Relational Sociology and the Globalized Society

A sociological theory that is appropriate to the processes of globalization has as its testing ground the ability to capture the morphostasis/morphogenesis of relations, which includes the morphostasis/morphogenesis of structures, culture and agency. This is the task that defines what a relational sociology has to be. The morphogenesis of relations is not the result of the morphogenesis of its individual components, but depends on the possibility of differentiation of social relations in their own right – that is as emergent phenomena with their own distinctive generative mechanisms. This leads on to the theory of social differentiation. The three well known forms of social differentiation (segmentary, stratified and functional) must be integrated with a fourth type: relational differentiation, which is held to emerge in the current globalizing society. The latter constitutes a new ‘social logic’ which is completely foreign to those who follow the Luhmannian scheme of social differentiation.