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The recent "relational turn" in the social sciences is bringing much needed attention to the study of social relations. This chapter discusses relational sociologists' efforts to reconnect, in more deliberate terms, with the primacy of relations and process thinking. For some theorists, all is social relations insofar as interdependent actors, transactions, and emergent patterns exist always-already in constant motion. This avidly anti-essentialist view of lived experience differs notably from the critical realist notion that relations can give rise to sui generis social effects, events, or phenomena. Notwithstanding different streams of thought on such matters, there is general agreement concerning the relational embeddedness of human activity. There is considerable theoretical value in thinking about community as a confluence of multifaceted relations and as an emergent phenomenon that possesses distinct properties.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-56042-1_7

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