Manifesto for a Relational Sociology

• Sociology faces a core dilemma between viewing the social world as static substances or dynamic processes.
• Traditional models like rational-actor theory and variable analysis mistakenly assume entities precede relations.
• A growing body of researchers seeks alternatives that treat social reality in continuous and processual terms.
• This manifesto outlines the relational perspective, examining its implications for both theory and empirical research.
• The essay also addresses ongoing challenges for relational analysis, including boundaries, network dynamics, and causality.

Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or processes, in static 'things' or in dynamic, unfolding relations.

• Important ideas emerge collectively from social networks rather than existing as isolated phenomena.
• The primary challenge in contemporary sociology is choosing between substantialist and relational perspectives rather than old dualisms.
• Substantialist thinking assumes that self-subsistent entities or things constitute the fundamental units of inquiry.
• Western languages inherently encourage process-reduction by treating constant changes and movements as isolated objects at rest.
• Substantialism views relations as merely supplementary modifications that do not affect the real nature of entities.

Our languages are constructed in such a way that we can often only express constant movement or constant change in ways which imply that it has the character of an isolated object at rest...

• The self-action perspective views entities as acting independently under their own inherent powers, a concept historically rooted in Aristotelian physics and Christian theology.
• Although modern natural sciences largely abandoned self-action in inorganic studies, the concept survived in modern philosophy, liberal political theory, and methodological individualism.
• Dewey and Bentley argue that the modern psychological and sociological concept of the mind as an actor is merely the old self-acting soul with its immortality removed.
• Rational-choice theory exemplifies this tradition by treating the individual human action as the fundamental unit of social life and assuming the fixity of actors' preferences.
• Even within game theory applications, individual actors engage with others while their underlying identities, characteristics, and fundamental interests remain unaltered.

All the spooks, fairies, essences, and entities that once had inhabited portions of matter now took flight to new homes, mostly in or at the human body.

• Sociological inquiry historically distinguished itself from economics by focusing on nonrational, norm-following action rather than purely rational self-interest.
• Founding sociological theorists drew upon Kant's notion of free, moral action as a safeguard against utilitarian perspectives.
• Holistic theories and structuralisms often replace the individual with self-subsistent entities like societies or structures as the exclusive sources of action.
• Processes and social movements are sometimes treated as self-acting entities that propel themselves along predetermined trajectories.
• The interactional perspective posits things balanced against one another in causal interconnection, where entities remain fixed and unchanging like billiard balls.

Entities remain fixed and unchanging throughout such interaction, each independent of the existence of the others, much like billiard balls or the particles in Newtonian mechanics.

• Physical inquiry and classical sociology historically focus on locating fixed units and their interactions.
• The variable-centered approach treats entities as static settings while variables themselves act as causal agents.
• Variable-centered research relies on quantitative methods like multiple regression and factor analysis.
• A fundamentally opposed perspective is the transactional or relational approach, which avoids presuming independent entities.
• In relational analysis, units derive their meaning and identity entirely from the dynamic roles they play within a transaction.
• This transactional mode views unfolding processes as the primary unit of analysis, heavily influenced by modern physics.

What decidedly do not do the acting in this perspective are the substances in question; all of the relevant action takes place among them—they provide merely the empty settings within which causation occurs—rather than being generated by them.

• Relational theorists reject discrete, pre-given starting points like the individual or society in sociological analysis.
• Individuals are considered inseparable from the transactional contexts in which they are embedded.
• Structures are viewed as empty abstractions apart from the active elements and associated individuals that compose them.
• Classical thinkers like Marx, Simmel, and Durkheim all recognized the fundamental primacy of social relations over isolated substances.
• Variable-based analysis is criticized for detaching elements and their attributes from their spatiotemporal contexts.

The soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge.

• A relational and transactional approach embeds actors within dynamic relationships and stories rather than treating them as stable, independent categories.
• Statistical methods like controlling for third variables fail to capture the deep ontological embeddedness of entities within actual situational contexts.
• Transactions are treated as ongoing, unfolding processes where actors are transformed and new entities emerge from joint activities.
• Scholars like Dewey, Cooley, and Elias use analogies such as joint music-making and game playing to illustrate fluid, relational systems.
• Sociocultural reality is likened to complex, flowing matter where self-subsistent entities never fully crystallize apart from their relational matrix.

Previously constituted actors enter [transactions] but have no ability to traverse [them] inviolable.

• Social facts and actions are invariably situated within specific contexts rather than occurring in isolation.
• Social actors can encompass diverse entities such as communities, firms, states, or even repeating patterns of events.
• Sociological analysis emphasizes the primacy of contextuality, process, and the totality of relationships among players.
• Major theorists like Marx and Parsons often blend relational insights with contradictory substantialist tendencies in their work.
• Thinkers frequently shift implicitly among different methodological viewpoints rather than strictly adhering to a single school of thought.

Indeed, they can even be events: any actor, after all, is but a series of “events that keep happening in the same way,” events with “stable lineages”.

• Talcott Parsons and Karl Marx both highlight the distinction between abstract analytical models and messy, concrete historical realities.
• Theoretical frameworks like game theory often bridge self-actional and transactional views by emphasizing temporally embedded, mutually contingent actions.
• Substantialism and relationalism represent fundamentally opposing perspectives on the fundamental constitution of social reality.
• Core sociological concepts like power, agency, and freedom require extensive reformulation when viewed through a relational lens.
• Power is traditionally treated as a substantialist entity to be seized or held, heavily influenced by Weberian teleological models of action.
• A transactional approach redefines power not as a static possession, but as a fluctuating, tensile equilibrium within a relational process.

At the core of changing figurations—indeed, the very hub of the figuration process—is a fluctuating, tensile equilibrium, a balance of power moving to and fro.

• Power is defined not as an individual attribute, but as an emergent property of relational networks and social positions.
• Scholars like Foucault and Bourdieu argue that power relations are immanent within economic, knowledge, and social structures.
• Equality and inequality are transactional outcomes rather than essentialist traits derived purely from individual human capital.
• Durable inequalities arise when actors improvise solutions to organizational problems and implement invidious categorical distinctions.
• Practices such as resource hoarding and network closure help crystallize hard differences in advantages and disadvantages.
• Freedom can similarly be reformulated beyond a mere legal status into a relational concept.

Bonds, not essences, provide the bases of durable inequality.

• Freedom is defined pragmatically as a set of actually enjoyed liberties rather than an abstract legal defense.
• A liberty creates an exposure of others to the consequences of a free person's choices and decisions.
• Understanding freedom through concrete transactions helps avoid the pitfalls of defining concepts by their essences.
• Agency should be reconceptualized relationally rather than viewed merely as a self-actional human will.
• Agency is an ongoing dialogic process where actors engage with changing structural environments and situations.

Defining things by their essences is always troublesome in an explanatory science.

• Agency is understood as path dependent, situationally embedded, and expressed through collectively organized action across time and space.
• A transactional point of view allows social inquiry to span a continuum from macroscopic structures to microscopic interactions.
• While national states are often treated as autonomous systems, their boundaries frequently overlap unevenly with actual human practices and identities.
• Societies are better conceptualized as multiple overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power rather than unitary entities.
• At the meso-level, Erving Goffman's studies of co-presence dismantle the idea of preconstituted actors in favor of syntactical relations among acts.

Human beings do not create unitary societies but a diversity of intersecting networks of social interaction.

• A sociology of occasions focuses on gamelike, unfolding, and dynamic processes within social matrices rather than static entities.
• Relational settings are characterized by spatial, network patterns, and temporal processes instead of a governing core essence.
• Individual identities and interests are not preconstituted, but rather emerge through mutual relations and transactional processes.
• Pizzorno reinterprets Hobbes to show that selves require mutual trust, recognition, and name-giving to come into being.
• Individual human agents are constituted as such only when they are recognized and named by other human agents within circles of recognition.

Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men.

• Melucci questions whether the term identity is too permanent for the fluid nature of collective action.
• Feminist theory and gender studies have significantly advanced transactional modes of reasoning.
• Traditional psychoanalysis relies on drive theory, viewing the individual as a monadic entity driven by basic urges.
• A newer school of psychoanalysis rejects essentialism in favor of relational individualism and object-relations theory.
• Relational perspectives treat transactions with others rather than pregiven drives as the basic unit of psychological study.
• Dialogic perspectives view the self as a public square where multiple internal and external elements are in constant conversation.

We are portrayed shaped by and inevitably embedded within a matrix of relationships with other people.

• The transactional perspective opens new empirical directions by organizing research around three transpersonal relational contexts: social structure, culture, and social psychology.
• Social-network analysis serves as a comprehensive paradigm for studying how resources and goods flow through configurations of social ties rather than focusing on preconstituted individuals.
• Network analysts follow an anti-categorical imperative, rejecting static attributional categories in favor of dynamic, observable processes-in-relations.
• Traditional historical debates regarding elite groups often fail because static subcategorization cannot adequately explain divergent actions and interests.
• Social networks operate as interstitial structures that cut across discrete communities, though they can occasionally congeal into more stable formations.

They adhere to what has been termed an “anti-categorical imperative,” rejecting the primacy of attributional categories and other substantives in favor of dynamic, “observable processes-in-relations.”

• Social networks feature directional flows and structural holes that create disparities in access to resources, information, and control.
• Network analysts use sociometry, graph theory, and multidimensional scaling to formally represent social configurations.
• The connectivity approach focuses on direct and indirect ties, actor centrality, and cohesive subgroupings like cliques.
• The positional approach emphasizes structural equivalence and uses blockmodeling to partition populations into stratified role-sets.
• Relational approaches to culture analyze meaning structures as webs of communication and transactions rather than isolated individual values.

relations visible only by their absence

• Categories are increasingly understood not as autonomous entities, but as historically shifting sets of relationships.
• Saussurean linguistics and structural anthropology establish that signs derive meaning from their differences within a system.
• Charles Sanders Peirce introduces a triadic, processual semiotic model consisting of sign, object, and interpretant.
• Mikhail Bakhtin contributes a dialogic approach where utterances function as links in an ongoing chain of communication.
• Cultural analysts across anthropology, history, and sociology are adopting these relational frameworks to study symbolic networks.

A sign . . . is something which stands to somebody [interpretant] for something [object] in some respect or capacity.

• Cultural analysts utilize relational social-network strategies such as semantic networks and blockmodeling.
• These techniques allow researchers to model the internal structure of cultural formations at both micro and macro levels.
• Relational studies in social psychology focus on transactional emotional dynamics rather than fixed individual personalities.
• Randall Collins views social life as an intermittent chain of interaction rituals generating emotional energy.
• Personality is reconceptualized as stable if-then situation-behavior transactions rather than enduring traits.

For any actor, social life consists in a long series of such interaction rituals, an intermittent chain of IRs, with levels of emotional energy accumulating gradually across them.

• Transactional theory shifts the analytical focus from broad personal traits to specific behaviors within varying conditions.
• Walter Mischel's research on children reveals intraindividual patterns known as behavioral signatures that reflect personality coherence.
• Despite its theoretical promise, relational analysis still confronts major unresolved issues such as boundaries, network dynamics, and causality.
• Defining boundaries in continuous relational webs remains one of the most persistent challenges for social researchers.
• Investigative strategies for boundaries are typically divided into realist approaches based on actors' experiences and nominalist approaches based on observers' categories.

The problem of boundary specification, of moving from flows of transactions to clearly demarcated units of study, from continuity to discontinuity, is perhaps the most frequently encountered of all challenges to relational analysis.

• Defining empirical boundaries within webs of relational transactions presents significant methodological and ontological challenges.
• Entities and identities emerge from clusters of transactions only when they demonstrate internal coherence and independent causal authority.
• Unlike substantialist analysis, relational sociology treats identities as problematic phenomena that must be actively explained rather than assumed.
• Relational sociology paradoxically struggles with dynamic network processes that transform matrices of transactions over time.
• Studies of processes-in-relations frequently privilege spatial topology and structural location over temporality and narrative unfolding.
• Ronald Burt's theory of structural holes suggests that action is best explained by complex relational configurations rather than actor attributes.

Once one defines the boundaries around a given matrix of transactions, how does one characterize what obtains inside those boundaries?

• Shifting from a substantialist to a relational viewpoint forces researchers to explain reproduction and constancy rather than development and change.
• Andrew Abbott argues that relational perspectives are superior because change can sometimes produce reproduction, whereas stasis cannot produce change.
• Historical network approaches often relied on static snapshots or separated structure from time, failing to capture true dynamics.
• Recent scholarship combines structural autonomy and robust action to show how network dynamics and structures are dialectically related.
• Harrison White introduces the concept of netdoms and switching, where actors navigate transitions between multiple social realities and stories.

It is possible to explain reproduction as a phenomenon sometimes produced by perpetual change; it is not possible to explain change as a phenomenon sometimes produced by perpetual stasis

• Current network theories often overlook the normative role of Deweyan intelligence and how social actors reflexively engage with everyday problems.
• Relational approaches struggle with explaining network dynamics and frequently fall back on substantialist habits by treating abstract forces as causal entities.
• Roy Schafer proposes an action language for the social sciences that replaces nouns and adjectives with active verbs and adverbs to describe processes.
• This methodological shift insists that real social actors performing actions within specific contexts drive social life, rather than invisible structural forces.
• While social actors can include organizations, they are always embedded in space and time, responding to concrete opportunities and constraints.

Can causality be conceptualized in a more satisfactory way?

• Causal analysis requires looking beyond reified structures to examine situational mechanisms that channel events.
• Bargaining and struggle over controlled resources serve as concrete examples of underlying causal mechanisms.
• Transactional thinking preserves action orientation while avoiding pure voluntarism through robust explanatory processes.
• Relational inquiry offers critical leverage by unfreezing static, essentialist categories that assume singular identities.
• While categorical thinking shapes social realities and policy, transactional perspectives challenge their reified and rigid nature.

Preeminent among the former is the capacity afforded by transactional thinking to "unfreeze" static, substantialist categories that deny the fluidity—hence, the mutability—of figurational patternings.

• Transactional thinking challenges taken-for-granted moral universes by dismantling process-reduction in both moral and practical life.
• Relational reasoning addresses how to evaluate conduct and values when those values are not viewed as preconstituted substances.
• Classical pragmatists like John Dewey and George Herbert Mead argue that values emerge from human engagement and transaction.
• Values arise when individuals experience discordance among multiple normative commitments in challenging circumstances.
• Problematic situations are resolved as actors reconstruct their relational contexts, thereby transforming both their values and themselves.
• Pragmatic action relies on intelligence, practical judgment, and the capacity to take the perspective of the other.

Transactional thinking, in a word, deconstructs a taken-for-granted moral universe; in so doing, it attacks in moral and practical life the very same tendencies toward “process-reduction” that Elias so forcefully underscored at the level of cognition.

• Democracy is framed as a mode of associated living embodying moral intelligence through conjoint communicated experience.
• A major unresolved question for relational thinkers is whether normative standards are purely procedural or substantively contentful.
• Relational sociology suffers from a notable neglect of normative concerns regarding the interpenetration of 'is' and 'ought'.
• Despite challenges, the relational mode of inquiry offers a compelling alternative to rational-choice, structuralist, and variable-based sociologies.
• The choice between substantialist and relational modes of inquiry is rapidly becoming the most consequential dividing line in sociological investigation.

This is a question that relational thinkers continue to be troubled by (to the extent that they address it at all), and that they have not yet—and may never—satisfactorily resolve.

• The study of transpersonal emotional flows remains seriously underdeveloped in social psychology.
• Transactional researchers must maintain theoretical consistency across levels of analysis rather than relying on ad hoc hybrid models.
• Relational thinking allows researchers to avoid mixing incompatible frameworks like rational-actor and network-analytic approaches.
• Systematizing alternative viewpoints from key thinkers will elevate internal debates and facilitate stronger theory-building.
• Transactional sociologists can achieve long-sought theoretical clarity and reflexivity by fully grasping their philosophical premises.

Entities of the World—Relate!

• The text consists of an alphabetical bibliography or reference list from an academic publication.
• It covers seminal works in sociology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and network theory.
• Key authors referenced include Pierre Bourdieu, Ronald Breiger, Nancy Chodorow, and John Dewey.
• The sources range from historical studies and structural analysis to feminist theory and pragmatism.
• The inclusion of diverse disciplines highlights the interdisciplinary foundations of social theory.

Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540–1640.

• The text consists entirely of an academic bibliography or reference list.
• It features citations from prominent sociologists, philosophers, and theorists such as Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, and Jürgen Habermas.
• Many references focus on sociological theory, social action, network analysis, and cultural studies.
• Works range from journal articles published in outlets like the American Journal of Sociology to foundational books.
• The listing reflects interdisciplinary foundations spanning linguistics, phenomenology, pragmatism, and economics.

University Press.

• The text is an extensive academic reference list or bibliography.
• It compiles foundational works in sociology, philosophy, psychology, and social theory.
• Prominent scholars and theorists featured include Karl Marx, George Herbert Mead, Talcott Parsons, and Ferdinand de Saussure.
• The entries span multiple decades of scholarly publication, primarily focusing on social systems, human behavior, and cultural analysis.
• Journals such as the American Journal of Sociology are cited among the publication sources.

Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434.

• The text is an academic bibliography section containing various scholarly works.
• It lists publications from notable sociologists and theorists like Georg Simmel, Margaret Somers, and Charles Tilly.
• Multiple entries are dedicated to Harrison C. White and his influential papers on social structures and networks.
• The references highlight topics spanning citizenship, social movements, political culture, and network theory.
• Bibliographic entries provide foundational literature for historical sociology and social theory.

Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action.

• The text concludes with a comprehensive bibliography of academic sources.
• Works cited include foundational sociological studies and publications.
• Authors referenced span various decades of sociological and cultural research.
• Publishing locations include major academic hubs like Chicago and New York.
• The section serves as the final compilation of literature for a larger work.

Wiley, Norbert. 1994. The Semiotic Self.

• Western languages inherently encourage process-reduction by treating constant changes and movements as isolated objects at rest.

Our languages are constructed in such a way that we can often only express constant movement or constant change in ways which imply that it has the character of an isolated object at rest...

• Dewey and Bentley argue that the modern psychological and sociological concept of the mind as an actor is merely the old self-acting soul with its immortality removed.

All the spooks, fairies, essences, and entities that once had inhabited portions of matter now took flight to new homes, mostly in or at the human body.

• The interactional perspective posits things balanced against one another in causal interconnection, where entities remain fixed and unchanging like billiard balls.

Entities remain fixed and unchanging throughout such interaction, each independent of the existence of the others, much like billiard balls or the particles in Newtonian mechanics.

• The variable-centered approach treats entities as static settings while variables themselves act as causal agents.

What decidedly do not do the acting in this perspective are the substances in question; all of the relevant action takes place among them—they provide merely the empty settings within which causation occurs—rather than being generated by them.

• Individuals are considered inseparable from the transactional contexts in which they are embedded.

The soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge.

• Transactions are treated as ongoing, unfolding processes where actors are transformed and new entities emerge from joint activities.

Previously constituted actors enter [transactions] but have no ability to traverse [them] inviolable.

• Social actors can encompass diverse entities such as communities, firms, states, or even repeating patterns of events.

Indeed, they can even be events: any actor, after all, is but a series of “events that keep happening in the same way,” events with “stable lineages”.

• A transactional approach redefines power not as a static possession, but as a fluctuating, tensile equilibrium within a relational process.

At the core of changing figurations—indeed, the very hub of the figuration process—is a fluctuating, tensile equilibrium, a balance of power moving to and fro.

• Durable inequalities arise when actors improvise solutions to organizational problems and implement invidious categorical distinctions.

Bonds, not essences, provide the bases of durable inequality.

• Understanding freedom through concrete transactions helps avoid the pitfalls of defining concepts by their essences.

Defining things by their essences is always troublesome in an explanatory science.

• Societies are better conceptualized as multiple overlapping and intersecting sociospatial networks of power rather than unitary entities.

Human beings do not create unitary societies but a diversity of intersecting networks of social interaction.

• Individual human agents are constituted as such only when they are recognized and named by other human agents within circles of recognition.

Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men.

• A newer school of psychoanalysis rejects essentialism in favor of relational individualism and object-relations theory.

We are portrayed shaped by and inevitably embedded within a matrix of relationships with other people.

• Network analysts follow an anti-categorical imperative, rejecting static attributional categories in favor of dynamic, observable processes-in-relations.

They adhere to what has been termed an “anti-categorical imperative,” rejecting the primacy of attributional categories and other substantives in favor of dynamic, “observable processes-in-relations.”

• Social networks feature directional flows and structural holes that create disparities in access to resources, information, and control.

relations visible only by their absence

• Charles Sanders Peirce introduces a triadic, processual semiotic model consisting of sign, object, and interpretant.

A sign . . . is something which stands to somebody [interpretant] for something [object] in some respect or capacity.

• Randall Collins views social life as an intermittent chain of interaction rituals generating emotional energy.

For any actor, social life consists in a long series of such interaction rituals, an intermittent chain of IRs, with levels of emotional energy accumulating gradually across them.

• Defining boundaries in continuous relational webs remains one of the most persistent challenges for social researchers.

The problem of boundary specification, of moving from flows of transactions to clearly demarcated units of study, from continuity to discontinuity, is perhaps the most frequently encountered of all challenges to relational analysis.

• Entities and identities emerge from clusters of transactions only when they demonstrate internal coherence and independent causal authority.

Once one defines the boundaries around a given matrix of transactions, how does one characterize what obtains inside those boundaries?

• Andrew Abbott argues that relational perspectives are superior because change can sometimes produce reproduction, whereas stasis cannot produce change.

It is possible to explain reproduction as a phenomenon sometimes produced by perpetual change; it is not possible to explain change as a phenomenon sometimes produced by perpetual stasis

• Roy Schafer proposes an action language for the social sciences that replaces nouns and adjectives with active verbs and adverbs to describe processes.

Can causality be conceptualized in a more satisfactory way?

• Relational inquiry offers critical leverage by unfreezing static, essentialist categories that assume singular identities.

Preeminent among the former is the capacity afforded by transactional thinking to "unfreeze" static, substantialist categories that deny the fluidity—hence, the mutability—of figurational patternings.

• Problematic situations are resolved as actors reconstruct their relational contexts, thereby transforming both their values and themselves.

Transactional thinking, in a word, deconstructs a taken-for-granted moral universe; in so doing, it attacks in moral and practical life the very same tendencies toward “process-reduction” that Elias so forcefully underscored at the level of cognition.

• A major unresolved question for relational thinkers is whether normative standards are purely procedural or substantively contentful.

This is a question that relational thinkers continue to be troubled by (to the extent that they address it at all), and that they have not yet—and may never—satisfactorily resolve.

• Systematizing alternative viewpoints from key thinkers will elevate internal debates and facilitate stronger theory-building.

Entities of the World—Relate!