Engagement as a Social Relation: A Leap into Trans-Modernity

In Modernity ‘engagement’ was understood in individual or collective terms: Weber and Marx offered the best-known exemplifications. Many sociologists still adhere to their basic paradigms. Many have also tried to combine them and have seen engagement as being co-determined by agency and by social structure. Although all acknowledge that engagement entails acting in, with, and usually through social relations, nevertheless, the intrinsically relational character of engagement has remained obscure, largely implicit and unexplored. Engagement has always entailed a social relation(s), but today is it is being re-examined as a relation because it is becoming more complex as it assumes morphogenetic connotations. Proposals for devising a new ‘relational sociology’ of engagement are on the increase. Yet these proposals are very different in their theoretical, methodological and applied approaches. We have to analyse them in more depth in order to clarify what ‘relational’ means. The Author maintains that a distinction needs to be made between relational theories (based on critical and analytical realism) and relationistic theories (based on constructionist and relativistic assumptions). The latter involve central conflation between subjective and objective factors, as well as between the nature of the individual contribution and the historical configuration of engagement. A new conceptual framework is put forward here in order to understand engagement as a relational reality operating through reflexivity, especially the meta-reflexivity that is distinctive of the after-modern or trans-modern social order.