The rise of ârelational sociologyâ in the last twenty years or so has coincided with something of a resurgence in the sociology of morality. It is interesting that the critiques of dualistic and static thinking that relational sociology has so thoroughly levelled against modernist social theory are not dissimilar from the kind of critiques in contemporary moral theory that have given the sociology of morality its new impetus. In the same way that relational sociology has sought to find new ways to move beyond seeing individuals as either determined products of social structure or as atomised subjects, in favour of conceptualising individuals as embedded interdependent actants, so too have certain significant trends in moral philosophy been scathing of the Enlightenment tradition of orienting âthe moralâ in accordance with the deliberative, universalising reasoning and rational action of the disembedded individual (see, for example, Gilligan 1982; MacIntyre 1985; Dreyfus 2014; Hekman 1995; Benhabib 1992). In line with such critiques delivered from a philosophic perspective, there has been a drive by sociologists to reconceptualise morality as something that is ordinarily enacted in the intersubjective dynamics of everyday social practice, and which is of tangible significance to the accounts that people give of themselves and their action (see, for example, Hitlin and Vaisey 2013; May 2008; Luckmann 2002; Holdsworth and Morgan 2007).
However, as Emirbayer (1997: 310) identified in his Manifesto for a Relational Sociology , â[o]ne of the most serious shortcomings of relational sociology to date is its relative neglect of normative concernsâ, and it seems that the situation today is not overly different from how it was in 1997. Although frequent reference is made to morality in the relational sociology literature (see, for example, Donati and Archer 2015; Burkitt 2008; May 2013; Crossley 2011), and while some relational concepts have entered into the moral theory literature and definite parallels in the direction of theorising have been drawn (see, for example, Christman 2014; Fritzson 2018; Gergen 2011), the distinct formulation of a relational sociology of morality is found wanting. This is regrettable because relational sociology provides the theoretical and methodological means to radically reconsider how we conceptualise social phenomena. It allows us to conceptualise social phenomena not as entailing substances external to interaction, but as being relationally produced and dynamically unfolding in the interdependent practice of relationally moulded individuals. Likewise, relational sociology does not reduce social phenomena to the actions of detached subjects, but rather sees individuals and their agency as being the product of the relations in which they are embedded.
In what follows, I argue that relational sociology, specifically an interactionist-relational sociology, provides sociologists of morality with the means to reconceptualise how moral phenomena are understood, but also how moral action and moral subjectivity are constituted and shaped within relationally entangled interaction. I argue further still that this provides a sociological theoretical framework for understanding morality with a dynamism which allows us to cut between the dualistic separation of the individual and social context in the formation of, and engagement with, morality in practice. The overall aim of this book is thus to show how a relational approach allows us to provide a coherent theory firstly of how morality is done in practice, and secondly of how individuals come to be able to engage with morality in practice in the ways that they do. In so doing, a relational approach contributes to an increasingly persistent critique of how morality has been conceptualised in the Western modernist traditions of philosophy, particularly in terms of how the conditions of moral action have been understood and how the moral subject has been conceptualised.
The ascendency of relational sociology has much to do with its capacity to simultaneously undermine holist/objectivist modes of thinking on the one hand, and individualist theories on the other. It does this âby conceptualizing both individuals and larger formations in which they participate (like collectivities, institutions, and social systems) as belonging to the same order of reality, a relational orderâ (Powell and DĂ©pelteau 2013). In the relational view, broadly construed social phenomena, including moral phenomena, are reconceptualised as being constituted and sustained across vast, historically produced networks of interaction, which engender and maintain emergent properties such as cultural practices, languages, social constraints, institutional formations, orders of practice and so forth (Crossley 2011). Such phenomena are reconceptualised as being the product of ongoing interaction, and are thus conceptualised in processual terms, as being continually in the making.
This is not to say that social phenomena are therefore the product of individual action, because it is within these networks that the actions and subjectivities of the individuals themselves are constituted. The relational approach makes this point on several grounds. Firstly, as will be argued predominantly in relation to the work of George Herbert Mead in Chapters 2 and 6, the individual, their subjectivities, dispositions, and modes of practice, as well as âhigherâ faculties such as capacities for moral evaluation and judgement, are necessarily formed within the relational interactions that constitute their socialisation, and which also embed the individual within the networks and practices that comprise their social world (Mead 1934; Habermas 1995). Secondly, the form that individual action can take is given course by the interdependences, institutions, and orders of practice that exist across the networks of relations within which they are enacted (Elias 1991; Hilbert 2009). Importantly also, relational approaches highlight how the directionality of interactions unfold intersubjectively between actors, who âprofoundly affect each other as they interactâ (Barnes 2000: 64; Bottero 2009; Crossley 2011).
However, the plasticity of conceptualising phenomena in terms of relations, as oppose to âsocial structuresâ, allows the relational approach to facilitate the fact that reflexively capable individuals stratify the world in very different ways, that their subjectivities are formed across a variety of settings that they occupy from differing positions, and that their action occurs and is transformed within multitudes of fluid, variable, and indeterminate interactional settings. What this view thus adds to the sociology of morality is a processual picture of how moral phenomena, such as values, expectations of conduct, terms of evaluation and judgement, are shared and sustained, and yet also transformed, as they are variably enacted and engaged with by differentiated individuals in the messiness of practice. It allows plural and intersecting moralities to be conceptualised as being necessarily socially constituted, but also as resisting being universali...