Social Networks and Relational Sociology
9.2 Holism and Individualism
During the 1940s and 1950s functionalism, a variety of holism, was the dominant paradigm within sociology and Talcott Parsons ( 1951 ) was its key point of reference. Notwithstanding Parsons’ own reticence regarding the problematic teleological form of ‘functional explanations’
(advocated, for example, by Radcliffe-Brown 1952 ), and that of Merton ( 1957 ), whom he cites approvingly, ‘social facts’ were explained by ref-
erence to the functions which they serve within social systems. The ‘parts’ of the system were explained by reference to the whole and more specifi cally its ‘functional pre-requisites’. Having argued for the importance of the actor in his ear- lier works (Parsons 1937 ), moreover, Parsons ( 1951 ) shifted them out of focus in his later, more holistic works. Actors were assumed but only as incumbents of roles and it was the roles, along with norms and other institutionalized ‘social facts’ that comprised the ‘parts’ of the systems he sought to analyze.
During the 1960s functionalism’s dominance began to wane. It was subject to extensive chal- lenges. In some cases, however, most notably cer- tain varieties of Neo-Marxism which themselves achieved a degree of dominance within the disci- pline, the primacy of the whole and this same way of theorizing it were retained. Marxists adopted their own version of functional explanation, explaining social institutions by showing that and how they serve capitalism and referring morphol- ogy and changes in society’s ‘superstructure’ to the needs of its ‘economic base’. Furthermore, the Marxist approach to history was, as Karl Popper ( 2002 ) observed, ‘historicist’; referencing ‘laws’
and a telos to which the process of social life would inevitably succumb (see also Merleau- Ponty’s ( 1973 ) critique). In the work of Althusser ( 1969 ) in particular, moreover, the apparent break marking Marx’s later work, where (according to Althusser) all reference to ‘man’ was removed in favor of such structural concepts as ‘mode of pro- duction’ and ‘social formation’, was celebrated.
Althusserian Marxism, like Parsonian functional- ism, removed human actors from the picture, identifying institutions as the relevant parts of the capitalist system for analysis and critique (although Althusser ( 1971 ) later reintroduced ‘the subject’ in his theory of ideology).
I am simplifying but this way of thinking about ‘wholes’ persists within sociology and it is deeply problematic. The concept of ‘functions’ is legitimate and often useful but the problems of functional explanation are well-documented (Hollis 1994 ), even, in some cases, by writers from within the functionalist camp (esp. Merton 1957 ). To explain a social fact, such as a role,
norm or convention by reference to the function which it serves within a system, especially when any reference to the actor who executes it is removed, is to explain it by reference to its effect.
The causal arrow runs backwards, effect becom- ing cause, without any explanation being offered as to how such a counter-intuitive chain of events is possible. And a similar problem is evident in relation to historicism; the end of history, its telos, is identifi ed as the cause of those actions which bring it about –again without any explana- tion of how such ‘backwards causation’ is possible.
The whole is hypostatized and reifi ed in this form of holism. It is not only more than the sum of its parts but more than the sum of their rela- tions too; a metaphysical essence separate from and determining both parts and their relations.
Society is not constituted through the interaction and ties of its members but is rather something
‘above’ or ‘behind’ such praxes, steering them.
The sociological holist, or at least this type of holist, commits what Gilbert Ryle ( 1949 ) calls a
‘category error’, imagining a separate substance of ‘society’ behind all manifestations of it, which explains those manifestations. Society is con- ceived as a thing, a substance. Relational sociol- ogy offers an alternative to this. Before I outline the relational approach, however, I want to briefl y consider the other side of this coin.
A number of Parsons’ critics called for ‘men’
(sic) to be brought back into sociological theory, arguing that ‘systems’ and the ‘social facts’ which form their parts do not do anything and possess no causal power; that they are mere patterns of human activity, done by social actors (Homans 1973 ; Wrong 1961 ). Actors ‘do’ the social world and everything in it from this perspective. They, not systems or social facts, have causal powers and should be the focus of our analysis.
In some versions of this argument ‘actor’
means ‘human actor’. Other versions, however, admit of ‘corporate actors’, such as trade unions, political parties, economic fi rms and national governments (Coleman 1990 ; Axelrod 1997 ).
Hindess ( 1988 ) offers a good argument in favor of the idea of corporate actors, suggesting that a collective of human actors form a corporate actor
where they have a means of making decisions which are irreducible to those of their members, and of acting upon those decisions. An economic fi rm, for example, typically has a means of mak- ing decisions (e.g. a ballot of shareholders), which are then binding upon its members, who are both empowered and compelled to execute this decision. The decisions of such corporate actors can be shown to be irreducible to those of their human participants, Hindess argues, because different procedures of collective decision mak- ing (e.g. different voting systems) give different outputs for the same individual inputs. In addi- tion, the actions of a corporate actor are often irreducible to those of the human actors who staff it in virtue of its legal status, power and resources.
Only a national government can declare war or a state of emergency, for example, and only a trade union can call a strike. The human individuals who act on the corporate actor’s behalf in such cases act in the name of the corporate actor, drawing upon its (not their individual) resources and its (not their individual) legal status.
A focus upon actors and their causal powers is important and affords a robust response and rebuttal to those forms of holism which invoke
‘society’ or ‘the system’ as a mysterious ordering principle of social life. However, this position is often couched in terms of individualism, and this is problematic.
In some cases individualism is ontological.
The theorist claims that social facts and practices are merely shorthand ways of referring to the actions of individuals. For the ontological indi- vidualist ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals …’, 1 to cite ex-British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Or rather society is a mere aggregate of individuals. Many sociological advocates claim to be methodological rather than ontological individualists, however. What this means is not always clear but I will suggest two variants.
1 Actually she said ‘… individuals and families …’ but her politics was a clear manifestation of this individualism.
The quote is from an interview in Women ’ s Own magazine 31/10/87.
In some cases it means that the sociologist acknowledges the existence of ‘emergent proper- ties’ in social life; that is to say, they accept the existence of ‘social facts’ which can only exist in the context of collective life and which are irre- ducible to individuals or aggregates of individu- als; but they maintain that such properties must be oriented to by individuals to enjoy any effect and that sociology should therefore remain focused upon individual actors. Max Weber ( 1978 ) falls into this camp. He recognizes that the social world comprises various emergent phe- nomena as well as social actors and that social actors orient to such phenomena in their deci- sions and actions. However, such phenomena only affect social life in virtue of the choices and actions that individuals adopt towards them, from his perspective, and he therefore focuses upon those choices and actions.
The second approach, characterized by James Coleman ( 1990 ), amongst others (e.g. Laver 1997 ), adopts much the same stance but pushes the position further by seeking individual level explanations for emergent phenomena. Coleman accepts that human behavior is affected by norms, for example, but argues that sociology must explain the origin and maintenance of norms; a task which, he insists, entails a focus upon indi- vidual actors and their motivations. Individuals pre-exist the social world, from this point of view, and to explain the social world, which is the job of the sociologist, we must therefore begin with individuals (see also Laver 1997 ).
The individualist position is fl awed on a num- ber of grounds. Firstly, its tendency to abstract individuals from society, in some cases invoking a pre-social ‘state of nature’, in order to explain society is artifi cial and fl ies in the face of much evidence. In phylogenetic terms we know that our primate ancestors lived in groups and that group living was amongst the selection pressures which shaped our evolution into human beings.
We were social, living with and in-relation-to others, before we were human and our biological evolution, qua humans, was shaped by this. No less importantly, however, ontogenetically our biology is only a starting point as far as ‘the social actor’ assumed in much sociological the-
ory, including individualistic theories, is con- cerned. The human actor is an outcome of sexual relations; takes shape, biologically, within the womb of their mother; and then emerges into the world helpless and dependent upon others for many years. At birth they possess very few of the properties of ‘the social actor’ and they only acquire these properties as a consequence of interaction with others. Through social interac- tion the human organism acquires language and thereby a capacity for refl ective thought; a sense of self/other and identity; tastes and preferences;
a moral sense; and many of the ‘body techniques’
necessary for getting by, to name only the most obvious. It becomes a social actor and the process of becoming is unending. Actors are continually reshaped by the interactions and relations in which they participate. They are always active in such interactions and relations, from the very beginning, never mere passive recipients of a cul- ture thrust upon them, but who and what they are is shaped and reshaped in interaction in ways often unintended by them. There is no social actor before or outside of the social world. The two emerge together.
This process of becoming is also a process of individuation in which the actor takes on a dis- tinct identity and becomes aware of herself as a distinct and unique being. Consciousness of self arises against a backdrop of consciousness of
‘not self’. And as Mead ( 1967 ) and Merleau- Ponty ( 1962 ), both important philosophers for relational sociology, argue, consciousness of self presupposes consciousness of the consciousness of the other. I become conscious of myself by becoming conscious of the other’s consciousness of me. Furthermore, consciousness, in these phil- osophical traditions (which inform relational sociology), is conceived not as an ‘inner realm’, separate from the world, but rather as a tie con- necting the individual to the world. To be con- scious of something or someone is to connect with them.
The social actor, on this account, is an emer- gent property of social interaction and relations.
We become who and what we are by way of our involvement in social worlds; that is, in networks, ties and interactions with others. And our capacity
to engage in such interactions is rooted in our earlier history of interaction and its formative effects.
A further, no less serious problem with indi- vidualism is that it treats social actions as dis- crete, failing to give proper consideration to interaction and interdependency between actors.
The social world is not an aggregate of individu- als and their actions but rather arises from inter- action, relations and the interdependence of human actions and thoughts.
Interestingly, some ‘methodological individu- alists’ acknowledge this point, incorporating interaction and interdependency in their work by way of game theory (which assumes that actors make decisions on the basis of how they observe and/or anticipate others will act and which, cor- respondingly, models the interdependence of individual decisions and its aggregate effects) and even, in some cases, social network analysis (which, like game theory, focuses upon interde- pendence) (Coleman 1990 ; Hedström 2005 ). In my view such thinkers are individualists in name only and have, in practice, crossed over to a rela- tional perspective – albeit a fairly minimal rela- tionalism which would benefi t from further embellishment. Neither their ontological nor their methodological inventories are reducible to
‘individuals’, since they acknowledge, at both levels, the signifi cance of interaction and, in some cases, ties and networks.
In what follows I elaborate upon the funda- mental concepts of relational sociology: i.e.
interaction, ties and networks. Before I do, how- ever, I will briefl y address a potential obstacle to the acceptance of relational thought in sociology:
namely, a residual empiricism which resists the idea that relational phenomena are real.
Empiricism identifi es the real with the percepti- ble and this generally favors individualism.
Human beings, qua bodies, can be seen, heard, touched etc. and their existence is therefore obvi- ous. Relations, by contrast, cannot be directly perceived and, to the empiricist frame of mind, this renders their existence questionable. On a strictly empirical level the social world is an aggregate of biologically individuated beings and the popularity of individualism in social and
political thought, I suggest, stems from this.
Against such empiricism, however, we should remind ourselves of the role of ‘unobservables’ in other sciences (Keat and Urry 1975 ). Neither gravity nor electricity can be directly perceived, for example. We only perceive them indirectly, by way of their effects (e.g. falling bodies or illu- minated light bulbs). However, nobody would dispute their existence or importance. If we can demonstrate the effect of relational phenomena, it follows, then it is legitimate to infer their exis- tence, whether or not we can directly observe them. This is the task of relational sociology – to which I now turn.
9.3 Networks, Interactions