Relational Sociology Research Articles

Searching for an Economic Basis for the Indo-Pacific: Evolution of India’s Approaches

The article is devoted to an analysis of Indias attempts to form an economic basis for its flagship foreign policy initiative - the concept of the Indo-Pacific. The author, using a multidimensional approach based on critical theory, historical sociology of international relations, the strategic culture approach and spatial approach, examines the evolution of the economic system of the Indo-Pacific in a historical perspective. India has historically played a key role in the system. So the Indian political elites believe that it has to be the regional hegemon. The rapid growth of the Indian economy at the beginning of the 21st century allowed New Delhi to start implementing its ambitions. The growth of neighboring China and its expansion into traditional Indian spheres of influence forced India to intensify the Indo-Pacific policy. Possible options for building the economic basis of the Indo-Pacific have been consistently explored in the article. The author highlights the economic mega blocs (TPP and RCEP), which India refused to join due to concerns about its economy; sub-regional trade and economic blocs and initiatives (SAARC, BIMSTEK, SAGAR, AAGC), local and relatively weak for providing the economic basis of the mega-region on their basis; finally, the latest infrastructure projects (Blue Dots Network, Build Back Better World), in which India is still hesitant to participate, not being sure of their effectiveness and fearing excessive involvement in anti-Chinese projects. The author concludes that India can either join Western infrastructure initiatives, or try to build an economic basis for the Indo-Pacific on a set of sub-regional initiatives. In the latter case, Russia could play an important role by implementing bilateral projects with India and participating in multilateral ones.

Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann

Reviewed by: Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment by Wibke Schniedermann Shuqin Fu Wibke Schniedermann. Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 177 pp., $18.61 (electronic), $18.02 (hardback). Gender issues in James's oeuvre have been subjected to extensive academic scrutiny. Among the scholarly works that probe into James's stance and speculation on gender, Wibke Schniedermann's Masculine Domination in Henry James's Novels: The Art of Concealment contributes impressively to work on gendered power relations and the narrative representation of these structures in James. Building on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology theory as well as his assumptions on masculine domination, the book specifically examines the female protagonists' personal struggles against and strategies to break from gender-based symbolic violence and symbolic power in three major James novels––The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Although much has been written about James's sensitivity to power disequilibrium, Schniedermann sheds new light on James's depiction of social power and its problematic implications that "account for this power's social conditionality" (2). This book is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1, which serves as an introduction, presents the subject and structure of the study. In particular, Schniedermann introduces the book's critical practice in "Daisy Miller: A Study" (1879) via Bourdieu's terms habitus, field, capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination. The author contends that a micro field is created in the novella, in which clashing habitus leads to the conflicts among the characters, whose capital distribution can be analyzed to disclose the represented social hierarchies. In this sense, symbolic capital works as the premise for the exercise of symbolic power, which can only exert its influence by means of actual misrecognition. Thus, Daisy's failure to recognize the established symbolic power literally plunges her into a closely knit and inescapable web of gender-specific domination as "the form par excellence of symbolic domination" (24). As a result, her absence and death at the end of the story constitute a doom foretold in the androcentric society. As Schniedermann explains, James's treatment of a female protagonist's absence in "Daisy Miller" is an experiment in the androcentric basis of feminine absence, which James develops in Isabel Archer. Thus, chapter 2 ("The Presence of Absence in The Portrait of a Lady") focuses on feminized vacancy and (absence of) visibility as well as the female character's inner struggle against gendered domination. The author contends that Isabel's fighting back is fully manifested through her feminized absence in the beginning of the novel, the constantly changing perspective toward her view, and her self-chosen absence at the end of the story. Unlike Daisy Miller, who is short on wisdom and lacks the disposition to empower her own subversiveness, Isabel's penetrating cognition and critical temperament make her subversion truly potent. Just as absence is a common topic of the textual analysis of "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady, inheritance as a species of symbolic capital turns out to be [End Page E-11] a shared theme of the textual interpretation in chapter 3 ("The Grip of Inheritance in The Wings of the Dove") and chapter 4 ("How to Survive One's Inheritance in The Golden Bowl"). Revolving around "the unequal distribution of capital and the gender-dependent sphere of influence provided by and through a character's resources" (26), the third chapter concludes that Milly's controversial triumph comes less from a misjudgment of her class privilege than from the latter's intricate interconnection with her wealth and fatal illness. Compared with Milly's moderate success, Maggie's victory is a full one in that "she achieves exactly what she aims at" (27): Maggie's astute cognition, firm decision, and consequent actions enable the novel to uncover the powerful effect of the well-disguised system of masculine domination. Firmly believing that her father deserves honor and authority, Maggie spares no effort in maintaining his power by hiding Amerigo and Charlotte Stant's adultery. In essence, what Maggie tries to cover is just what the text tries...

A critical realist view of gesture

ABSTRACT In the panorama of gesture theories, the contribution of relational sociology based on critical realism is underdeveloped. This contribution seeks to fill the deficit by considering Giovanni Maddalena's theory on the ‘complete gesture’. On the one hand, this theory is appreciated as a significant step forward from classical pragmatism. On the other hand, since theories based essentially on phenomenology and semiotics are at risk of nominalism, if we want to understand the gesture from a critical realistic perspective, we need to complement the theory of gesture with a relational social ontology. This means that the theory of the gesture as action (unit act) must be placed within an ontological and epistemological framework, in which Peirce’s triangle is related to the latent value of the real as indicated by the sign. A relational alternative to Peirce's semiotic triangle is presented here with the aim of connecting the sign of the gesture to the underlying reality.

A critical realist view of gesture

ABSTRACT In the panorama of gesture theories, the contribution of relational sociology based on critical realism is underdeveloped. This contribution seeks to fill the deficit by considering Giovanni Maddalena's theory on the ‘complete gesture’. On the one hand, this theory is appreciated as a significant step forward from classical pragmatism. On the other hand, since theories based essentially on phenomenology and semiotics are at risk of nominalism, if we want to understand the gesture from a critical realistic perspective, we need to complement the theory of gesture with a relational social ontology. This means that the theory of the gesture as action (unit act) must be placed within an ontological and epistemological framework, in which Peirce’s triangle is related to the latent value of the real as indicated by the sign. A relational alternative to Peirce's semiotic triangle is presented here with the aim of connecting the sign of the gesture to the underlying reality.

Exploring the relational nature of teachers’ agency negotiation through master- and counter-narratives

Teachers’ agency has recently been vastly studied from a sociocultural perspective, emphasising that teachers’ action is shaped by the structures within which teachers work. However, this study provides a different perspective, introducing relational sociology to the research on teachers’ agency. Here, agency is seen as embedded in interdependencies and relationships, either personal or impersonal. Finnish newly qualified teachers were interviewed concerning their teacher training and work to explore how they negotiated agency in their narratives. The analysis shows the entanglement of master- and counter-narratives in agency negotiation as the teachers drew on prevailing societal master-narratives and simultaneously provided opposing categories through counter-narratives. The results reveal three aspects of relationships through which the agency was negotiated: political, cultural, and epistemic. The study contributes to the understanding of teachers’ agency, paying attention to language and the plurality of relationships in agency negotiation and formation.

Wicked problems and sociology: building a missing bridge through processual relationalism

ABSTRACT Relationalism presumes conceptual primacy of relations over the elements engaged in those relations. In that sense, relations are not viewed as something external to pre-given elements, but as constitutive of those elements. Processual relationalism presumes that the relations between/among elements are not just static ties, but unfolding, dynamic processes. Currently, processual relationalism is increasingly present in the social sciences. Nevertheless, it is the movement of relational sociology that has been at the forefront of the processual ‘relational turn.’ In this paper, the authors argue that the methodological potential of processual-relational sociology should be taken decisively further since it is especially relevant for addressing the socio-political reality of our time that is increasingly characterized by what has been referred to as ‘wicked problems’. Through introducing the distinction of self-action, interaction and trans-action as it is discussed in relational sociology, the authors argue that the methodological consequences of processual relationalism overlap with constitutive explanation, which is an important addition to causal explanation that is prevalent in the ‘variable-centered’ social sciences. The authors offer a sketch of a research agenda for explaining a wicked problem that needs a processual-relational methodology to be addressed: the ongoing COVID-19 Crisis.

Emerging from the shadow of the Soviet Union: the case of the accountancy field in Latvia

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the structure of the accounting field in a post-Soviet context – Latvia. This study also aims to generate insights into the extent to which professionalization processes are shaped by national particularities and to demonstrate how self-styled professional fields change over time.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from the relational sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and drawing on 83 interviews, the paper highlights the forms of capital (cultural and social primarily) that help define what constitutes appropriate conduct for successful career progression in the accounting field.FindingsThe values ascribed to forms of capital that structure the Latvian accounting field fluctuate across time and space. This suggests that the structure of professional fields – as understood by the structuring properties of different forms of capital – is variable and fluid. Additionally, fields themselves can become more or less desirable over time to those who possess certain forms of capital.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the results may be specific to one national accounting field, the idiosyncrasies constitute the contribution of the paper, showing that the form and structure of accounting fields vary in accordance with national particularities. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of fit between habitus and field and of adjustment to the surrounding rules of the game in professional contexts.Originality/valueThe findings are important for understanding the form that an accounting field can take in an emerging economy that has fully embraced neoliberalism while maintaining strong residues of the Soviet system. The findings are also relevant for understanding the dynamics of change more broadly in self-styled professional fields.

Decision entity-ness: taking agency seriously in organizational decision-making studies

Objective of the study: In this essay, we problematize the onto-epistemological assumptions of organizational decision-making theories, focusing on the concepts of action and decision.Approach: Based on the epistemological perspective of transaction, we propose an understanding of decision as a relational element of action and in action, constructing an explanation supported on the relational ontological understanding of reality.Originality/relevance: We introduce the concept of decision entity-ness, based on relational sociology from the perspective of transaction and the idea of relational agency.Main results: The concept of decision entity-ness allowed us to theoretically combine the processual and performative dimensions of organizational decision-making.Theoretical contribution: As a contribution, we developed an original theoretical-explanatory framework that emphasizes decision, understanding it as an element that distinguishes organizations from other social systems.

Networks from culture: Mechanisms of tie-formation follow institutionalized rules in social fields

Tie-formation mechanisms like homophily, reciprocity, transitivity, and preferential attachment operate to varying degrees across contexts. Romantic ties tend to be homophilous by age, education, and ethnicity, and to remain dyadic. Scientific citations, in contrast, fall into highly unequal preferential attachment patterns. Triangulation is nearly absent in advice and patronage networks but features prominently in friendship ties. Building on relational sociology and field theory, we argue that such variation in patterns of connectivity derives from the meaning attached to relationships, which varies by context. Tie-formation logics are institutionalized rules-of-the-game and susceptible to change over time. Accordingly, the mechanisms of tie-formation behind empirical network patterns have to be connected to the cultural rules in particular fields.

(Shared) ethnicity in ethnographic research on clandestine and informal practices in the migrant and ethnic minority economy

This article addresses the methodological and ethical challenges of ethnographic research on sensitive topics such as clandestine practices in the migrant and ethnic minority economy. Drawing on related criminological and sociology of deviance literature I draw on my experiences of insider-ethnographic research in the Chinese migrant and ethnic minority economy in the Netherlands and Romania to demonstrate how stigmas related to race/ethnicity and clandestine practices can strongly shape access, rapport and researcher’s positionality in the field. Research participants’ concerns about these stigmas also revealed ethical questions on how to report on clandestine and informal practices without contributing to further stigmatisation and racialisation. At the same time, my experiences show that whether clandestine practices and race/ethnicity are considered sensitive topics is an emergent issue. In the Netherlands, due to active enforcement of clandestine practices in the migrant and ethnic minority economy, these practices were a sensitive topic of inquiry. In Romania, by contrast, clandestine practices were not treated as sensitive subject matter as these were normalised by research participants and broader Romanian society, due to a lack of active enforcement and criminalisation.

Relational Sociology and Comparative Law

Abstract Relational sociology, or the idea that relationships are the starting point for empirical research, offers comparative law distinctive analytical frameworks, heuristics, and methods. This Article proposes that these could advance traditional goals of comparative law by reconceiving fundamental categories of law, state, and society in relational terms while broadening the scope of useful comparison, and adopting a processual view of legal communities, legal knowledge, and culture rooted in practical action. It also highlights how comparative law offers sociology opportunities for deeper engagement with law, culture, transnationalism, and the dynamics of different normative orders. A relational analysis of disciplinary knowledge production suggests that deeper cross-disciplinary engagement has been limited less by shared interests than by the structures of academic knowledge production.

ФРАНЦУЗСКИЙ ИССЛЕДОВАТЕ ЛЬ ФРЕДЕРИК ЛЕПЛЕ КАК ОСНОВОПОЛОЖНИК ЭТНОСОЦИОЛОГИИ БАШКИР

The subject of the article is the analysis of the state of the Bashkir patriarchal family as a representative part of Bashkir society in the middle of the 19th century, undertaken by the French sociologist Frédéric Le Play (1806–1882). The object of the research is his monographic study on this topic. The aim of the article is to determine the methods, which Le Play applied for studying the everyday life, economy and material culture of the Bashkirs, to analyze the facts, which he revealed and the conclusions he drew. The tasks proceeding from this goal are based on studying the features of the author's research methodology, empirical material, identifying original conclusions regarding the life support system of a large Bashkir family in the 19th century as a structural element of Bashkir society. The article shows the necessity of using methods of qualitative sociological analysis, applied by the author, in the domestic science. For the first time, a critical analysis of a previously unknown in the Russian historiography is given, its advantages and disadvantages are appreciated, as well as the possibilities of its use in the sociology of race and ethnic relations and anthropology of the Bashkirs.

The doxa of accountability knowledge: A socioanalysis of accountability research in accounting

AbstractThis paper offers a systematic reflection on accountability research in accounting literature. It shows the dynamic relationships and networks between the construction of accountability research, academics, and accounting journals. The research involves a systematic review of accountability literature in selected accounting journals, using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Drawing on Bourdieu's relational sociology for its theoretical and methodological frameworks, the paper constructs a socioanalysis of academic and intellectual capital by categorizing various positions and reputations in relation to accountability scholarship in the field of accounting. It finds that a subtle process of position taking works in both symbolic and material ways through citing and being cited by key authors in this cultural field. The paper develops a general but sociopolitical theoretical approach to the field study of accountability in accounting. The doxa of accountability reflects the cultural capital and the way in which doxa of the accounting field is recognized and valued. The paper argues that the process of cultural production is a dialectic sociopolitical process, which influences authors’ reflections and choices and at the same time is influenced by the network of authors and journals.

Towards Relational Spatiality: Space, Relation and Simmel’s Modernity

By reconsidering Simmel’s concept of space, this article introduces space into the epistemological field of relational sociology to construct a relational spatiality based on relational sociology, demonstrating the continuity between spatial and relational approaches in the study of modernity. It first explains Simmel’s relational epistemology and the metropolis, and then constructs the relational spatiality vis-a-vis the two main viewpoints of contemporary relational sociology. Space is relational in nature because it is defined by iterative interactions between actors, which go beyond visible geographical cognition to sociologically express the living process people experience in fragmentary forms of social space. Furthermore, this relational spatiality, combined with Michel Foucault’s discourse, reveals the process attribute of space from the perspective of relational sociology, showing the possibility of a spatial epistemology based on relational sociology.

Relational Sociology on a Global Scale: Field-Theoretical Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Comparison and the Re-Figuration of Space(s)

Der Vergleich, obwohl eines der grundlegendsten Verfahren der Sozialwissenschaften, ist alles andere als eine unumstrittene Methode. Tatsachlich existiert nach wie vor ein enorm heterogenes Feld vergleichender Ansatze, die jeweils auf unterschiedliche intellektuelle Traditionen, verschiedenartige Verstandnisse des Vergleichens, spezifische Probleme und Forschungsstrategien bezogen sind. Verschiedene, auf ihre jeweilige Weise hochentwickelte komparative Forschungsrichtungen stehen so weitgehend unverbunden nebeneinander, wodurch letztlich analytische Potenziale verschenkt werden: landervergleichende (haufig mit quantitativen Verfahren und erklarenden Zielsetzungen verknupfte) Studien einerseits und kulturvergleichende (typischerweise mit qualitativen Verfahren und verstehend-hermeneutischen Anliegen verbundene) Ansatze andererseits. Die modernen Sozialwissenschaften sehen sich indes mit einer zunehmend komplexen globalen Wirklichkeit konfrontiert, die sich weniger als je zuvor adaquat auf der Grundlage einseitiger Referenzsysteme erfassen lasst. Vor diesem Hintergrund entwickeln wir in diesem Beitrag die Sozialraum- und Feldtheorie Pierre BOURDIEUs durch eine konsequent relationale Lesart in eine Richtung weiter, die es erlaubt, unterschiedliche Konzeptionen und Techniken des sozialwissenschaftlichen Vergleichs im Rahmen eines einheitlichen Bezugsrahmens zur Geltung zu bringen. Der Ruckgriff auf diesen allgemeinen Bezugsrahmen eroffnet die Moglichkeit, nationale, internationale sowie transnationale Vergleiche anzustellen, ohne dabei die jeweiligen Referenzsysteme und die damit korrespondierenden Vergleichsentitaten essenzialisieren oder hypostasieren zu mussen.

Playing marbles, playing music

Playing marbles, playing music

Ambivalent perceptions of the Other: Towards a dual-process sociology of intercultural relations

Applying theories from sociology and social psychology concerned with the intersection of culture and cognition to in-depth interviews, this paper empirically explores the Norwegian majority population’s perceptions of cultural diversities using a dual-process (DP) methodological and analytic approach. Globalization has produced a mix of new anxieties, opportunities, and curiosities, leaving most people juggling conflicting objectives of self-preservation and self-realization, and making cognitive self-regulation and behavioural flexibility valorized skills of contemporary life. Instead of identifying xenophobic and cosmopolitan attitudes at opposite ends of a spectrum, the current paper argues in line with current research and theory in studies of DP cognition that they commonly co-exist, albeit in separate automatic and discursive cognitive systems, within the same individual. As a result, people’s perceptions of cultural and ethnic diversities tend to be ambivalent and contextually malleable – for example, in cases where their deep dispositions appear incompatible with their own self-concept or dominant cultural expectations. Most centrally, the current research proposes concrete strategies to elicit responses from both cognitive systems in the context of interpretive interviews. Secondly, the paper proposes clues that help to identify from which cognitive system interviewees’ conflicting cosmopolitan and xenophobic attitudes originate, thereby enabling researchers to further delineate the specific characteristics of these attitudes, including the mode of cultural learning through which they form, their flexibility or robustness to change, their role in behaviour motivation, and the extent to which they are conscious and controllable.

Engage the vulnerable in the institutional change: a novel perspective from missionaries in Africa

Research on tackling social exclusion has highlighted the role of institutional intermediaries as prominent actors able to rebalance power of resource and market access. However, scholars have taken-for-granted that excluded people accept interventions aimed to tackle their societal exclusion. Our study addresses this limitation by examining the under-theorized religious intermediaries to model a process through which engaging resigned marginalized people in a platform of inclusive relationships. Our analysis was informed by the intersection between neo-institutionalism and relational sociology. By doing so, we offer novel and rare empirical substantiation and theoretical elaboration on the micro-foundations and processes of institutionalism.

Mapping the Evolution of the Business and Society field and Moving the Research Agenda Forward

In this paper, we map the business and society field from a relational approach that allow us to understand the direction, the pace and velocity at which the field has been evolving and to identify the three main trends; (1) the number of components included in the business and society approach, (2) the emergence effect (3) the level of analysis that explains all three, moving from functionally towards supra-functionally oriented approaches in the field of business and society. Based on these trends and following a problematization approach, we propose a new approach, the complete supra-functional approach (SCA) based on relational sociology (Donati and Archer, 2015) which challenges the main positivist and modernist assumptions in the field ( the separation fallacy and the functionalism-positivistic concept of paradigm) following the problematization approach. We applied the SCA in the Covid-19 panorama as an example of how it works and what this entails in practice.

A sociological imagination for a clumsy world: François Dépelteau’s relational sociology

In this paper I introduce the special section on the work of the late Francois Dépelteau (1963-2018), by analyzing an essential tension within the relational sociology which I call the division between “clumsy” and “elegant” relationalism. “Clumsy” relationalism as exemplified most uncompromisingly by Francois is in a way an extreme perspective on social research, prescribing a certain “obsession” with change and unfolding of reality, rather than its stability or firm foundation. As Francois has put it in one of his last published works: “Everything is changing all the time, including ourselves. This is hard to accept since we are looking for some sort of stability often to reassure ourselves.” I ask why should we accept this perspective rather than continue with reassuring ourselves. I also point out that both “elegant” and “clumsy” relationalisms are useful for social research, but that the latter is increasingly pertinent for contemporary world inhabited by “wicked” social problems that have no elegant solutions or even definitions. I also analyse in more detail Francois’s critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology that is the most eminent example of “elegant” relationalism, and the furthering of “clumsy” relational sociology in the contributions to the special section by Nick Crossley and Jean-Sebastien Guy.