This article explores how the concept of agency in social theory changes when it is conceptualized as a relational rather than an individual phenomenon. It begins with a critique of the structure/agency debate, particularly of how this emerges in the critical realist approach to agency typified by Margaret Archer. It is argued that this approach, and the critical realist version of relational sociology that has grown from it, reify social relations as a third entity to which agents have a cognitive, (...) reflexive relation, playing down the importance of interaction. This upholds the Western moral and political view of agents as autonomous, independent, and reflexive individuals. Instead, the article considers agency from a different theoretical tradition in relational sociology in which agents are always located in manifold social relations. From this, an understanding is created of agents as interactants, ones who are interdependent, vulnerable, intermittently reflexive, possessors of capacities that can only be practised in joint actions, and capable of sensitive responses to others and to the situations of interaction. Instead of agency resting on the reflexive monitoring of action or the reflexive deliberation on structurally defined choices, agency emerges from our emotional relatedness to others as social relations unfold across time and space. (shrink)

`The work develops and articulates a brilliant and original central thesis; namely that modern individuals are best understood as complex bodies of thought, as embodied symbolic and material beings. Future work on mind, self, body, society and culture will have to begin with Burkitt's text' - Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois `After his excellent Social Selves, Ian Burkitt has produced a new theory of embodiment which will become required reading for those working in the areas of social theory, sociology, (...) cultural studies and social psychology. Steering between constructionist and realist theories of the social actor, Bodies of Thought provides an innovative assessment of Foucaultian, Eliasian, and feminist approaches to the body and a sustained critique of Cartesian notions of the subject' - Chris Shilling, Department of Social and Historical Studies, University of Portsmouth In this incisive and truly impressive book, Ian Burkitt critically addresses the dualism between mind and body, thought and emotion, rationality and irrationality, and the mental and the material, which haunt the post-Cartesian world. Drawing on the work of contemporary social theorists and feminist writers, he argues that thought and the sense of being a person is inseparable from bodily practices within social relations, even though such active experience may be abstracted and expanded upon through the use of symbols. Overcoming classic dualisms in social thought, Burkitt argues that bodies are not purely the constructs of discourses of power: they are also productive, communicative, and invested with powerful capacities for changing the social and natural worlds. He goes on to consider how such powers can be developed in more ethical forms of relations and activities. Bodies of Thought will be essential reading for students and academics in social theory, social psychology, cultural studies, feminist theory and the sociology of the body. (shrink)

This article takes a critical approach to emotion regulation suggesting that the concept needs supplementing with a relational position on the generation and restraint of emotion. I chart the relational approach to emotion, challenging the “two-step” model of emotion regulation. From this, a more interdisciplinary approach to emotion is developed using concepts from social science to show the limits of instrumental, individualistic, and cognitivist orientations in the psychology of emotion regulation, centred on appraisal theory. Using a social interactionist approach I (...) develop an ontological position in which social relations form the fundamental contexts in which emotions are generated, toned, and restrained, so that regulation is decentred and seen as just one moment or aspect in the relational patterning of emotion. (shrink)

In their respective analyses of Western civilizations, both Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault were concerned to overcome metaphysical notions of power and freedom, seeing them as relations rather than as properties possessed by some groups and individuals but not others. This essay explores the similarities between their understanding of power and freedom as relations. However, there are many differences between these two theorists, most important of which is the Nietzschean philosophy that is the foundation of Foucault's analysis. Central to the (...) Foucauldian and Nietzschean understanding of power and freedom is the concept of "agonism," the eternal contest between humans. The author argues that this concept reintroduces metaphysics to the analysis of power and freedom in the form of a metaphysics of conflict. Elias's work offers a better way out of metaphysics because it is based on a sociological ontology from which truly relational concepts of power and freedom can be devised. (shrink)

(1997). The situated social scientist: Reflexivity and perspective in the sociology of knowledge. Social Epistemology: Vol. 11, New Directions in the Sociology of Knowledge, pp. 193-202.

In this piece, I argue against the Cartesian trend of seeing persons, selves and mind as something distinct from the body. It is claimed that Descartes realized the importance of the link between body and mind, but never pursued this connection, and this then becomes the aim of the paper. Another effect of Cartesian modes of thinking is to divorce human knowledge from its material contexts, driving a wedge between mind and matter. Some forms of social constructionism appear to fall (...) into this latter trap and instead I argue for a view of persons as embodied beings whose selves are intimately connected to the body. Using the work of Bourdieu, Elias, Merleau-Ponty, and Ilyenkov, I also suggest that thought cannot be disengaged from a human body active in its world and that knowledge not only partly separates us from the materiality of existence, but connects us to it in deeper ways, as another dimension of human existence. Human beings can then be regarded as bodies of knowledge – active thinkers and persons engaged with the multi-dimensional world around them and capable of producing change. (shrink)