Symposion on Relational Sociology

Berliner Dom (former East)

Last week I was lucky to attend the symposion on relational sociology at Berlin’s Humboldt University. I had encountered network theory and empirical network analysis earlier, e.g. in Manuel Castells‘ Network society, Mark Granovetter’s famous essay on the strengths of weak ties and Ronald Burt’s brokerage and closure, and I see empirical network approaches as an increasingly important paradigm in German sociology. But this symposion was the first time I encountered Relational Sociology around Harrison White’s approach. So I took the opportunity to watch the symposion. The program was interesting since one could watch new transatlantic relations being established to other theory traditions by relating networks to functional sytems, to boundaries, to culture, to structure, to knowledge organization online with the example of Wikipedia, to aesthetic markets, to stories, to quality conventions, to social inequality and to the emergence of „Big structures“ from basic relationships such as friendships and alliances. Through the presentations, White’s approach was confronted with various cases: social movement publics, disciplines in science, knowledge organizations and the emergence of order in Wikipedia, empirical aesthetic markets, network relations in news stories in the German Print media, to social inequality as a consequence of the interplay of network structure and cultural patterns, and to the emergence of „Big Structures“ such as power. The conceptual contributions and empirical cases presented were chosen, examined and presented rather to affirm than to challenge Harrison White’s apporach. The symposion might have profited from contributions challenging the paradigm: Relational sociology as a new transatlantic school of thought was coming together – particularly from White’s contribution in network theory and German systems theory – yet leaving open space for challenges in theory and empirical studies within the network and other schools of thought at later occasions.

Werbung

One for the socioblogophere

So, Sozlog now received a bunch of old and new links. Readers from my original sozlog are familiar with my hobby to try discover weblogs and websites on sociology and collect them in my sozwiki – hoping for an emerging global socioblogosphere with increasing density 🙂 As you can see, I shuffled around the links a bit. I try to include some of the most interesting German sociobloggers and some new sites. Most sociology blogs I managed to discover up to now are located in US, Great Britain and Germany, only very few in other contries. My hunch is this due to the largest size and higest density of the Socioblogosphere in the US, Great Britain and the widespread use of the English Language. Kieran Healy was the first blogging sociologist to show up in 2006, and he draw my attention to orgtheory. Recent discoveries include A sociologist’s commonplace book by Dan Hirschman and Understanding Society and his parallel blog Changing Society by Daniel Little. As my search continues, I hope to discover more weblogs, wikis, sites from research institutions and professional associations around the globe. Considered that Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Arabic are represented among the top languages on the internet, I hope to find more sociology sites in these languages. To my experience, blogging in English in addition to German has been a tremendous advantage in terms of visibility and might help to find more weblogs and sites on an international level. In case you can recommend sociology sites I missed, pleas drop me a line or add the weblogs and websites to the link collection in sozwiki.