Abstract
Together with concepts such as pillarization and consociational democracy, the notion of social transaction has been forged to account for national contexts where different subcultures coexist and yet simultaneously maintain their own autonomy. But while pillarization became a widely agreed-upon diagnosis of Belgian society, limited in its descriptive reach to this and a few similar contexts, social transaction, by contrast, has become part and object of a scientific practice stretching out from France as far as Canada. The paper seeks to better understand the notion’s emergence in Belgium and its relevance beyond this original context. We first examine what the concept reveals of its historical and intellectual context, and vice versa. Next, we show that its engagement with different and opposing sociological strands grants social transaction a typically ambivalent character that mirrors the experiences of its authors and their position within francophone sociology. The notion does not make unambiguous theoretical choices, but rather gives and takes between production (Touraine) and reproduction (Bourdieu), exchange (Mauss) and negotiation (Crozier). If despite its rootedness, the notion of social transaction has nevertheless gained relevance beyond Belgium, so we suggest, a plausible explanation might be found in its claim that the opacity of the social world stands as one of its most universal and productive traits.
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Notes
Only later would the student protests emancipate themselves from this so-called Flemish cause and individuate into an autonomous movement in which the anti-authoritarianism against the French-speaking establishment turned into a broader concern for the democratization of higher education (cf. Vos 2006).
To what extent these demands genuinely expressed the students’ wishes – or instead merely voiced the concerns of others – is even half a century later still a topic for debate. There are certainly elements indicating that the students’ demands at least coincided with the interests of other parties. Apart from the already mentioned close link with the Flemish movement, the protesting students enjoyed the vocal support of their Dutch-speaking professors, for example, who joined them and even incited them to skip school, as Jef Verhoeven (1982) mentions.
The tragicomic split of the library collection, amounting to over a million volumes, took almost an entire decade. In the absence of any agreement on substantive criteria, the library’s possessions were halved according to their shelf mark, attributing odd and even numbers to each new library respectively. This arbitrary principle, as related by Chris Coppens et al. (2005), was considered the fairest and, contrary to popular myth, avoided multi-volume publications being up divided between the two libraries.
One of the concept’s clearest precursors is to be found in Rémy and Voyé’s (Voyé and Rémy 1974) self-devised method of participative scenario building, conceived in situ by trial and error. The scenarios served both analytical and prescriptive purposes, as they were meant to formulate to architects and the political establishment to what extent the city’s facilities matched, or should match, the needs and wants of the population. In a wording that still bears the echoes of previous events, the scenarios’ central ambition was to imagine how “to translate into space the diversity of aspirations of different socio-cultural groups,” whilst allowing everybody to make explicit their specific needs.
Significantly, Rémy tacitly borrows this very expression from Bourdieu (1974). But where Bourdieu used it to reflect on the determining causes of what statistics revealed as probable, indicating for example the self-fulfilling prophecies that feed the reproduction of social inequality, Rémy explicitly inverts its meaning to underline the contingency of everyday life, stressing how the social world only obtains coherence as it unfolds.
Max Weber (1979, p. 72), too, of course claims: “Every case of a rationally oriented exchange is the resolution of a previously open or latent conflict of interests by means of a compromise.”
Besides the notion of social transaction, there is a multitude of related concepts to be found in scientific disciplines other than sociology, such as linguistics, legal studies, psychology and of course economics. However, since the writings of Rémy and Voyé bear little (explicit) witness to such ‘extra-disciplinary’ elaborations, we have deliberately limited our discussion to how social transaction participates in the sociological debate.
Besides the above cited monographs edited by Maurice Blanc (Blanc et al. 1994), devoted to the work of Rémy and Voyé, there are the recently published volumes presenting third-generation research, now devoted to Blanc himself (Causer and Hamman 2011; Hamman and Causer 2011). During the last decade, special issues have appeared almost yearly in the Belgian journal Pensée plurielle, while the journal of the international association of francophone sociology, SociologieS, devoted a special issue to the notion in 2016.
“The clearest thing is the importance of ambiguity,” writes Blanc, together with David M. Smith and Blanc (1997).
In a similar vein, Jean-Claude Passeron (1991) speaks of sociological concepts as semi-proper nouns, which unlike more rigid designators require a certain elasticity in order to work.
Staf Hellemans’ work may therefore be called rather exceptional, in the sense that he was the only one attempting to strip the notion of its provincial character and transform pillarization into a general theory, where both the (sub)differentiation into societal blocs and the ensuing de-pillarization are considered to result from the interaction between social movements and modernity. Quite significantly, Hellemans too concludes with the ambiguity of its outcome. Contemporary society, Hellemans (1990) writes, “is more than ever covered by a veil of ‘unsurveyability’.” For an account of the challenges he faced in translating the pillarization concept to other geographical contexts, we refer to his contribution in this special issue.
“. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers’ Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro N, Cap. XLV, Urida, 1658″ (Borges 1998, p. 325)
A similarly contrarious argumentation that sees ambiguity not as a nefarious problem for social life to solve but as its outcome, can be found in Merton and Barber’s (1963) seminal text on role ambivalence, where they argue how the highly ordered relationship between professionals and clients is itself a structural source of ambivalence, affecting the role behavior of both.
We borrow this expression from Nils Brunsson (1989), well aware that in his writings it carries a more specific meaning and not the pejorative undertone of what is here alluded to.
A related position, although from a very different angle, has been theorized in unequivocal terms by De Munck and Verhoeven (1997), who observed how procedures are negotiated in order to overcome situations where normative certainty lacks or cannot be reached.
Here Niklas Luhmann’s (1972) early writings on the fictitious character of consensus were a clear (and acknowledged) inspiration.
In the sense that Simmel (2009a, p. 602) attributes to strangers as ‘objective persons’ – not as figures of “mere aloofness or disengagement,” but of “indifference and engagement.” He considers them a constitutive part of the social context wherein they participate, albeit with an increased degree of freedom and without any strong commitments.
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Jean Rémy, one of the key figures whose work we discuss in this paper, passed away on October 6, 2019. He was preceded by co-author Émile Servais, who died a year earlier. This article was written between the two events, but admittedly does not feature the hagiography commonly found in obituaries. It does, however, try to express a critical appraisal of a bold and creative style of thinking that even today remains unparalleled in Belgian sociology.
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Vanden Broeck, P., Mangez, E. Ambiguous Coexistence and Social Transaction: on a Sociology of Opacity and Institutionalized Discretion. Am Soc 51, 172–187 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09444-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09444-2