Suchergebnisse

In den aktuellen Debatten der Sozialen Arbeit sind systemische und konstruktivistische Überlegungen etabliert. In diesem Kontext finden sich Positionen die der Individualisierung jeglicher Verantwortung das Wort zu reden scheinen. Dem wird hier als ein spezifischer systemisch-konstruktivistischer Ansatz der Relationale Konstruktivismus entgegen gestellt, der die für die Soziale Arbeit notwenige Betrachtung der Subjekte in ihren Umwelten (person in environment) ermöglicht. Dies ist zugleich ein Plädoyer für eine relationale Soziale Arbeit, die weiterhin die Zuständigkeit für die Beachtung und Bearbeitung der Schnittstelle zwischen Individuum und Gesellschaft behält. Der von Björn Kraus vertretene erkenntnistheoretische Ansatz des Relationalen Konstruktivismus mag eine mögliche Antwort auf die auch für eine relationale Soziale Arbeit notwendige Frage nach deren erkenntnistheoretischen Voraussetzungen liefern und zu einem sprachlichen und analytischen Instrumentarium beitragen, das für eine professionelle Praxis genutzt werden kann. Das wird im Rahmen des Beitrags exemplarisch an den Kategorien der Lebenswelt und der Lebenslage, sowie der Macht erörtert.

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.

Abstract
This article challenges the view that sociological explanation is based on methodological individualism and suggests using relational concepts for constructing explanations of social phenomena. It develops a relational concept of social mechanisms based on sociological systems theory and illustrates its explanatory power by drawing on research on changes in educational organizations in Germany.

This article aims to extend contemporary work on relational leadership theory by conceptualizing leadership as embedded in the everyday relationally-responsive dialogical practices of leaders. Relational leadership requires a way of engaging with the world in which the leader holds herself/himself as always in relation with, and therefore morally accountable to others; recognizes the inherently polyphonic and heteroglossic nature of life; and engages in relational dialogue. This way of theorizing leadership also has practical implications in helping sensitize leaders to the importance of their relationships and to features of conversations and everyday mundane occurrences that can reveal new possibilities for morally-responsible leadership. We develop and illustrate the notion of relational leadership by drawing on the work of Bakhtin and Ricoeur, and on an empirical study of Federal Security Directors.

The destruction of Beirut's port and large areas of the inner city following the August 2020 explosion occurred amid (and has exacerbated) an unprecedented national economic and social crisis portending another potential phase of urban "reconstruction" and a national political revolution. Critical scholars have highlighted the shortcomings of urban planning and governance in the city after the Lebanese civil war, particularly in terms of housing, infrastructure, and social inequalities, especially between the urban core and periphery. Beirut's post-war reconstruction(s), guided by blended-scale governance (i.e., public/private, confessional/political, national/local) and a real estate-oriented growth model have neither managed to completely restore nor efface the city's erstwhile status as an entrepôt of regional and international economic, cultural, and political importance but have instigated processes of rapid urbanisation and uneven development. These processes, historical trajectories, political and socio-economic dialectics, and shifts in urban political economy render Beirut relevant to the nascent empirical category of "relational cities," i.e., cities whose geographical-historical profiles position them as urban nodes connecting regional-global-national systems of flows under globalised capitalism. This article positions Beirut in the context of the debate on relational urbanisation for empirical exploration, and also points to the evental possibilities for alternative geographies that flow from the October 2019 protests.

AbstractWe investigated language development, relational aggression, and relational victimization in ethnically, socioeconomically diverse preschoolers. Relational aggression was positively related to language development. Girls were more relationally aggressive than boys, and higher‐socioeconomic status (SES) children were more relationally aggressive and victimized than lower‐SES children. Neither gender nor SES conclusively moderated the relation between language and relational aggression, though some findings suggest the possibility of stronger relations among boys and lower‐SES children. Teachers agreed on ratings of relational aggression and relational victimization to a moderate extent.