harold Garfinkel, which comprehensively entails "the intimate in-
terdependence between representation and represented object... such that the sense of the former is elaborated
by drawing on knowledge of the latter, and knowledge of the latter is elaborated by that which is known about
the former" (Woolgar 1988: 33).
2
The silent performative effectiveness of scientific or political statements derives "naturally" from the relative
"capacity of spokespersons or 'authorities' to enforce collective recognition and hence to realize their repre-
sentations with the aid of an accredited and therefore credible language" (Pels 2002: 77). Any scholarly de-
scription of society can eventually "produce significant changes within society once this description reaches a
certain level of acceptance. To have any influence on the practical job of modifying self-descriptions, theories
must be able to gain recognition and circulation outside narrow intellectual circles. Then it becomes a descrip-
tion of society within society, and thereby changes society (the names of Marx, Kant and Freud may suffice to
prove this point)" (Laermans and Verschraegen 1998: 128). This ultimately calls for the explicit celebration of
the so-called "theory effect" of the sociological discursive construction of reality (Bourdieu 1991), which is
often underestimated and erased (or just methodologically neutralized).
142 C. TSEKERIS

Bourdieu (or Roy Bhaskar), accordingly, represent a major European contribution to re-
lationalist theoretical thought, which emphatically stresses the mutual constitution of (ex-
ternally determined and internally motivated) social actors and emergent structures (see
e.g. Bourdieu 1984, Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).
But sociological relationalism is also depicted and cultivated in the long debates on re-
flexivity (or self-reflexivity). Reflexivity profoundly involves the inspiring relational con-
ception of "internal conversation" (Archer 2003) that theoretically describes the continu-
ous self-confrontation of the individual (that is, the self-self relationship), as well as its
complex "dialogical" interaction with the (ever changing) social environment.
It is hence "the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to
consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa" (Archer 2007: 4).
This inherent relational "mental ability" is nevertheless being seriously neglected within
the flux of routine or habitual daily action. In response to such an unwarranted neglect,
Gerald Myers (1986: 206) reflexively observes that the crucial importance of:
"self-dialogue and its role in the acquisition of self-knowledge, I believe, can
hardly be exaggerated. That it plays such a role is a consequence of a human
characteristic that deserves to be judged remarkable. This is the susceptibility of
our mind/body complexes to respond to the questions that we put to ourselves, to
create special states of consciousness through merely raising a question. It is only
slightly less remarkable that these states provoked into existence by our questions
about ourselves quite often supply the materials for accurate answers to those
same questions."

Arguably, the relational sociological theorization of reflexivity as a "complex dialogi-

cal interaction" heavily draws from the famous school of American Pragmatism (mainly
grounded on the original stimulating insights of John Dewey, William James, Charles
Sanders Peirce and George Hebert Mead)3.
From a relational social epistemological analytic standpoint, the self (including the
epistemological/philosophical or sociological self) is rather reflexively re-created; it is
necessarily intertwined with the "real world" and dialectically re-constituted by the on-
going, mutual, synergetic and (chaotic) self-organizing interaction of the ego (1) with the
emergent social structures and (2) with the significant others (actual, imagined, or im-
plied)4. The very existence (or appearance) of these "significant others" is completely
integral to the evolutionary reflexive emergence of selfhood. Yet, in the original social
interpretivist sense of George Herbert Mead, the "other" is not only the other (significant)
person, "but another perspective: another way in which the world is judged or appreci-
ated" (Natanson 1956: 64).

3
According to Margaret Archer, "only if the 'internal conversation' can be upheld as an irreducible personal prop-
erty, which is real and causally influential, can the exercise of its powers be considered as the missing mediatory
mechanism that is needed to complete an adequate account of social conditioning" (Archer 2003: 16).
4
In parallel, what should also be reflexively recognized is the particular importance of the "I-thou" relationship
(Buber 1970), which was the very essence of the great Socratic dialogues. This complex relationship has been
involved with the original introduction of second-person inter-subjective methodologies, such as Bohmian
dialogue, leading to innovative forms of "dialogic consciousness" (Bohm 1985).
 Relationalism in Sociology: Theoretical and Methodological Elaborations 143

The self thus appears neither as a mere "object" of knowledge, nor as an empirical
ego, which somehow lacks autonomy, agency, imagination, choice, creativity, improvisa-
tion and spontaneity. In other words, the human subject is not passive, self-assured, at-
omistic, and narcissistically private any more (see e.g. Tsivacou 2005, Cilliers and De
Villiers 2000, Briggs and Peat 1999)5. The self-in-relation-with-others (methodological
relationalism) is now clearly prevailing upon the old self-in-social-vacuum (methodologi-
cal individualism6) (Ho et al. 2001).
Instead of naively seeing subjectivity as an isolated, independent, self-contained and
self-referred locus of individual experience (according to the classical Cartesian ego), the
synthetic reflexive-relational logic, in the open spirit of Ludwig Binswanger (1963), fruit-
fully links it with objectivity and inter-subjectivity, through an (endless) uncertain circu-
lar-dialectical (relational) process, without however reducing ontological questions to
epistemological ones (just as Kant did), or "facts" to performative descriptions and inter-
pretations, symbolic categories and conceptual frameworks.
Within a relational-realist or reflexive-realist7 analytic framework, knowledge cannot
and should not be erroneously confounded with the "recording and analysis of the 'pre-
notions' (in Emile Durkheim's sense) that social agents engage in the construction of so-
cial reality; it must also encompass the social conditions of the production of these pre-
constructions and of the social agents who produce them" (Bourdieu 2003: 282)8.
This is of course in line with Roy Bhaskar's or Pierre Bourdieu's stance of critical/relational
realism, but not with Anthony Giddens's ultra-activistic structuration theory, or with Ber-
ger/Luckmann's subjectivistic accounts of social constructivism, which implicitly reproduce
and naively celebrate the old tradition of phenomenological individualism.

3. RELATIONAL METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

For almost 20 years now, the relationalist methodological approach to social phenom-
ena is increasingly at the very heart of American sociology (and rarely applied in Euro-
pean sociology). In methodological terms, relationalism mainly aims at both the theoreti-

5
Of course, it is almost a commonplace nowadays that the self is relational. In addition, it is almost a truism that
knowledge cannot be analytically distinguished from its multiple complex cognitive-political practices, as well as
from the multiple complex social relations that make it generally acceptable and legitimate. However, many of the
so-called "situated" or "contextual" perspectives "still treat the environment as supplemental to the individual con-
sciousness" and the "concept of autonomous individual mind – learning to participate – remains privileged and
fundamentally unchallenged" (Fenwick 2001: 247). This implicitly reflects the continuing determination of so-
cial/sociological theory to be strong, on the varied basis of final analytic judgments, robust results, compelling ar-
guments and inescapably powerful conclusions (Pels 2003). It is remarkable that hardly anyone in everyday per-
formative practice actually sees knowledge as inherently circular! See e.g. Pels 2002 and Woolgar 1988.
6
Methodological individualism is fundamentally ill-equipped to recognize the individual's embeddedness in
the social network and adequately reflect the complexities involved (see Cheng and Sculli 2001).
7
For the notion of relational or reflexive or circular realism, see Pels 2000.
8
Of course, this should carefully refrain from any sort of "last-instance" objectivism and decisively move towards a
rather never-ending reflexive dialectic between micro and macro, action and structure, transformation and repro-
duction, individuality and sociality (or individual and collective action), randomness and simplicity, contingency
and directionality, emergence and social causation (Sawyer 2007), as well as towards a generalized critique of na-
ïve/uncritical/unreflexive realism, reification and essentialism, at the level of both everyday world-making and pro-
fessional scientific (sociological/organizational) analysis.
144 C. TSEKERIS

cal modeling and the empirical analysis of social networks as complex socio-cultural
formations. This systematic combination between emerging cultural patterns and network
structure eventually succeeded to fruitfully transcend the spectre of pure structuralism that
persistently hunted most network research.
Coming from the allegedly obsolete structuralism of network analysis, the main pro-
ponents of relational sociology (Harrison White, Mark Granovetter, Peter Bearman, Paul
DiMaggio, Charles Tilly, Roger Gould, and Ann Mische) proceeded to variously model
social structures neither as patterns between individuals (in the tradition of Radcliffe-
Brown and Nagel) nor as meaningless entities, but as meaningful dynamic networks. In
specific, Harrison White's Identity and Control (1992) triggered a long chain of seminal
empirical studies on the central theoretical and methodological assumption that "a social
network is a network of meanings" (White 1992: 67).
This central assumption also implies that the (reciprocating) identities of social actors,
individual or corporate, gradually emerge from the multiple roles these actors actively
perform in their particular networks (which inherently contain social dynamics and are the
essential sites of co-evolutionary meaning-formation). That is why the social researcher's
analytic framework must now strategically move from the traditional atomistic "focus on
the individual to a relational analysis" (Morris 2004: 2). The person then ceases to be the
fundamental, unquestioned and unproblematized elementary building block of social
analysis (White 1992: 197)9.
In the same line with Harrison White's (1992) original notion of the fluid relational
spaces of publics, actor-network theory (ANT) sees topology as concurrently interweav-
ing time and space with heterogeneous and hybrid networks of actants (humans and non-
humans), which are functionally differentiated into regions, networks and fluid spaces
(see e.g. Mol and Law 1994). In general, actor-network theory, as enthusiastically devel-
oped by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, John Law and others, has ex-
hibited a deep creative focus on complex relations as productive of action, including
technological (or "socio-technical") objects and sites in its imaginative, adaptable, mobile
and multiple "networked" universes (or hybrids)10.
In a similar vein, Mustafa Emirbayer's (1997) famous "manifesto for a relational soci-
ology", heavily drawing upon pragmatist, linguistic and interactionist philosophies, as
well as upon historical and network analysis, arguably promotes a non-substantive onto-
logical conceptualization of our social world, where human relations tend to dynamically
shift and change. From this analytic viewpoint, social actors do not have fixed attributes
although collective (structured) configurations can potentially achieve conditions of stability.
In his overwhelmingly influential manifesto, Emirbayer analytically co-relates the
theoretical relationalist vision to specific programs of empirical research (at the levels of

9
However, instead of a strategic analytic understanding of networks as basic units of modern societies (Castells
2004), other scholars primarily look at them as a distinguished form of sociability (see e.g. Holton 2005).
10
Reality is extracted, in Bruno Latour's terms, "not from a one-to-one correspondence between an isolated
statement and a state of affairs, but from the unique signature drawn by associations and substitutions through
the conceptual space" (Latour 1999: 161-162). This directly refers to the so-called "mobility turn" in the con-
temporary social sciences: "The new mobility paradigm argues against this ontology of distinct 'places' and
'people'. Rather, there is a complex relationality of places and persons connected through performances"
(Sheller and Urry 2006: 214).
 Relationalism in Sociology: Theoretical and Methodological Elaborations 145

social structure, culture, individual psychology and social psychology). The systematic
study of culture, for instance, does not involve a myopic focus on individual attitudes or
values, but an advanced analysis of complex figurations of patterned relationships, net-
worked communications, or transactions.
In turn, the relational logic further promotes and renews the particular sociological
and interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary11 methodology (rather than technique) of social
network analysis, which has significantly blossomed in recent years. The strategic focus is
now increasingly placed on the density and reach of network relations (rather than on the
strength of ties), as the current analytic interest in "small worlds" (see Barabási 2002)
clearly indicates, as well as on the innovative study of egocentric (or personal) networks,
particularly defined from the standpoints of egos (or focal individuals).
Analysts here typically "use survey research to gather information about the networks'
composition (e.g., percent gender), structure (e.g., the density of interconnection among
members), and contents (e.g., the amount of support provided to egos). This is useful for
studying far-flung communities, the provision of social support, and the mobilization of
social capital" (Wellman 2007).
Moreover, the rising analytic interest in the relationalist mode of thinking seems to be
very relevant with the advent and pervasive introduction in the 1990s of the Internet, or
the World Wide Web, which is supported by fluid interconnected networks of users,
computers and computer grids12.
In particular, the Internet potentially offers a huge capacity for looking at and model-
ing (in a both flexible and accurate way) surprising combinations of strong ties, weak ties,
and structural holes that decisively transcend the well-defined modern order (once figured
out by formal functional analysis). It also offers an ever increasing interconnectedness of
system components through software, cybernetic architecture and the general "networked"
character of life13. This in turn produces increased, far-from-equilibrium and highly
unpredictable "system" effects (Barabási 2002). Relationalism's fruitful and versatile

11
In addition to sociology, as Barry Wellman sums up, "network analyses are often found in management studies
(mergers; organizational behavior); anthropology (kinship, urban relocation); geography (dispersion of network
members); communication science (virtual community on the Internet); information science (information flows);
political science (political mobilization); psychology (small groups; social support); social history (social move-
ments); statistics (multilevel analysis); and mathematics (graph theory)" (Wellman 1997). Since the mid 1990s, in
particular, social network analysis has been rapidly maturing as an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary (or even non-
disciplinary) scientific research field, with the publication of many handbooks and edited volumes, and the de-
velopment of new advanced software packages. However, it is often still accused of seriously lacking specific
analytic attention to complex intersubjective processes of symbolic interpretation and meaning-construction.
For instance, A. Stinchcombe strongly criticizes social network analysis as follows: "One has to build a dy-
namic and causal theory of a structure into the analysis of links … We need to know what flows across the
links, who decides on those flows in the light of what interests, and what collective or corporate action flows
from the organization of links, in order to make sense of intercorporate relations" (Stinchcombe 1990: 381).
12
Web 2.0 (also known as the social Web, read/write Web, or wisdom Web), the latest phase in the rapid Web's
evolution, as perceptively anticipated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is right at the very forefront of real/virtual political
life, international relations, governmental projects, decision-making processes, and public debate. It is perhaps the
most people-centric, interactive and creatively participative technological enterprise in human history, giving sub-
stantial relational impetus to emerging socio-political movements. For the first time, humanity is spontaneously
moving so fast towards the non-linear self-organizing model of democratic governance.
13
As Barry Wellman concisely concludes, "Network rudimentary Internet software has proliferated, attempting
to connect people who know each other directly and indirectly" (Wellman 2007).
146 C. TSEKERIS

character still promises new and exciting intellectual developments within the wider
diverse fields of sociological theory and methodology.

4. CONCLUDING REMARKS
In our contemporary "speedy", "risky" and "globalized" social world, everything is
inter-related to everything else, in one way or another (on a both vertical and horizontal
level). We should thus permanently suspend the "old", "traditional" or "received" (sub-
stantialist) notion that anything can be merely understood and explained in isolation from
anything else.
All life is truly, irrevocably and unpredictably interconnected. From this analytic
viewpoint, we can clearly see that "particular tensions and dislocations always unfold
from the entire system rather than from some defective 'part'. Envisioning an issue as a
purely mechanical problem to be solved may bring temporary relief of symptoms, but
chaos suggests that in the long run it could be more effective to look at the overall context
in which a particular problem manifests itself" (Briggs and Peat 1999: 160-161)14.
The on-going playful interdependency of all being surprisingly gives us enormous hope
that there is indeed something beyond the myopic (short-sighted), fragmented, reductionistic
and exploitative view of human nature15. It is exactly this "on-going playful interdependency"
that profoundly guarantees us the very possibility of human cooperation, synergy, synthesis,
critical reflexivity, creativity, spirituality, free will and choice. Let's openly recognize, acknowledge
and celebrate interconnectivity, emergence and change, so that we can become active co-
participants rather than arrogant masters of our world.

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RELACIONIZAM U SOCIOLOGIJI:
TEORETSKA I METODOLOŠKA DOSTIGNUĆA
Charalambos Tsekeris
Relacionizam, kao suprotnost supstancijalizmu i kao jedinstvena kritika esencijalizma u nauci,
oduvek je bio složena pojava u klasičnoj, modernoj i postmodernoj sociološkoj misli. Osnovni cilj
ovog rada je da istražuje, defineše i odredi složenost s osvrtom na odredjene uticaje i dileme u
savremenoj društvenoj/sociološkoj teoriji i metodologiji. Rad tako predstavlja kritički pregled načina
razmišljanja o relacionizmu i važnih pojmova izvršnosti, refleksivnosti i bića kao društvene mreže
istraživanja, što je u suštini američke sociologije.
Ključne reči: sociologija relacionalizma, epistemologija, društvena mreža, metodologija, refleksivnost,
izvršnost, društveno istraživanje.