Networks

Epistemological and Historical Background

In the history of science, there has been a shift from the analysis of substance and essence toward analysis of relations and connections. More than 60 years ago, in a series of papers on epistemology and logic, two eminent political philosophers/scientists, John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, outlined three historic levels of paradigmatic organization of the social sciences. In order of chronological appearance, these advancements, presented almost as a secular trend, underwent three major transformations in perspective—self-action, interaction, and transaction. The first two of these are labeled substantialist, while the latter could today be recast in terms of relational thinking. The perspective of self-action is described as a prescientific concept regarding humans and things as possessing powers of their own that initiate or cause their actions. It was most characteristic of ancient and medieval philosophy and of the Christian doctrine of the soul. In the second version of substantialism—interaction—the relevant action takes place among the entities themselves. Yet much like billiard balls or the particles in Newtonian mechanics, these entities remain fixed and unchanged throughout such interactions. It is only in the perspective of transactionalism, fundamentally opposed to both variants of substantialism, does scientific inquiry turn to aspects and phases of action, without final attribution to elements or other independent entities and without isolation of presumably detachable relations from such independent elements.

By reinterpreting and contextualizing this early contribution, its classificatory scheme was later refurbished by Mustafa Emirbayer (1997) in a manifesto for a relational sociology. In particular, the author draws attention to the units of analysis inherent in and dominating social science models of more recent derivations. Methodological individualism, norm-based approaches, and variants of structuralism are all assigned to the paradigm of self-action. The first, in its rational-choice version, takes individual human action as the elementary unit of social life. In the game-theoretic version, pregiven entities are seen to generate self-action—that is, actors engage in games with others without their underlying interests and identities encountering substantial change. In norm-based approaches, individuals are depicted as self-propelling, self-subsistent entities pursuing internalized norms, with the latter actually forming the basic unit of analysis. Finally, structuralism does not posit individuals but self-subsistent societies, or social systems, as the exclusive sources of action. Accordingly, it is durable, coherent entities that constitute the starting point of inquiry. The second variant of substantialism—interaction—is present today in the form of conventional survey research and historical–comparative analysis. It is the so-called variable-centered approach, including methods such as multiple regression and factor analysis, that best represents this variant. Providing merely the empty settings within which causation occurs, it is not the substances or actors in question that do the acting according to this particular view but, rather, the very variable attributes themselves.

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