Advancing Together: Defining 'Relational' Part 1
The term relational is one that means different things to different people. It is ambiguous in an uncanny way, and can easily lead to a 'talking past one another' situation. There are at least three distinct meanings for 'relational;' and wholeheartedly engaging in relational research requires a proper accounting for each of these. With this in mind, we will journey from the most abstract to the most basic definition.
At the highest level of abstraction, 'relational' refers to a way of describing social reality. Mustafa Emirbayer employs the term to distinguish a new sociology focused on "transactions" and social processes from a conventional sociology focused on things, persons, and entities. Fundamentally, relational scholars argue for social analyses that place social interactions, sustained relationships, and social processes at the center, rather than entities such as nation-states, organizations, and social groups that they consider to be relatively static. Ultimately, they see interactions, social networks, and sustained processes as the chief protagonists shaping our social world, rather than individuals and/or power-holding entities.
At a lower level of abstraction, 'relational' refers to a relationship-focused way of analyzing social reality. This not only means social relationships between people, but also relationships between social formations, such as culture and social structure, or between particular forms of social division like class, gender, race, and nation. Patricia Hill Collins, for example, uses the term relationality to provide analytic space for seeing social inequality with greater clarity. Using a framework rooted in Black feminist thought, she asserts that a relational lens allows analysts to see how formations of social division are inherently interconnected and how they co-produce distinct disadvantages for people caught on the wrong side of a demarcation. More generally, the use of the term at this level of abstraction is primarily focused on tying social action to a set of relationships and tracing how actions go on to impact relationships.
The basic definition for relational is: "characterized or constituted by relations," according to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. This logically leads to finding the meaning of relations, which is basically described as the quality of connecting two or more things. The relational lens as a viewpoint focused on connections is quite apt, and has relevance at each level of abstraction. In Part 2, we will explore the implications of committing to a relational lens.
