Conceptualizing Relational Sociology

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Christopher-FP-Prelims.indd ii 10/3/2013 8:33:26 PM
 Conceptualizing Relational Sociology

Ontological and Theoretical Issues

Edited by
Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau

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 CONCEPTUALIZING RELATIONAL sOCIOLOGY
Copyright © Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau, 2013.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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ISBN: 978–1–137–37990–0
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Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: XXXX 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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 Contents

List of Figures and Table vii

Introduction 1
Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau
1 Feminist Preludes to Relational Sociology 13
Sarah Redshaw
2 Relational Sociology and Historical Materialism:
Three Conversation Starters 27
Kenneth Fish
3 Relational Sociology, Theoretical Inhumanism, and
the Problem of the Nonhuman 45
Craig McFarlane
4 Advancing Sociology through a Focus on Dynamic Relations 67
Debbie Kasper
5 Norbert Elias on Relations: Insights and Perspectives 87
Charalambos Tsekeris
6 Critical Strategies for Implementing a Relational Sociological
Paradigm: Elias, Bourdieu, and Uncivilized Sociological
Theoretical Struggles 105
Christopher Thorpe
7 Interactions, Juxtapositions, and Tastes:
Conceptualizing “Relations” in Relational Sociology 123
Nick Crossley
8 Collective Reflexivity: A Relational Case for It 145
Margaret S. Archer

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 vi Contents

9 What Is the Direction of the “Relational Turn”? 163

François Dépelteau
10 Radical Relationism: A Proposal 187
Christopher Powell
11 Relational Sociology as Fighting Words 209
Mustafa Emirbayer

References 213
Index 231

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 Figures and Table

Figures
4.1 Simplified model of relations among disciplinary
subject matter 73
4.2 Model of sociology’s theory of dynamic relations 81
4.3 Model of relational process theory, viewed over
time from “above.” 82
5.1 An initial mapping of a social network as imagined by
Elias (1970) 93
7.1 An illustrative network graph 126
7.2 Modelling social space 131
7.3 Bourdieu’s account of class formation 135
7.4 Mark’s model 140
8.1 Collective reflexivity as triadic 158

Table
10.1 Guidelines for a radical relationism 188

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Christopher-FP-Prelims.indd viii 10/3/2013 8:33:27 PM
 Introduction
Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau

What Is Relational Sociology?

What is relational sociology? At its broadest, relational sociology
investigates social life by studying social relations. Throughout the
history of the discipline of sociology, its practitioners have defined
their work through a focus on one or another of various differing
types of objects. The list of these objects is long; the classical tradi-
tion gives us social facts, social action, and social classes, and the past
100 years have added symbols, systems, interest groups, institutions,
ethnomethods, practices, identities, signs, discourses, and many oth-
ers. Each of these distinct objects of analysis has helped to define a
distinct project within sociology, projects like functionalism, conflict
theory, interactionism, ethnomethodology, critical theory, feminism,
cultural sociology, and so on. In one sense, relational sociology is
one more project like these, defined by its distinct object of analy-
sis and by the distinctive approaches used to study that object. In
another sense, it is a way of pursuing any one of these other projects.
Relational sociologists study social relations. But how they do so, and
what precisely they mean by “social relations,” varies considerably
from one relational sociologist to another. This volume and its com-
panion volume Applying Relational Sociology: Relations, Networks,
and Society provide a rough guide to the varying ways in which rela-
tional sociologists have defined what it is that they do.
Relational ideas in social theory go back at least as far as Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and feature prominently in the works of land-
mark theorists like Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer, Norbert
Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Seyla Benhabib, Bruno
Latour, and Nancy Chodorow, among others. As a self-conscious

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 2 Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau

project, however, relational sociology took shape in the 1990s, abetted

greatly by Mustafa Emirbayer’s germinal “Manifesto for a Relational
Sociology.” Participants in this project commonly define their work
in contrast with both holist and individualist thinking in the social
sciences. So, for instance, where Emile Durkheim, in “The Rules of
Sociological Method,” defined social facts as substantial “things,”
existing at a given moment in time, and having a reality separate from
individuals, relational sociologists treat social phenomena as processes,
constituted by flows of action or interaction, which operate imma-
nently to the life of individuals rather than on a separate order of real-
ity. Conversely, where Max Weber, in Economy and Society, defined
social qualities like class, status, and power in terms of attributes (like
“life chances”) attached to individuals, defined social relations them-
selves in individualistic terms (as the probability of individuals’ actions
being mutually reciprocally oriented), and proposed that all collective
phenomena including religion, ethnicity, and the state be understood
in terms of individuals’ subjectively meaningful motivated actions,
relational sociologists are more likely to emphasize how individuals
are always-already enmeshed in relations of interdependency with
others and cannot be understood, even theoretically, apart from their
relational contexts.
So, for instance, do we treat power as a kind of substance that
some people have more of and others less or none, and which can
therefore be present or absent in any given situation; or do we treat
it as the effect of a field of relations, as something that flows among
actors, and which therefore involves everyone (if unequally) and can
be found in every situation? Do we treat identity as an essence, a set
of defining characteristics that each individual carries around with
him or her, or do we treat it as an effect of the flow of practices of
identification and differentiation, always dynamic and fluid? Most
importantly, do we treat individuals and society as separate entities,
belonging to different orders of reality, or do the words “individual”
and “society” designate two distinguishable but inseparable aspects
of the ongoing flow of interdependent human action? These questions
help to define the distinctiveness of relational thinking in sociology.
Overcoming dualism has been especially important to many rela-
tional sociologists. When Durkheim enjoined sociologists to “treat
social facts as things,” he thereby sought to give sociology a distinct
object of investigation and so obtain for it a special place among
the sciences. But this gesture, which remains intuitively appealing
for many social scientists and which appears in everyday language

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 Introduction 3

whenever we talk about “the economy” or “the state” or “the sport

of hockey,” generates serious problems. If society and individual are
separate types of things, how can we account for the effects that each
have on the other? In particular, if we call the constraining effects
of society on human individuals’ “structure” and the ability of indi-
viduals to freely determine their own actions “agency,” then we as
sociologists are caught in a double bind: The more that we find our-
selves capable of explaining individual action as the product of struc-
ture, the more we deny, in thought, the ability of human beings to be
aware, reflect, and make choices, while the more scope we allow for
individual agency the less space we leave for that distinctive mode of
explanation that is sociology. Relational sociologists have sought to
overcome the individual–society dualism, and the structure–agency
dualism that comes along with it, by conceptualizing both individu-
als and the larger formations in which they participate (like collec-
tivities, institutions, social systems) as belonging to the same order
of reality, a relational order. Social formations (structures, systems,
discourses, etc.) are nothing other than the relations among interde-
pendent human beings. And, equally importantly, individual human
action is always and everywhere action in and through relations.
Having said this, however, we must immediately qualify our
description by acknowledging that it does not precisely describe the
aims of all relational sociologists. Among practitioners of the art, one
finds a common focus on relations but widely differing positions on
fundamental questions about what social relations are, how they can
be known, and what they tell us about the world. Are social relations
emergent entities, having a reality or an explanatory force unto them-
selves that is irreducible to individuals or to individual action? And if
so, are they the building blocks of all other social formations—that
is, is all of society relational—or are they only one type of social
formation among others, so that society can be more relational or
less relational from one time and place to another? Or, alternatively,
are relations nothing more than patterns in the actions of individ-
uals, patterns in the ways that individuals are constrained by each
others’ actions, and are therefore dependent on one another? Or are
they some third kind of thing, an elementary force out of which both
individuals and collective phenomena are constituted? Do relations
depend on humans’ subjective perceptions of them to have any effects,
or are they in some way independent of individual subjectivity? Are
they imbued with meanings and defined by the meanings they carry,
or are they essentially morphological and meaningless? Are relations

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 4 Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau

concrete ties among actual people, or are they relative positions in

some kind of social space? How does one observe relations? Can we
measure and analyze them quantitatively, or qualitatively, or both,
and if so, how? Are they something about which we can have objective
knowledge, or does the relationist abolition of dualism extend even to
the abolition of subject–object dualism, thus calling into question the
very notion of objective knowledge and of science itself? Is relational
thinking a vehicle for social critique, or is it a reactionary assault
on Enlightenment humanism, or is it neither of these, being instead
politically protean or polymorphous? Different relational sociologists
give, or would give, differing answers to these and other fundamental
questions. Many of these differences are on display in this collection,
and others can be read between its lines. These differences reflect the
diverse origins of relational sociology and the varying aims of those
who participate in it. We believe that they also express the intellectual
vitality of a project that is just beginning to take shape, a shape that
can perhaps be glimpsed in the pages of this collection.

A Rough Guide
When the response to our call exceeded our expectations, we faced
the difficult task of sorting the submissions into two volumes. This
volume includes chapters of two general types: those that connect
relational sociology to social theory more broadly by examining rela-
tional ideas in the work of specific social theorists and those that
focus specifically on how relations are conceived. The companion
volume, Applying Relational Sociology: Relations, Networks, and
Society, includes chapters that focus on specific methodological issues
or that apply relational sociology to empirical questions.
As part of its methodological focus, Applying Relational Sociology
includes a cluster of chapters grounded in social network analysis:
Harrison C. White, Frédéric Godart, and Matthias Thiemann exam-
ine qualitatively different forms of uncertainty that are obtained in
networks; Jorge Fondevila and Harrison White examine how the
use of reflexive and indexical language affects the structuration of
networks; Jan Fuhse investigates the interaction of social networks,
communication, and culture; and Heather Price tackles the problem
of how to operationalize dyadic measures as independent variables
in empirical research. Also in that volume, John Mohr compares
Bourdieu’s linear, dimensional conception of social space with Kurt
Lewin’s topological, “hodological” conception of space and relates

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 Introduction 5

both to the new institutional analysis of DiMaggio and Powell. Two

chapters deal with evolutionary concepts: Lars Bo Kasperson argues
for Elias’s concept of “survival units” as a fundamental starting point
for relational sociology, and Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen argue
for “evolutionary niches” as a key unit of analysis. Finally, two chap-
ters apply relational sociology to a qualitative analysis of empirical
situations, one local and one global: Daniel Monterescu investigates
relational spatiality in the Jewish–Arab mixed town of Jaffa, and
Pierpaolo Donati analyzes the transformation of relationality engen-
dered by contemporary globalization.
Within the volume you are now reading, the chapters fall into three
broad categories. The first three chapters connect relational sociol-
ogy to social critique as Karen Redshaw, Kenneth Fish, and Craig
McFarlane engage relationally with feminist theory, Marxism, and
animal rights theory respectively. Each of these chapters gives us a
sense of how relational thinking makes a difference not only to the
scientific investigation of social life, but also to concrete problems in
politics and ethics.
Sarah Redshaw’s “Feminist Preludes to Relational Sociology”
introduces us to the difference between individualist and relational
thinking. In the individualist thinking that prevails in contempo-
rary medical practice, mother and infant are conceived of as separate
beings. The result is that newborn infants are cared for separately
from their mothers, often in separate physical spaces, by medical
professionals who involve the mother little or not at all in decisions
and practices of care. Women report feeling alienated from the pro-
cess of care, and even from their own newborn children. Drawing
on relationally oriented feminist thinkers like Seyla Benhabib, Carol
Gilligan, and especially on Nancy Chodorow’s concept of “relational
individualism,” as well as on Nick Crossley’s work in relational soci-
ology, Redshaw argues for recognizing the mother–infant relation
as important in and of itself, replacing individualized care of the
infant with care that involves maintaining the emotional, practical,
and physical connection between mother and child. More broadly,
Redshaw argues that relational individualism enables the recogni-
tion of the specific interdependencies, such as those of gender, which
condition individual experiences, without reducing individuals to the
bearers of a homogeneous collective identity.
Like Redshaw, Kenneth Fish synthesizes the ideas of relational
sociologists with those drawn from a tradition of social critique.
In “Relational Sociology and Historical Materialism: Three

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 6 Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau

Conversation Starters,” he points out that relational sociologists have

been reluctant to engage deeply with Marx’s historical materialism
and argues that they should do so by making three ontological points.
First, human nature is neither individual nor collective, but is essen-
tially relational, and this relational essence accounts for why sociolo-
gists should focus on social relations. Second, the essential basis of
social relations lies in the social division of labor. It is through labor,
that is, through the coordinated effort of producing their means of
subsistence and thereby transforming the material world, that human
beings engender all other forms of social relation. This does not mean
that all other types of social relations can simply be read off of rela-
tions of production, but that labor relations are implicit in all other
relations and must be understood for any other relations to be com-
prehensible. Third, the process of labor is inherently dynamic, and
hence historical materialism accounts for why social relations change.
Fish contends that historical materialism offers a fruitful ontological
underpinning for relational sociology and recommends a thorough,
constructive conversation between the two perspectives.
Juxtaposed to Fish’s relational humanism is Craig McFarlane’s rela-
tional inhumanism. In “Relational Sociology, Theoretical Inhumanism,
and the Problem of the Nonhuman,” McFarlane directly criticizes
what he calls the “reactionary humanism” of relational sociologists
like Margaret Archer and Pierpaolo Donati, which privileges human
beings both ethically and analytically over all nonhuman beings.
McFarlane calls this gesture reactionary because, historically speak-
ing, it has reasserted humanism against both the antihumanist criti-
cisms of Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault and
the post-humanist claims of authors like Donna Haraway and Bruno
Latour. Humanism is unjustifiable, McFarlane argues, except as pure
anthropocentric prejudice; although he agrees that sociology should
promote thriving and oppose suffering, the reasons for confining this
ethical concern to human beings fall apart on close inspection. Worse
yet, humanism undermines the principles of relational sociology itself.
Providing an example of inhumanist relational sociology in the empiri-
cal study of the shifting relations between humans and domesticated
animals, McFarlane argues that relational sociologists must recognize
the nonhuman sociality on which human sociality depends.
The next three chapters, by Debbie Kasper, Charalambos Tsekeris,
and Christopher Thorpe respectively, focus on two of the most influ-
ential relational theorists outside of social network analysis, Norbert
Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. These chapters unpack the qualitative

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 Introduction 7

ideas, the metaphors, and images, through which many sociologists

have come to think relationally, and discover fruitful answered ques-
tions or previously unexplored implications in these germinal works.
In “Advancing Sociology through a Focus on Dynamic Relations,”
Debbie Kasper argues that relational sociology provides a means for
making sociology fundamentally continuous with the natural sci-
ences. Kasper draws heavily on the specific contributions of Norbert
Elias, whose work centered on the anti-dualist claim that “society”
and “the individual” are not really separate things. Elias argued that
human beings are biologically constituted in such a way as to be
dependent on one another for our material survival, from conception
to death; we are social by nature and can act only in and through
social relations. By practicing a given style of life within a figuration
(a large formation of social relations), we acquire habitus, a relatively
stable but open-ended set of dispositions that enables us to operate
in the world and to innovate new practices. Synthesizing ideas from
Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, Kasper develops a model of the dynamic
interactions of social figurations, habitus, practices, and lifestyles,
which, she argues, accounts for both the stability and the fluidity of
social life.
Like Kasper, Charalambos Tsekeris presents a heavily Eliasian
articulation of relational sociology, and focuses especially on Elias’s
account of relations as the practical interdependence to which human
beings are always subject. One implication of this interdependence,
according to Elias, is that the ordinary perception of our selves as
bounded wholes separate from the world around us is mistaken; we
are homines aperti or “open people.” Tsekeris gives a relational inter-
pretation to the work of George Herbert Mead to show how human
beings constitute their selves through active engagement in relations
of interdependency. Relations of interdependency combine to form
figurations; by acting within figurations individuals acquire habitus,
dispositions that operate as an embodied sense of the social world.
Tsekeris emphasizes Elias’s claim that processes of figuration tend to
generate unplanned order; linking figurational analysis to contempo-
rary chaos theory, he argues that contemporary networked societies
in particular are inherently chaotic, and therefore both deterministic
and unpredictable. Like Kasper, he argues forcefully for the elevation
of relational sociology to a general paradigm for all sociology.
That may be easier said than done, however. In “Critical Strategies
for Implementing a Relational Sociological Paradigm: Elias, Bourdieu
and Uncivilized Theoretical Struggles,” Christopher Thorpe synthesizes

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 8 Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau

Elias’s figurational analysis and Bourdieu’s analysis of field to cri-

tique rationalistic accounts of scientists’ decision making. Scientists
are embedded in relational fields constituted by the particular species
of scientific capital in which they have invested their practice. These
fields condition scientists’ habitus, their embodied “feel for the game”
of scientific rationality, which manifests in the reflexive perceptions
and dispositions through which they intuitively determine the plausi-
bility of truth claims. Rather than freely choosing scientific theories
on the basis of a common rationality, scientists are intuitively disposed
to favor some types of claims over other, so that scientists invested in
nonrelational modes of explanation will tend to find relational claims
threatening and will incline toward using “strategic” rationality to dis-
count claims that a “pure” rationality would admit. Thorpe suggests
that this tendency can be overcome by exposing the workings of field
and habitus; by being conscious of the biases resulting from strategic
rationality, scientists can become free to make decisions based on pure
rationality. However, Thorpe’s prescription relies on the dissemination
of an analysis that is itself based on relational thinking, suggesting a
catch-22 situation and leaving open the question of how to advance
the relational paradigm by strategic means.
The final four chapters, by Nick Crossley, Margaret Archer,
Francois Dépelteau, and Christopher Powell, all turn in one way or
another on the question: What is a relation? Differing ways of concep-
tualizing relations imply different understandings of what relational
sociology is and how one does it.
In “Interactions, Juxtapositions, and Tastes: Conceptualizing
‘Relations’ in Relational Sociology,” Nick Crossley examines the ten-
sion between theories that conceptualize relations as concrete ties
between social actors, and those that conceptualize relations as rela-
tive positions in a field of social space. Both conceptions are impor-
tant, Crossley argues and his goal is to indicate means by which they
can be synthesized. Crossley focuses on Bourdieu’s field-space concep-
tion of relations, noting its strengths in explaining the relative unifor-
mity of tastes shown by actors subject to similar forms of domination.
Without a notion of relations as concrete ties, however, Bourdieu can-
not account for the uniformity of tastes among elite actors who are
relatively free from necessity. Crossley’s solution, drawing on ideas
from Noah Mark and Peter Blau, is to propose that social spaces
engender the formation of homophilous networks of concrete social
ties. In other words, actors in similar social spaces tend to form con-
crete networks with one another and thereby develop common tastes.

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 Introduction 9

At the same time, historically fluid social networks dynamically

generate their own social spaces. Neither networks nor spaces are
primary; each engenders and conditions the other diachronically.
Although Margaret Archer’s chapter “Collective Reflexivity: A
Relational Case for It” is ostensibly focused on arguing that social
theorists need to make more use of the concept of reflexivity, at the
core of her argument is a distinctive conception of social relations.
Reflexivity is the capacity of actors to consider themselves in relation
to their social contexts and vice versa. Archer builds her argument by
critiquing theories of the plural subject who engages in “we-thinking,”
theories developed by John Searle and Margaret Gilbert. For Searle,
an individualist, plural subjectivity is possible because individual
actors have a conception of this plurality in their minds; for Gilbert,
a holist, it results from the objective fact of prior agreements to act
in common. Archer rejects both options by pointing out that actors
derive relational goods (and relational evils) from acting together.
Actors themselves perceive relationships as things distinct from the
other actors with whom the relationship is formed. This perception is
a case of reflexivity. The distinct status of the relationship as a thing
unto itself allows actors who think and act reflexively to coordinate
their actions with others’ without necessarily having the same ideas in
common or feeling themselves obliged by a prior social contract.
In contrast to Archer’s insistence on a distinct ontological or at least
epistemological status for relations, François Dépelteau advocates a
single-level ontology in which relations are simply the transactions
between interdependent individuals. Dépelteau classifies existing rela-
tional theories into three types. In deterministic and co-determinis-
tic theories, social relations are conceived as some kind of emergent
phenomena, ontologically distinct from individual action. Whether
relations determine action or relations and action co-determines each
other, the society–individual dualism is preserved, with all the intrac-
table problems that this entails. “Single-level” theories form a third
type in which social relations are not ontologically or epistemologi-
cally distinct from empirically observable human action. In transac-
tional theories, for example, all action is trans-action between two or
more concrete actors. Social constraint results from the constraints
that individuals exert on each other through transactions, not from
emergent social structures. Dépelteau argues that a single-level ontol-
ogy is necessary for relational sociology to realize its full potential.
In “Radical Relationism: A Proposal,” Christopher Powell takes a
different approach to the problem of abolishing dualisms by proposing

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 10 Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau

that all phenomena, including individuals themselves, be understood

as composed of relations. Rather than relations being emergent from
human action, humans themselves, social structures, and indeed non-
human actors and forces, are emergent from relations. Thus, human
beings and all other phenomena are figurations. Relations are pro-
cesses that can best be conceptualized as work, that is as transforma-
tive action. In this nonhumanist framework, 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 epistemological frame-
works for understanding the same phenomena. This framework abol-
ishes subject–object dualism and therefore employs reflexivity rather
than objectivity as the standard of validation for truth claims.
In a brief afterword, “Relational Sociology as Fighting Words,”
Mustafa Emirbayer reflects on how relational sociology has shifted
from an oppositional project, critical of sociology’s mainstream, to a
more affirmative project that seeks to join that mainstream through
paradigm building. Arguing that it is important to keep alive rela-
tional sociology’s spirit as “fighting words,” Emirbayer warns that
sociology continues to be dominated by old substantialist ideas,
even in new waves of scholarship. Epistemological vigilance is still
necessary.

Relational Sociology: From Project to Paradigm

When we first issued the call for essays for this project, it was titled
Relational Sociology: From Project to Paradigm. This title expressed
a lofty ambition. In Thomas Kuhn’s classic work The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, the term “paradigm” refers to a singular scien-
tific achievement that defines in theoretical terms the objects, forces,
and relations about which one can ask scientific questions and which
describes by example the methodological means for answering those
questions. A paradigm so defined provides the foundational con-
sensus on which a community of researchers could base a scientific
enterprise. In Kuhn’s view, such consensus is necessary for a mature
science, because it provides the means by which scientists can establish
a shared truth about some aspect of the natural universe. In Kuhnian
terms, sociology is not (yet?) a mature science because it has no single
paradigm, only a multiplicity of contenders for paradigmatic status.
Taking relational sociology “from project to paradigm” would mean

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 Introduction 11

weaving together the diverse threads of inquiry that go by the name

of relational sociology and establishing an ontological and method-
ological consensus that would allow relational sociologists to propose
and validate truth claims in agreement with one another. Moderately,
such an achievement would consolidate relational sociology as a dis-
tinct scientific enterprise; more ambitiously, it could establish a para-
digm for the discipline as a whole.
As the responses to our call flooded in, we realized that relational
sociologists are still quite some ways from achieving such a consensus,
even among themselves let alone for sociology as such. Furthermore,
they may not need or want such a paradigm. The diversity of ontolog-
ical and methodological starting points in relational sociology allows
its practitioners to investigate a wide range of phenomena, whereas
the establishment of a metatheoretical consensus always implies the
possibility that some phenomena will disappear from view and some
questions will become unaskable. Kuhn’s model of normal science,
derived as it is from his study of physics, chemistry, and biology,
might be too narrow for sociology.
In his Course in Positive Philosophy, written between 1830 and
1842, August Comte, inventor of the word “sociology” and arguably
the first self-identified sociologist, compares the maturation of the
scientific study of social life to the natural sciences and proposed two
main reasons why sociology took longer to achieve maturity marked
by consensual agreement on objective truths, than did the natural
sciences. First, social phenomena are more complex than nonsocial
phenomena; and second, as participants in social life, we have a stake
in them, they concern us vitally, and so our explanations of them are
enmeshed in our struggles with one another to define truth in accor-
dance with our interests. These arguments imply that establishing a
paradigm necessarily eliminates some complexities and some interests
from our discourse while privileging others. In this way, scientific
truth, about society if not also about the natural world, remains, for
the present at least, irreducibly hermeneutic and political.
It may be, then, that our initial goal of moving “from project to
paradigm” was premature or even wrongheaded. Recognizing this,
we set ourselves the more modest goal of bringing together as many
differing visions of relational sociology as we could, juxtaposing them
with one another, so as to enable an informed discussion about their
differences and their commonalities, their relative strengths and limi-
tations, and the opportunities for further innovation whether that
innovation takes place through synthesis or paralogy. In this respect,

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 12 Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau

we think we have succeeded. Although we cannot claim that this col-

lection offers a representative sample of all relational sociology (tech-
nically, it is a kind of a snowball sample), it brings together enough
varying articulations to enable a dialogue across difference to begin.
And for readers with little or no prior acquaintance with relational
sociology, this collection offers a showcase of the diversity, complex-
ity, depth, and vitality of the work being done under this banner. Like
the popular series of travel books, these volumes serve as a “rough
guide” to the exciting intellectual adventure that is relational sociol-
ogy, from the “big names” whose work is established and influential,
to up-and-coming junior scholars with a gleam in their eye for the
future of the field. It is a handbook to the language games we are
playing, and an invitation to join in.

Christopher-FP-Intro.indd 12 10/3/2013 8:53:53 PM