Social Attractors: A Proposal to Enhance “Resilience Thinking” about the Social

Abstract

This article proposes social attractors as a way of addressing limitations in the functionalist sociology commonly applied to the social when examining ecological-social relations. It focuses on “resilience thinking” to argue the case. Resilience thinking is discussed (1) as an analytical strategy whereby ecological and social attractors perform analogous roles in a coordinated approach to ecosystems and social relations, and (2) as a social movement within the “new ecology” that institutionalized around the notion of resilence. The article begins by describing the institutionalization of resilience thinking. It then argues that functionalist assumptions about equilibrium contradict those of resilience thinking and lead to conflated views of social relations. The theoretical context of the social attractor, which stems from a synthesis of critical realism and Gramscian analysis of power, is outlined. Finally, the qualitative, nonlinear methodology that the social attractor facilitates is illustrated through a hypothetical example involving ecosocial relations.