Relationship Problems: A Systems Perspective

Relational sociology seeks to offer an alternative to theories that presuppose individual or collective attributes as essential components of sociological explanations. Its basic claim therefore is “anti-essentialist” but also “structuralist” in the sense that social units are traced back to elementary structures, i.e. to the relationships among its constituent elements. Many contemporary social theories share those basic tenets, and systems theory is a particularly fitting candidate as it pursues a resolutely non-individualistic research program. However, the concept of “social relationship” has no obvious place in systems theory. That is because it seems to be not quite as anti-essentialist as it claims: The very notion of relationships presupposes the entities that are related to each other. It is thus replaced by the concept of social system which consists not of individuals, but of communication. A concept of “social relationship,” reformulated in terms of communication, then can no longer be located at the fundamental conceptual level.

What at first sight appears to be a depreciation of the very core of relational sociology may on closer inspection be useful to give social relationships a firm footing in social theory. The concept is then free to denote a specific form of social system formation, which is different from other forms. The paper will discuss the implications of such a reconceptualization of relationships against the backdrop of systems theory’s typology of social systems: If relationships do not simply “constitute” interactions, organizations or society as a whole how are they related to and distinguished from these social forms? The paper argues that conceiving social relationships as a particular social form enables us to give a more comprehensive and more complex account of social reality.