The Relational Subject

Pierpaolo Donati is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre of Studies on Social Innovation (CESIS) at the University of Bologna, Italy. Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Social Ontology at the University of Warwick.

• Part I: 1. Introduction: relational sociology: reflexive and realist; 2. The plural subject versus the relational subject; Part II: Prologue: the sources of relational subjects and their resources; 3. The relational subject and the person: self, agent and actor; 4. Socialization as relational reflexivity; 5. Culture reproaches to relationist sociology; Part III: Prologue: the range of relational subjects: where and how they emerge; 6. When relational subjects generate relational goods; 7. The emergence of collective relational subjects and their societal impact: beyond the market/state binary code; 8. Relational subjects and the ravages of globalized markets: the need for subjects with relational ethics; 9. Conclusions: collective subjects and the added value of social relations.

'The Relational Subject by Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer is something new under the sun … what Donati and Archer have produced seems to me distinctly new both to standard Western sociology and the standard Western philosophy of social science. The theory articulated in The Relational Subject is certainly distinctly different from the varieties of relational sociology that precede it …' Douglas V. Porpora, Journal of Critical Realism