University of Victoria

Relational Sociology: From Project to Paradigm (Conceptual)

Networks, fields, figurations, discursive formations: these and other relational ideas have gained widespread currency in contemporary sociology, and a distinct relational sociology has been on the rise over the past decade and a half. But for this relational turn to lead to a fully-‐ fledged paradigm shift, fundamental questions must be addressed. Just what are relations, anyway? How do we observe and measure them? How does relational sociology extend or revise the achievements of more established sociologies? Just how deep a shift in our understanding of the sociological enterprise does a relational and reflexive framework entail? To develop a more comprehensive relational sociology, we solicit papers on principles, concepts, methods, advantages and limits of relational sociology. Included papers may address such topics as self-‐reflexivity, transactions, agency, interdependency, relational methodologies, and relational social structures or mechanisms or processes, interdisciplinary connections, and the implications of relational thinking for critical theory, amongst other possibilities.

Chair: Jean-Sebastien Guy, Dalhousie University

Session Organizer: Francois Depelteau, Laurentian University, fdepelteau@laurentian.ca ; Christopher Powell, University of Manitoba, chris.powell@ad.umanitoba.ca ; Tatiana Savoia Landini, Federal University of Sao Paulo, tatalan@uol.com.br

The return of exploitation in pragmatic sociology

Jim Conley, Trent University, jconley@trentu.ca

Exploitation had largely disappeared from the sociological lexicon when in 1998 Charles Tilly made it one of four relational mechanisms producing durable, categorical inequalities. Despite some similarities to the largely abandoned Marxist concept, Tilly's notion of exploitation is both looser (it does not depend on the labour theory of value and economic calculation), and broader (conceptually at least, it goes beyond economic exploitation). It is also primarily concerned with different sociological problems, particularly the legitimation of durable and pervasive inequalities when categories inside organizations are matched with categories from their environment. After summarizing Tilly's argument, this paper identifies some problems with it, and following Neil Gross in considering Tilly's later work as a kind of pragmatist sociology, argues that they can be addressed using the pragmatic sociology of critique developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. First, the legitimation of categorical inequalities can be studied as a "contentious conversation" (Tilly) of justification and critique. Second, Boltanski and Thévenot's conception of a plurality of orders of worth can give some practical content to Tilly's conceptual extension of exploitation beyond economic relations. Third, the pragmatic sociology of critique's project of a political and moral (but not moralistic) sociology explicitly addresses the inescapably evaluative connotation of the concept of exploitation, and its use in denunciations of suffering. By making this dimension of the concept explicit, imprecise rhetorical invocations of indignation can be replaced by empirical investigations of its use in disputes.

Thursday June 6, 2013 03:15 PM - 04:45 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-062

Social structures and transactions: ongoing discussion with critical realists

Francois Depelteau, Laurentian University, fdepelteau@laurentian.ca

Some relational thinkers like myself have argued that relational sociology should be based on the idea that the classical notion of social structure refers to ongoing and more or less stable patterns of social transactions. In this sense, social structures are effects of transactions and not causes of actions. In the last years, critical realism and relational sociology have been connected by authors such as M. Archer and P. Donati. In this respect, relational sociology would be compatible with the idea that social structures do have some causal powers on individuals and groups. In fact, for them good relational sociology should be based on this social ontology, and the notion of transaction should be rejected as being anti-sociological. In this paper, I would like to answer to their critiques of the notion of transaction, explain why social structures and their causal powers do not exist, and how sociology can be based on transactional analysis.

Thursday June 6, 2013 03:15 PM - 04:45 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-062

Radical Relationism: Things Without Essences and Relativism Without Solipsisim

Christopher Powell, Department of Sociology, University of Manitoba , chris.powell@ad.umanitoba.ca

This paper presents the implications of a radically relational sociological epistemology – that is, an epistemology that understands all phenomena as constituted through relations. In this epistemology, relations constitute, and thus analytically precede, the phenomena they connect. Relations are understood as processes of transformation and therefore as work. Thus, no object, including the subject, has any essential existence of its own; the stability and exigency of things is produced through the operation of relations. Structure and agency do not refer to different and opposed qualities but to differing and complementary perspectives: all relational structures exercise agency and all agency is relationally structured. Scientific knowledge itself, emerging from relational figurations, is neither an ideological distortion nor an accurate mirror of an objective reality, but a particular way of producing relations among things; reflexivity replaces objectivity as the cardinal epistemological value. This radical relationism, which dissolves subject-object dualism, is neither realist nor anti-realist, but irrealist and allows for a robust naturalistic, materialist, empirically grounded social science.

Thursday June 6, 2013 03:15 PM - 04:45 PM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-062