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Power and Relational Sociology

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The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology

Abstract

“Relational turn” is a new buzzword in the social sciences. Yet there is a lot less consensus on the very meaning of “relational.” The latter is a family-resemblance concept such as most of the important social science concepts. One possible remedy for alleviating the confusion is using a metalanguage for organizing the different meanings of the word. I take my lead from one such metalanguage, which was coined a couple of generations ago by Dewey and Bentley, picked up by programmatic metatheorists of “relational sociology” in 1990s and 2000s, and carried to the topic of conceptualizing power in the current decade. This is the vocabulary of self-action, inter-action and trans-action . In this chapter I use this conceptual triangle to capture the entire variation of conceptions of power that present themselves as “relational.”

Writing this chapter was supported by the Estonian Research Council with the personal research funding granted to the project PUT1485 A Relational Approach to Governing Wicked Problems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    He has also remained true to this form in later works, when he proclaims: “I continue to suggest that the concept of power should remain attached to the agency that operates within and upon structures” (Hayward and Lukes 2008, p. 11).

  2. 2.

    See Munro (2009) for a more general account on the relationship between actor-network theory and power.

  3. 3.

    Emirbayer (1997, p. 292) includes Bourdieu among the “relationalist” (= trans-actionalist) perspectives on power; but, for Dépelteau (2008, pp. 53–54), Bourdieu’s general perspective leans strongly towards inter-actionalism (co-determinism), and for Crossley (2011, pp. 26–28) it seems to even be somewhere between inter-actionalism and self-actionalism (though he doesn’t use this vocabulary).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia

    Peeter Selg

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  1. Peeter Selg
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  1. Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada

    François Dépelteau

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Selg, P. (2018). Power and Relational Sociology. In: Dépelteau, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_27

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