Introduction

Abstract

Considering that ‘the social’ is the sociological object par excellence, it is peculiar how vague and equivocal the notion has remained within the discipline. Paradoxically, it is as if it was at the same time the most obvious and the most obscure thing, at once present and absent. The social is always presupposed in sociological discourses, but it hardly ever comes under discussion as such by itself. It appears more as a stable explanatory variable than something to be explained. For example, while sociologists are keen to reveal the ‘social construction’ of practically any thing,¹ it is with only few exceptions that they have come to ask how the social itself is constructed, stabilized, and held together. To pick another example, The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, 2006) presents 19 entries that include the epithet ‘social’; ranging all the way from ‘social and system integration’, ‘social change’, and ‘social closure’ to ‘social reproduction’, ‘social structure’, and ‘social system’. Yet what is curiously missing from the book is an entry on the social itself.