Social relation
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A Social relation is a concept in social science referring most generally to a relationship between two or more people, but that relationship can exist without those people actively and deliberately relating, communicating or associating with each other.
Therefore, the concept of a social relation can in fact refer to a multitude of different kinds of social interactions, perhaps regulated by social norms, between people who have a social position and perform a social role. In the hierarchy of sociological concepts, a social relation refers to something more than behavior, action, social behavior, social action, social contact and social interaction.
Social relations form the basis of social organization, social structure, social movement and social system. Individuals are born into a pre-existing pattern or network of social relations, define their identity through social relations, and ultimately cannot survive or stay healthy in an isolated way without social relations. On the other hand, if they experience intense pressure from other people, this can cause individuals to withdraw or try to escape from social relations.
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[edit] Examples
In this sense, a social relation is therefore not necessarily identical with a unique interpersonal relation or a unique individual relation of some type, although all these kinds of relations presuppose each other; a social relation refers precisely to a condition which groups of people have in common or share.
For example, the simple statement "Jack and Jill love each other" might refer to a unique interaction between two people, the meaning of which might be difficult to define for an outsider. Yet, Jack and Jill may also be socially related in many different ways, insofar as they both are, as a matter of fact, members of the same or different social groups, and thus their identity is shaped in good part by the fact that they belong to those groups. If we wanted to understand and explain their behaviour, we would need to refer to those social relations. We might establish the milieu they grew up in, their ancestors, the jobs they do, where they lived, who their friends are, and so on, all of which helps explain why they necessarily interact in the way that they do, and not in some other way, and how they are connected to other people.
At a higher level of abstraction, we might consider two groups which are socially related, for example, although they live in different places, they depend on each other in trading goods and services.
At an even higher level of abstraction, we might consider the relationship between an individual and the whole of the world population, or the relationship of the world population to itself.
Some might indeed argue that a social relation exists between mortals and a god (or gods), though others would regard this more as an imaginary relation. In flights of fancy, we could extend the analysis to the relation of all sentient organisms in the universe.
[edit] Theorists
However, the difficulties only start here, because now it needs to be established how exactly these social relations exist, how we know they exist, what kinds of social relations there are, and how we can find out about them, verify them or identify them. About these questions researchers often disagree and debate, proposing different kinds of methodology to obtain knowledge of social relations.
At one end of the spectrum, Karl Marx approvingly quotes Giambattista Vico's argument that humans can understand their society in its totality because "they made it themselves"; the limits to what humans can know are mainly practical in nature. At the other end of the spectrum, Karl Popper rejects the possibility of objective knowledge about society as a whole, suggesting that methodological holism must lead to totalitarianism; progressive social change can only be achieved through the small steps of piecemeal social engineering.
[edit] Understanding social relations
There are at least three problems in understanding social relations.
- many social relations are not directly observable by an individual, and can only be inferred from the observable effects they have with the aid of abstractions. We know from experience that people in a community are socially related but we cannot observe all the ways in which they are socially related. This raises the question of how we know they exist, how we can prove that particular social connections exist, and how exactly they exist (in what form).
- reflexivity: in the case of social science, the scientist is in a very obvious way himself or herself part of the social world being studied (this occurs also in natural sciences; not just in the sense that a biologist is also a biological being, but also even in theoretical physics - cf. the reflections of David Bohm). This raises the question of the extent to which the scientist can obtain objective knowledge about society beyond his subjective interpretation of it.
- animal and insect populations for example also display a kind of "social" behaviour, so that social relations are not necessarily uniquely human relations (cf. the insights of sociobiology), and social relations might exist between humans and animals (though some dispute this; they argue that associative relations are confused here with true social relations; a human being could associate with all sorts of things or organisms, without a social relation being involved).
[edit] Types of social relations
In broaeness (dissociated, focusing inward on the inner world, or expressing an inner state outwards) (studied e.g. in phenomenology and general psychology).
- intersubjective awareness (an awareness which occurs in association with other people and is internal to that association) (studied e.g. in social psychology and sociology).
- objective awareness (dissociated, focusing outward to a world that exists mind-independently, as is developed e.g. in science to a high level).
- reality-transforming awareness (transitions in practical action reframing the boundaries of different forms of awareness and changing consciousness, or connecting different forms of awareness - occurring in work, play, love, activism, politics etc.
- transcendent awareness (going beyond personal knowledge or experience - some would include intuition and spirituality under this heading; it is the subject of much writing in religion and New Age thought).
Corresponding to these levels of human awareness, we could also define different kinds of social relations; i.e., the different ways in which humans might experience the connections among their own kind:
- subconscious social relations (for example at the level of the collective unconscious or between parents and children,
- social relations which exist only in subjective awareness or subjective perceptions (a person might act as though a social relation exists),
- intersubjective social relations involving shared meanings conveyed through communication,
- objective social relations which exist whether someone is aware of them or not (they might nevertheless be communicated insofar as we communicate with everything we are and do);
- social relations in the process of being transformed from one kind into another, or being interrelated with each other;
- spiritual or intuitive social relations of some kind.
As illustration, we can apply the foregoing to the notion of a group.
- A person might almost out of instinct identify with a group or relate to it;
- s/he might imagine being a member of a group, regardless of whether this is really the case;
- a group might exist only in the form of intersubjective relations among its members;
- a group might exist as an objective description, or as an objective reality, even regardless of whether one was aware of belonging to it;
- a group might be forming or dissolving, or both at once, and it might be changing its boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, perhaps overlapping with other groups;
- a group might also exist at the level of a common spiritual affinity or identification (Cf. the notion of a noosphere).
However the group may exist, or be perceived to exist at some level - with the obvious consequences that has for the kinds of social relations involved - it is clear that understanding different kinds of group relations require different methods of inquiry and verification.
Precisely because social relations may be experienced at different levels of awareness, they are not necessarily transparent at all. Indeed, Karl Marx wrote ironically in this respect that "science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided."
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Dick Houtman, Class and Politics in Contemporary Social Science: 'Marxism Lite' and Its Blind Spot for Culture [1]
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
- Karl Marx, The German Ideology
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
- Frank Furedi, Where have all the intellectuals gone?
- Piotr Sztompka, Socjologia
