Power and relational sociology

Peeter Selg

pp. 539-557

in: François Dépelteau (ed), The Palgrave handbook of relational sociology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

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."

Cited authors

Dewey John