Social relations
Although Harvard University has featured a "Department of Social Relations" (in which Talcott Parsons played a prominent role), and although the term "social relations" is frequently used in social sciences, there is no commonly agreed meaning for this concept (see also the entry social).
It could be argued though that a social relation is, in the first instance, a relation between people, and more specifically (i) a relation between individuals insofar as they belong to a group, or (ii) a relation between groups, or (iii) a relation between an individual and a group. The group could be an ethnic or kinship group, a social institution or organisation, a social class or social stratum, a nation, or a gender etc.
In this sense, a social relation is therefore not identical with a unique interpersonal relation or a unique individual relation, although all these types of relations presuppose each other; a social relation refers precisely to something that people have in common.
However, the difficulties only start here, because now it needs to be established how these social relations exist, how we know they exist, what kinds of social relations there are, and how we can find out about them, verify them or identify them. About these questions researchers often disagree and debate, proposing different kinds of methodology to obtain knowledge.
At one end of the spectrum, Karl Marx approvingly quotes Giambattista Vico's argument that humans can understand their society in its totality because "they made it themselves"; the limits to what humans can know are mainly practical in nature. At the other end of the spectrum, Karl Popper rejects the possibility of objective knowledge about society as a whole, suggesting that methodological holism must lead to totalitarianism; progressive social change can only be achieved through the small steps of piecemeal social engineering.
There are at least three problems in understanding social relations. The first is that many social relations are not directly observable by an individual, and can only be inferred with the aid of abstractions. Another is one of reflexivity: in the case of social science, the scientist is in a very obvious way himself or herself part of the social world being studied. A third kind of problem is that animals and insects for example also display a kind of "social" behaviour, so that social relations are not necessarily uniquely human relations (cf. the insights of sociobiology).
In broad terms, we can distinguish six basic levels of human awareness: (1) subconscious awareness; (2) conscious subjective awareness (dissociated, focusing inward on the inner world, or expressing an inner state outwards); (3) intersubjective awareness (an awareness which occurs in association with other people and is internal to that association); (4) objective awareness (dissociated, focusing outward to a world that exists mind-independently); (5) reality-transforming awareness (transitions in practical action reframing the boundaries of different forms of awareness and changing consciousness, or connecting different forms of awareness) (6) transcendent awareness (going beyond personal knowledge or experience).
Corresponding to these levels of human awareness, we could also define different kinds of social relations, i.e. different ways in which humans might experience the connections among their own kind: (1) subconscious social relations (for example at the level of the collective unconscious or between parents and children, (2) social relations which exist only in subjective awareness or subjective perceptions, (3) intersubjective social relations, (4) objective social relations, (5) static and dynamically changing social relations, (6) spiritual social relations of some kind.
As illustration, we can apply the foregoing to the notion of a group. A person might almost out of instinct identify with a group or relate to it; s/he might imagine being a member of a group, regardless of whether this is really the case; a group might exist only in the form of intersubjective relations among its members; a group might exist as an objective description, or as an objective reality, even regardless of whether one was aware of belonging to it; a group might be forming or dissolving, or both at once; and a group might also exist at the level of a common spiritual affinity or identification.
However the group may exist, or be perceived to exist - with the consequences that has for the kinds of social relations involved - it is clear that understanding different kinds of group relations require different methods of inquiry and verification. Precisely because social relations may be experienced at different levels of awareness, they are not necessarily transparent at all. Indeed, Karl Marx wrote ironically in this respect that "science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided".
References
- Dick Houtman, Class and Politics in Contemporary Social
Science Marxism Lite and Its Blind Spot for Culture
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
- Karl Marx, Grundrisse
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
- Frank Furedi, Where have all the intellectuals gone?