Abstract

The chapter outlines two major understandings of the social, which are referred to as “inter-actionalism” and “trans-actionalism” with reference to Dewey and Bentley’s distinction between three understandings of social action. It is argued that the major difference between these understandings is not in their emphasis on the centrality of social relations in making sense of social phenomena but in their implicit understanding of the form of those relations: inter-actionalism sees the form of social relations to be causal in nature, whereas trans-actionalism sees them in terms of constitution. By bringing out this distinction between causation and constitution and articulating the methodological consequences of causal and constitutive theorizing/explanation, it is clarified in a concise vocabulary the core of deep relational or trans-actional version of relational sociology.