Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: In this paper, I argue for the importance of mechanisms and mechanism-based explanations in the context of relational sociology. As an approach to social inquiry, relational sociology is founded on the promise that knowledge of social relations can improve our understanding of social phenomena. Although relational sociologists justify this promise by attributing great generative power to relations, this alone provides little guidance on how social relations contribute to social explanation and understanding. I suggest that thinking about social relations as or within mechanisms is key to appropriately constraining explanatory practice. Relational-mechanistic explanations should describe all and only the social relations (and their organizational features) that are (the components of) mechanisms responsible for the social phenomenon to be explained. Social relations can be mechanistically responsible for phenomena either causally or constitutively through etiological or constitutive mechanisms. Since the claim that social relations are constitutive of social phenomena is distinctive of relational sociology as an approach, I focus on the importance of constitutive mechanisms. I show how constitutive mechanisms are central to explaining at least two important classes of social explananda: the causal capacities of social actors and the unfolding of social processes.
Source: Digithum
Author: Joonatan Nõgisto
Institution: Tallinn University
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7133233151