A book about theories is often an ambivalent work because it has a seductive side, but also some rough edges. On the one hand, it is an invitation to walk through a vast landscape of authors, theories, and concepts fostering insights, leading us sometimes to reconsider our views on some specific object of investigation, and to debate them. On the other, however, there is often a high mountain on the horizon of this landscape that the reader has to climb in order to enjoy the view of that landscape. If we take the viewpoint of the reader, s/he would inevitably ask us: why should we travel with you, what would be the reward for our pain , what would we win in the end? These are legitimate questions, and one way to answer them is to entice our reader with what it feels like to reach the top, with what it looks like at the end of the walk. Therefore, let me give you a foretaste of what you will get at the end of this book. This book delivers an understanding of relation as a macro-phenomenon in society. It appears concretely as a configuration of institutions , organisations, social groups or similar non-personal actors (in this book, they are called âinstitutionsâ, the reason for which will be explained later) and individual actors. This configuration involves reciprocity between non-personal and personal actors, which requires some explanation.
First, we speak of relation as a macro-phenomenon in order to say that it cannot be reduced to personal interaction(s) between individual actors, even if these interactions obviously contribute to the real existence of a relation. This leads us to our second point: relation is a configuration involving reciprocity between non-personal actors or institutions and personal or individual actors. By configuration, we do not mean a context of observable interactions between actors, but an embeddedness of these actors in a reciprocity from which they directly or indirectly benefit. We shall see later that this benefit is not the same for institutions and individual actorsâfor institutions, it opens new possibilities of expansion; for actors, it means new possible positions within society. In order to speak of the transition from one to another configuration of the relation, we use the expression âcycles of the relationâ, or âcyclical development of configurations of the relationâ.
Our third point regards reciprocity . We understand reciprocity as a special relationship that legitimates institutions and personal actors, and whose concrete manifestation is strongly conditioned by the expansion strategies of institutions on the one hand, and to a lesser degree by the personal actors on the other. This leads us to the final point of our explanation: relation is not the product of personal actors. In other words, we understand relation not in the context of a bottom-up perspective, but instead in the frame of a top-down approach. Relation depends on the interplay between the expansion strategies of institutions, which strongly conditions reciprocity between personal actors. Personal actors can also affect this reciprocity , but in order to do so, they must gain in legitimacy . This presupposes that they already have been embedded in a reciprocal relationship with an institution, which in turn presupposes a lot of work of gathering the support of other actors and everything that depends on them, as well as a social position enabling them to do this kind of work efficiently. In this sense, our concept of relation would enable us to understand how institutions have an impact on the life and social careers of personal actors, and how these personal actors can affect the expansion strategies of institutions by contributing to the meaning of reciprocity with the institution and, therefore, to the legitimating operations which these institutions produce. We call this sociological perspective sociology through relation.
In many respects, our contribution could be seen as a rehabilitation of reciprocity . This is only partly true, however. We shall see over the course of the book that reciprocity remains an interesting concept in order to describe the meeting point between corporate and individual actors or, more precisely, in order to describe how they meet when they meet. In this book, we provide a detailed analysis of what this âmeetingâ means. But for now, let us promote the view that reciprocity is only a special concrete relation, materialised in this special circumstance, and nothing else. Therefore, the sociology through relation that proposed here is not some sociology of reciprocity . On the one hand, this is consistent with the attempt to keep the ârelationâ as something that cannot be reduced to a special kind of relationship, like power relationships or personal interactions. On the other hand, this is also consistent with the opposite consideration that argues that ârelationâ is society in its most elementary expression. This ontological concept of relation will be discussed, both in this introductory chapter and later in the book. Let us say for now that, once we get rid of such an ontological framework and once we do not consider relation as another word for personal interaction(s), then we can take a lot more activities into account, and we can see how they contribute to the materialisation (or not) of this special configuration where a reciprocity occurs between institutions and personal actors that legitimate them and their activities.
However, it might be asked: is there a point in writing such a book? Relation is, as we know, a concept widely shared in sociology and the social sciences. It can be found in every kind of sociological theory , and one might think that for this reason , everything that we can say about relation has already been said. In this book, we certainly agree with the idea that relation is widely spread in sociology and the social sciencesâand this is precisely the problem: if relation is everywhere, it hardly is at the centre of sociological theory . It has hardly been taken into account as the kernel of a corresponding theory , and it hardly leads to a sociological investigation of society through the analysis of this relation. Nevertheless, there have been, and there are, attempts to do soâwe might think of relational sociologists, for example, who consider relation as more than interactions only, and who try to promote it to take the centre place in the sociological investigation. In our view, the works of these sociologists make an important contribution to rethinking the relation not only as one sociological concept among many, but as a new way to look at society. In this introduction, an example is used to describe such an attempt. This example enables us to better understand the contrast between a view on relation as a concept among many, and a view that puts relation at the centre of sociological theory . We are, however, not looking at all relational sociologists but will only investigate two debates between the network sociologists inspired by Harrison White, and their critics. Among the latter, we focus on the sociology of relation as conceived by Margaret Archer and Pierpaolo Donati, which criticises network sociology and some of its most important challengers.
This brings us to a second point: what do we mean when we are speaking of âa new way to look at societyâ? Do we mean that this new way is unprecedented in the sociological tradition ? Certainly not. Even if it is hard to find authors whose aim is to deliver a sociology centred on relation, we nevertheless encounter intuitions and fragmented reflections which, once systematised, could lead to such a prospect. This book takes up these threads and proposes their systematisation based on the example of five key debates in the French sociological tradition . This analysis will provide a basis for a theory of relation that understands relation as a macro-phenomenon in society as described above.
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To begin with, however, we have to explain the terminology th...