Relational Agency

Abstract

This chapter puts the concept of agency into a relational context, avoiding the traditional ‘structure/agency’ debate in sociology. Instead of the concept of ‘social structure’, society is understood as the sum of the manifold social relations composed of temporal-relational contexts. Using two network analyses of different historical contexts, I argue that social change occurs as manifold social relations are reordered and reimagined. In this process, agency has to be reconceptualized as the power of interactants and interdependents to work from within the temporal-relational context to expand its horizon of possibilities and to create new goals of interaction. Because we are interactants and interdependents rather than lone, autonomous agents, our capacity to act is contained within power relations, and is dependent on our co-capacity to improvise on habitual actions and to redeploy resources in response to practical dilemmas. In this we also exploit the polyphony of meanings and values that define our problematic situations in order to reconstruct social relations and organizations. In this view, reflexivity is not the kernel of agency, but instead reflexive agency is a moment within social action more generally, which may have non-conscious origins, and is always set within temporal-relational contexts of interaction and interdependence.