Guest editors: Elżbieta Hałas and Pierpaolo Donati
The relational approach, which has a long tradition and widely differing variants, has reemerged and grown stronger, forming a new, vital movement in the social sciences. After postmodern diffusion and beyond the stagnation of interpretative against normative conceptualizations of social life, relational sociology offers new insights and could play a leading role in reconstructing the discipline to face the challenges of the global age. Social relations are among the key sociological concepts and have been studied as constitutive for social bonding. Contemporary relational thinking assumes radical changes in the ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological status of social relations.
The aim of this issue is to reflect upon and discuss the innovative potential of contemporary relational theorizing about society, culture, and persons. Various theories of contemporary socio-cultural changes evoke relationality, but relational thinking is different from “relationistic” positions. Relational questions are investigated by the founder of the new paradigm, Pierpaolo Donati, and other authors interested in the relational turn.