This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo.

From Simmel to Relational Sociology

Sophie Mützel and Lisa Kressin Abstract Georg Simmel (1858-1918), who is widely regarded as one of the classics and intellectual grandfathers of sociology, has written on a variety of topics from several disciplinary perspectives. Yet despite the breadth and richness of his work, current sociology typically focuses only on individual dimensions. On the one hand, Simmel’s work is seen as foundational to a formal sociology, which is at the core of social network analysis. On the other hand, Simmel’s works on cultural issues yield astute analyses of modernity, which is why they are classics in the sociology of culture. However, such one-dimensional interpretations of Simmel’s work appear limited and in turn do not sufficiently capture his influence on the field of sociology. This chapter claims that the separated readings of the “two Simmels” need to be brought together to make full analytical use of Simmel’s most important heuristic distinction: form and content. Moreover, we will show that relational sociology of the past four decades has moved in that direction by taking the interrelation of structure and meaning seriously. Keywords Simmel, Form, Content, Social Network Analysis, Relational Sociology

1. Introduction

Probably unique among his sociological contemporaries, Simmel explored time and time again the world of everyday social interactions and their cultural manifestations. [...] Not only does Simmel claim that sociology should study the 'microscopic-molecular' processes within human interaction and hence justifiably study micro-sociology as well as the study of major social structures and formations, but he also asserts that such an investigation will produce a 'deeper and more accurate' understanding of society and, we might add here, equally of cultural formations. Frisby & Featherstone, 2006, p. 9 Georg Simmel (1858-1918), who is widely regarded as one of the classics and intellectual grandfathers of sociology, has written on a variety of topics from several disciplinary perspectives. Yet despite the breadth and richness of his work, current sociology typically focuses only on individual dimensions. On the one hand, Simmel’s work is seen as foundational to a formal sociology, which is at the core of social network analysis (SNA). On the other hand, Simmel’s works on a wide range of cultural issues, including e.g. his treatise on money (Simmel, 2004) or on the modern city (Simmel, 1950d), yield astute analyses of modernity, which is why they are classics in

1 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. the sociology of culture. However, such one-dimensional interpretations of Simmel’s work appear limited and in turn do not sufficiently capture his influence on the field of sociology (e.g. Beer, 2019; Dahme & Rammstedt, 1995; Frisby, 2011; Goetschel & Silver, 2019; Goodstein, 2017; Häußling, 2010; Kaern, Phillips, & Cohen, 1990; Mozetic, 2017; Pyyhtinen, 2018). Building on these insights, this chapter argues that the two-stranded reading of Simmel of contemporary and past sociology leads to a one-dimensional use of his work. Moreover, we claim that the separated readings of the “two Simmels” need to be brought together to make full analytical use of Simmel’s most important heuristic distinction: form and content. This distinction needs to be treated as a duality instead of a contradiction (e.g. Lizardo, 2019). We will show that relational sociology of the past four decades has moved in that direction by taking the interrelation of structure and meaning seriously. We argue that further use of Simmel’s duality of form and content will yield additional analytical depths and insights. Relational sociology, as an analytical approach, offers an alternative to substantialist works of a sociology that understands the social mostly in terms of its “fixed entities with variable attributes” (Abbott, 1988; Emirbayer, 1997, p. 286). It also tries to emancipate itself from its analytic roots in structural analysis. Instead of single interactions, the focus lies on the dynamic relations between social entities that shape social formations. At the same time, relational sociology does not aim for deterministic macro- analysis; from a relational perspective, structure emerges from “unfolding, ongoing processes” (Emirbayer, 1997, p. 289), which result from an individual’s capacity for agency and involvement in the construction of meaning. To be sure, relational sociology unites basic concepts of understanding the social while drawing on different sociological traditions (e.g. Crossley, 2015; Dépelteau, 2015; Emirbayer, 1997; Mische, 2011). In this chapter, we will mainly focus on Simmel’s enduring influence on the school of relational sociology, which combines social network and cultural analysis. The development of this specific field of relational sociology is driven by empirical studies as well as an elaborated toolkit of methods, which are based in network and often text analysis (e.g. Mische, 2011; Mützel, 2009; Pachucki & Breiger, 2010). In addition to being deeply embedded in the same relational thinking that drives Simmel’s understanding of society and social life, adding elements of meaning to a formerly culture-free, structural network analysis (White, 1992), relational sociology implicitly draws on the main distinction made by Simmel: form and content. An interest in the combination of both form and content has pushed the development of a relational sociology rooted in network analysis since the 1990s. In that sense, Simmel is not only a classic of relational

2 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. thinking in his works on form but also in his work on the relations of content, that is meaning. This chapter offers a genealogy of concepts, which have moved from Simmel to formal to relational sociology via a path of social network analysis as well as a path of cultural analysis. The focus is in particular on U.S. and European sociology. Thus, this chapter contributes to ongoing discussions on the interrelation of structure and meaning in relational sociology and underscores Simmel’s foundational thinking on the duality of form and content.

2. Simmel’s Sociology

[S]ociety is for Simmel only a result of the relations among individuals and groups, something that has to be produced and connected rather than always being there (Pyyhtinen, 2018, p. 24). Georg Simmel, born in 1858 in Berlin, is known as one of the founders of sociology: He fundamentally contributed to the definition of sociology’s jurisdiction as a discipline and was one of the founders and board members of the German Sociological Association in 1909.1 Yet despite his ideational and institutional importance for German sociology, he was never granted a full and permanent professorship in sociology. Instead, he died as full professor in philosophy in Strasbourg in 1918 (Wolff, 1950, xviii). In academic circles, Simmel was well known as a Berlin intellectual and lecturer. At the same time, he was seen as an eclectic academic, prolifically writing on a variety of issues from different backgrounds, including sociology, philosophy, psychology, and history. This, in turn, made it difficult for Simmel to obtain a full professorship in one discipline. Additionally, Simmel was facing the anti-Semitic resentments of his time (Jung, 2016). Simmel understood science as empirical and non-normative. Scientific knowledge was not to be discovered with a practical or normative goal in mind, but as an end in itself (Dahme, 1995). Defining sociology as a science in that sense, while also writing on “personal ‘attitudes towards the world in the language of a view of life’” (Dahme, 1995, p. 225, own translation) however meant a constant crossing of disciplinary boundaries for Simmel. By his own definitions, he was a sociologist and philosopher.2

1 After only three years of membership, Simmel and colleagues, such as Max Weber and Werner Sombart, left the association again due to opposing opinions on the question of Werturteilsfreiheit (Nedelmann, 2007, p. 75). 2 Dahme elaborates on Simmel’s differentiation between science and philosophy, and the blurring of this boundary over the years of his writing. While Simmel’s definition of formal sociology followed a rather positivistic notion of science, he

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Contrary to his standing in German academia, in the U.S. Simmel was “in the unusual position of being the only European scholar who has had a palpable influence on sociology […] throughout the course of the 20th century” (Levine, Carter, & Miller Gorman, 1976, p. 813). Translated from German and published as early as 1893 in journals such as The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and The American Journal of Sociology, Simmel’s works on “The Problem of Sociology” (Simmel, 1909), “The Persistence of Social Groups” (Simmel, 1898), “The Chapter of the Philosophy of Value” (Simmel, 1900), “The Number of Members as Determining the Sociological Form of the Group” (Simmel, 1902a, 1902b), or “The Sociology of Conflict” (Simmel, 1904a, 1904b, 1904c) were accessible in English. Thus, Simmel was very visible and influential in early U.S. Sociology (Small, 1902). He also had a “prominent position” (Wolff, 1950, xxiv) in Park’s and Burgess’ (1922) textbook with several contributions, including “The Sociological Significance of the ‘Stranger’”, “Sociology of the Senses: Visual Interaction”, and “The Metropolis and Mental Life”. In the 1950s, Simmel was re-translated and re- discovered in U.S. Sociology by the second generation of Chicago School members, structural sociologists and their intellectual kin. Nevertheless, translations into English of two of his main monographs were published only recently, i.e. the complete work of “Sociology” (Simmel, 1908/2009) and Lebensanschauung “The View of Life” (Simmel, 1922/2010). One of the most important concepts of Simmel’s work and a core analytical principle for sociology is the notion of Wechselwirkung, variously translated as “reciprocity”, “reciprocal orientation”, “reciprocal effect”, “reciprocal interaction”, or “interaction”. Simmel starts with an empirical observation: whatever an individual or a larger collective does, has effects on what another individual or a larger collective does. Such interactions show a “global regulative principle” (Simmel, 1890/2001, p. 13); they exist in general and cannot be avoided. The effects of interactions come in different forms. Such focus on interactions leads to study relations between social actors, rather than just individual actors. The concept of Wechselwirkung also “stands for his rejection of reification and mystification of supraindividual social units and his commitment to process analysis […] What we experience as if it were a social unity, is in reality composed of permanently ongoing processes” (Nedelmann, 2007, p. 68). Society is thus not a fixed later described science as one of many forms of culture (Dahme, 1995, p. 226), always in need to legitimize its claims. In his later work, he even introduced a “philosophical sociology” next to the formal, clearly scientific one. While it is often argued that during his life Simmel made a clear turn from sociology to the metaphysics of his last book “The view of life”, Dahme argues, this can only be understood as a mere shift of perspective (Dahme, 1995, p. 228).

4 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. unit. Rather interactions between individuals lead to a dynamic and gradual process of sociation, or Vergesellschaftung. In that sense, any social group is an event, a Geschehen (Simmel, 2017), because “sociation continuously emerges and ceases and emerges again” (Simmel 1950a, p. 10). In developing this relational and processual notion of Wechselwirkung, Simmel differentiates between form and content of interaction: While a form of interaction is analytically understood as abstracted from specific social situations in space and time (e.g. hierarchy, competition, or friendship), when observed empirically, form never exists without content (e.g. “impulse, interest, purpose, predisposition, psychological state, and incitement”) (Simmel, 1908/2009, p. 23). Simmel argues that for “a special science of society as such” the forms of interaction need to be only analytically separated from their contents (Simmel, 1909, p. 298). Social forms can appear in different contexts, taking on different contents while retaining their form. This particular understanding of sociology’s task has propelled sociology forward: on the one hand, it led to further insights into the analysis of social structure using formal, mathematical methods. It also sparked further developments of Simmel’s ideas in urban studies of the so- called Chicago School. This distinction and the interrelation between form and content are thus not only theoretically significant, but equally important for categorizing Simmel as either a formal sociologist or as a scholar of cultural content, a dualism which should be turned into a duality, i.e. an interrelation. Simmel on Form In his endeavor to legitimize sociology’s existence and to define a unique research subject for the emerging discipline, Simmel uses his analytical categories of form and content to define sociology’s position in relation to other social sciences. Simmel develops a sociology that is explicitly not an “encyclopedic sociology” (Parsons, 1998, p. 32; Sorokin, 1964, p. 499), but rather focuses on the study of interactions and their sociation as a new analytical perspective. He calls this study of social forms pure or formal sociology. In contrast to other formal sociologists who like von Wiese have classified 650 social forms (Sorokin, 1964, p. 495), Simmel’s formal perspective is not interested in “some classification of social forms” per se or of static character but focusses on “the emergence and movement of relations and their forms” (Pyyhtinen, 2018, p. 36). In his own works, Simmel studies e.g. the forms of groups (Simmel, 1898, 1902a, 1955/1964), conflict (Simmel, 1904a, 1904b, 1904c, 1908/2009), “superordination and subordination” (Simmel, 1896, 1950d) and sociability (Simmel & Hughes, 1949). Simmel uses the term “form” as institutional patterning, as interactional processes, as ways of being sociable, and as forms of experiencing (Wanderer, 1987, p. 22). He also looks at even more “basic

5 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. structural elements” (Hollstein, 2001) such as space, spatial distance, and anticipated duration (Simmel, 1908/2009). Because of a focus on interactions as foundational for social forms, Simmel’s works have greatly influenced understanding the social in relational, network analytic terms. Simmel on Content Besides his contributions to the program of a formal sociology and its defining concepts, Simmel has also paid great attention to the characteristics of modernity, especially to modern life in the city. In this sense, his major works on fashion (Simmel, 1957), money (Simmel, 2004), and urban life (Simmel, 1950d) share a cultural-philosophical perspective when focusing on the time and place specific contents of general social forms (e.g. Frisby & Featherstone, 2006; Mozetic, 2017). For Simmel, to understand modernity meant studying different modes of life, e.g. within the conditions of the metropolis or the economy of money. To do so also included seeing and experiencing the place under study, hence a “microscopic view” on the subjects and objects of study. An important distinction within his writings on culture is the distinction between subjective and objective culture (Frisby & Featherstone, 2006, p. 5): Culture is, as it were, formed intentional subjectivity that emerges out of human life and its interactions and is created by human beings as objectified contents or entities in language, religion, normative orders, legal systems, traditions, artistic artefacts, and so on. In addressing the transition from one form of culture to another, Simmel theorizes the process of institutionalization (Martin, 2009; Nedelmann, 2007), the Verdichtung or condensation of specific micro interactions and their subjective intentions into objectified modi of culture. Indeed, this captures a “dialectic of institutionalization” (Martin 2009, p. 337): If interactions are repeated, and participants have a subjective understanding of the boundaries and contents of this interaction, something new becomes created whether or not the participants intended this – the “relationship” or tie seems a thing in itself. People can then orient to the relationship as opposed to one another. This also may work vice versa: “people can make their understanding of the content of the relationship separable from a particular structure” (Martin, 2009, p. 337). In contrast to his analyses of social forms as a sociologist, Simmel’s philosophical works on culture focus on a diagnosis of his time and urban space and normatively claim a “tragedy” or “crisis of culture” (Simmel, 1916, 2008). Originating in life, “cultural forms may occasionally develop

6 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. in such a manner that they begin to constrain life and even become destructive for life” (Pyyhtinen, 2018, p. 121). Simmel thus saw cultural elements to develop their own logics, reacting upon – in the sense of constraining – the individual because of their relationships, i.e. recurrent patterns of interactions.

3. From Simmel’s Formal Sociology to Social Network Analysis

In the U.S., Simmel’s ideas on social forms inspired works on the analysis of social structure. One line can be traced back to Robert K. Merton at Columbia University. Not only did he cite and praise Simmel in his own work (e.g. Merton, 1968, 1972). Merton also taught Simmel’s ideas in his class “on the history of sociological theory and analysis of social structure” (Levine et al., 1976, p. 819) to students, who would later contribute to sociological theory and methods in their work on the sociology of conflict, social exchange theory, or SNA, e.g. Alvin Gouldner, Peter M. Blau, James S. Coleman, Lewis A. Coser, and Charles Kadushin (Levine et al., 1976; Pyyhtinen, 2018). Another scholarly line of direct influence is Kurt H. Wolff at Brandeis, who translated some of Simmel’s central German texts (e.g. Wolff, 1950), and who introduced Ronald L. Breiger to Simmel’s work (Breiger, 1974, p. 181). Moreover, in the U.S., Simmel’s ideas on social form have been foundational for much of seminal social network analytic ideas. The historical lineage from Simmel’s formal sociology to social network analysis is uncontested (Kadushin, 2012). Indeed, Lizardo points out that (2009, pp. 47–48) most U.S. network theorists trace back their lineage to Simmel’s work (Boorman and White 1976; Breiger 1990; Breiger and Ennis 1979: 263, n. 264; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994: 1415; Pescosolido and Rubin 2000; White, Boorman, and Breiger 1976: 730, n. 731), and that they see themselves as fostering a radical paradigm shift through which the formal classical tradition of Simmel will finally be realized (Berkowitz 1982, 1988; Wellman 1988). In his texts, which Simmel himself considered and labeled as sociological, he developed several concepts that have become building blocks of structural analysis and its specific form of social network analysis (SNA). Unlike Simmel himself, whose work on social form was conceptual and descriptive, structural sociologists have translated insights into perspectives on the empirical social world that can be mathematically modeled and formalized. Simmel’s formal sociology inspired the elaboration of formal

7 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. toolkits. Two of Simmel’s concepts concerning social forms have in particular shaped sociological perspectives on social relations, have contributed to moving the focus on relations rather than on properties of individuals, and have been foundational for the developments of relational sociology: social circles and their intersections as well as the importance of group size. Social Circles and their Intersections One of Georg Simmel’s fundamental insights into social structure is to see the intersection of social circles (Simmel, 1955/1964)3. Simmel understands society as a bundle of partly overlapping, relatively loose clusters or social circles, which intersect each other. A social circle is the union of individuals who belong to it and, in turn, an individual is an intersection of the circles to which the individual belongs (141). Thus, Simmel connects belonging to different social circles to individuality. Individuality stems from a set of unique crisscrossing memberships in social circles. In turn, social integration stems from the interlinkages of individuals between different memberships in social circles (Simmel, 2018, 465 ff.). This was foundational for later studies on the relationship of the individual and society in modern times (e.g. Nadel, 2004). In his study “The Friends and Supporters of Psychotherapy: On Social Circles in Urban Life” (1966), Kadushin uses Simmel’s theoretical work on social circles for empirical analysis. Kadushin calls for the empirical analysis of social circles with computational methods, in this case latent class analysis, “so that a body of knowledge about circles can be developed” (Kadushin, 1966, p. 789). He also notes, “sociometric methods are the obvious tool for the study of social circles, and these methods have been in existence for over 30 years”. However, in this paper Kadushin “defined circles empirically without necessarily having to engage in extensive and difficult sociometric analysis” (Kadushin, 1966, p. 792). Even more influential, conceptualized as “affiliation networks”, Simmel’s social circles have had an enormous impact on the analysis of social structures and the development of SNA. In his seminal article Breiger (1974) formalizes Simmel’s idea (181-182): Consider a set of individuals and a set of groups such that the value of a tie between any two individuals is defined as the number of groups of which they are both members. The value of a tie between any two groups is defined conversely as the number of persons who belong to both of them.

3 The German reference is Die Kreuzung der sozialen Kreise (Simmel, 1908/1992). In a 1955 translation into English, Bendix chose the title “The web of group- affiliations” (Simmel, 1955/1964).

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A set of actors thus affiliates with a set of groups and vice versa. Information about these two sets of data can be represented together: persons and the groups they belong to can be expressed as a two-mode affiliation matrix. In turn, the relations between persons and the groups they belong to can be visually represented as a bipartite graph, in which the two types of nodes are simultaneously shown, connected by their affiliation. Affiliation networks are different from social networks derived from direct interactions between actors in the sense that the nodes consist of two different kinds (“two modes”), e.g. actors and events. This characteristic led to Breiger calling them “membership networks”. Moreover, affiliation- or two-mode-networks can be transformed into two separate though substantively interrelated and consistent of each other one-mode networks: one consisting of actors related by their shared membership of the same group, and the other consisting of groups related by their shared members. This technical feature of duality, going back to Simmel with a mathematical re-formulation, has presented network analysts with the possibility to work with data sources other than direct interactional data that typically originate from observations or questionnaires. Data sources range from vast arrays of historical data from archives (e.g. Ventresca & Mohr, 2005) to large-N datasets of trace data (e.g. Shi, Shi, Dokshin, Evans, & Macy, 2017). Moreover, these technical aspects have shown broad usage in formal modeling of what are called two-mode or bimodal or affiliation networks in the sociological social network literature (e.g. Agneessens & Everett, 2013) and bipartite graphs in the “new” science of networks, with a reference to graph theory (e.g. Watts, 2004). Utilizing the formal modeling properties, research from a variety of disciplines has shed light on substantive areas, including the study of taste (e.g. Lizardo, 2006), social movements (e.g. Bearman & Everett, 1993; Diani & Kousis, 2014), historical change (e.g. Tilly, 1997), scientific fields (e.g. Moody, 2016), organizations (e.g. Mizruchi & Galaskiewicz, 2016), markets (e.g. Brailly, Favre, Chatellet, & Lazega, 2016), and the global economy (e.g. Hidalgo & Hausmann, 2009), to name only a few. The concepts of affiliation networks and “duality” have been applied and further developed in decades of empirical research, “moving from studying interrelations among social actors to analyzing the underlying structure of interests, tastes, styles, and categories” (Mützel & Breiger, Forthcoming). Group Size: Dyads and Triads Another of Simmel’s influential insights for formal sociology is the importance of group size for social dynamics (“Die quantitative Bestimmtheit der Gruppe”, Simmel, 1902a, 1902b, 1950b). Simmel distinguishes between dyads and triads – and understands this difference as fundamental. Dyads form the basis of the social as they are the outcomes of

9 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. interactions between two individuals. In dyads, secrets are safe, yet dyads are inherently fragile: “if one individual departs, a group may still continue to exist” (Simmel, 1902a, p. 40), while a dyad breaks apart. A significant change occurs, if a third individual joins the dyadic interaction. With the move from two to three and with the embedding of dyads into context, social forms become collective social forms (objektive, überindividuelle Gebilde). At the same time, a third also becomes an intruder to dyadic relations. Simmel distinguishes between three functions a third individual may take (Simmel 1950c): the third may be a non-partisan or a mediator who keeps the collective social form together; the third can also be a divisive force: a tertius gaudens (from tertius gaudens duobus litigantibus or “if two quarrel, the third rejoices”), who draws benefits from keeping the two others apart and thus indeed obliterating the interactions between all three individuals by allowing only dyadic interactions; or a third may follow the idea of divide et impera (divide and conquer) and destructively split up the social form altogether. This special role of the social form of triads vis-à-vis dyads has sparked many SNA concepts. For one, dissecting a network into its basic units of dyads and triads and their characteristics is a typical way to reduce complexity in the analysis of network structures. Instead of analyzing the network as a whole, it can be grouped into these smaller social forms. For example, basic centrality measures make use of the social form of a dyad, as they are calculated based on the existence of a relation between two nodes. Triads, as more complex social forms, have been used to characterize network structures, e.g. using a so called “triad census” (Davis & Leinhardt 1972). Moreover, triads have informed many SNA theories with regard to the structures of a network. Heider proposed the concept of the “balanced state” of a triad (1946), which he later explicitly relates to Simmel (Heider, 1958, p. 179). Heider “focused on a single individual and was concerned about how this individual's attitudes or opinions coincided with the attitudes or opinions of other ‘entities’ or people” (Wasserman & Faust, 1998, p. 220). Heider’s idea is that attitudes change if the constellation within this triad is imbalanced, the consequence is that balance needs to be restated. This cognitive theory has been formalized to a structural theory (Cartwright & Harary, 1956), proposing the use of the “definition of balance […] generally in describing configurations of many different sorts, such as communication networks, power systems, sociometric structures, systems of orientations, or perhaps neural networks” (Cartwright & Harary, 1956, p. 292). Across the sciences others have worked with Simmel’s structural insights on the clustering of the social world on the basis of triadic closure: having a mutual contact increases the tendency of two formerly unconnected actors to

10 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. establish at least a weak tie (e.g. Granovetter, 1973; Kossinets & Watts, 2006; Newman, 2001). Building on Simmel’s insights of the tertius gaudens (Simmel, 1950c, p. 154) and social circles, Ronald Burt develops the concept of “structural holes” (1992). This concept describes a specific position within a social structure that gains its advantages from uniting or splitting two other parties. Without the third, the two are separated by “a hole”.4 Those two might be representations of social circles making the third the intersection. Burt formulates this into his theory of a “Social Structure of Competition” (1992), in which those who occupy the hole control benefits of information, thus putting them into the position of a “broker” (Burt, 1992, p. 34): The tertius plays conflicting demands and preferences against one another and builds value from their disunion. You enter the structural hole between two players to broker the relationship between them. Burt understands his “structural hole argument” as a “theory of freedom” (Burt, 1992, p. 7), i.e. the freedom of the third to take advantage of “entrepreneurial opportunities”. In contrast, Krackhardt (1999) points to the triadic forces that restrict individuals because they “contribute to the group’s survival and preserve its identity at the expense of the individual, at least when compared with the isolated dyad” (Krackhardt 1999: 185). Krackhardt introduces the notion of a “Simmelian tie” as a reciprocal and strong tie between two actors embedded in a clique, in which they are also “each reciprocally and strongly ties to at least one third party in common” (186). Bound by a third as part of a clique and its norms of public behavior gives each actor less autonomy, less power, and less independence. Simmelian ties are also found to be more persistent than Heiderian processes (Krackhardt & Handcock, 2007). These insights on the structural form of triads and the role of third have informed a rich literature on brokerage conceived as a “relation in which one actor mediates the flow of resources or information between two other actors who are not directly linked” (Fernandez & Gould, 1994, p. 1457) and in which the broker as a tertius gaudens stands between disconnected actors, benefitting from the position by playing off the two others against each other leveraging and exploiting their conflict (Burt 1992). Others have extended the structural features of brokerage by highlighting the processes of third parties’ interactions (e.g. Obstfeld, Borgatti, & Davis, 2014). This work indicates conduit brokerage, i.e. passing of information without attempting to change the relationship (Burt 2004) as well as a tertius

4 Much earlier, White et al. stated, that “the essential feature of social networks may well be the sharp breaks in patterns – the ‘holes’ in the networks” (White et al., 1976, p. 737).

11 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. iungens brokerage, in which the third actively pursues coordination and connection (Obstfeld 2005, 2017), following Simmel’s notion of the third as a non-partisan, who brings others together. Formal Sociology of Abstract Structures The two 1976 publications of “Social Structure from Multiple Networks” on blockmodels and role structure (White et al., 1976; Boorman & White, 1976) offer another level in the formalization of forms and in abstraction for the analysis of social relations. The formal method of blockmodeling sheds light on structurally equivalent positions within networks. Actors with similar relations to other actors are grouped within a block, though those of a block do not need to have direct relations to each other. Indeed, no or few relations also yield structural equivalence. Blockmodeling reduces the complexity of a network of relations to focus on the more generalizable and socially deep structure of positions and their relations. It is a mathematical, formalized method, which has yielded important insights on social structure (e.g. Bearman, 1993; Padgett & Ansell, 1993) and in the past decades has been developed mathematically (e.g. Doreian, Batagelj, & Ferligoj, 2004; Žiberna, 2014). Yet others are concerned: for example, Nadel (2004, p. 122) asks if social forms are too 'pure' or 'formal', too empty of content and hence uninformative? The answer is that this rigorous formalism, and the consequent ‘emptiness’ of the description, are the price we must pay for the extraction of an embracing and strictly positional picture of societies. To be sure, White et al. (1976) explicitly chose to focus on the analysis of structure. They point out that “[t]he cultural and social-psychological meanings of actual ties are largely bypassed. […] We focus instead on interpreting the patterns among types of tie” (734). Nevertheless, the analysis is deeply relational: the “resulting ‘blockmodel’ is a view of social structure obtained directly from aggregation of the relational data without imposing any a priori categories or attributes for actor” (White et al., 1976, p. 731). At the same time, White et al. recognize the existence of different types of relations that lead to different interpretations of positions in a network (e.g. friendship or kinship). Similarly, Breiger’s (1974) use of the intersection of social circles from affiliation networks to the concept of duality, interpreting both modes of networks as mutually defining, also contains a translation of Simmel into highly formal methods while at the same time considers relations between entities in their meaning making capacity. Formal and relational, these works are exemplars of relational analyses of social forms and benchmarks for contemporary relational perspectives.

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4. From Simmel to Cultural Analysis to Relational Sociology

In the U.S., Simmel’s microscopic investigations of “mundane everyday interactions and our experience with them” (Frisby & Featherstone, 2006, p. 9) became very influential for another important strand of sociology: symbolic interactionism. While interested in social forms as “the elementary particles of sociation” (Rock, 1979, 51) interactionism takes as its starting point the micro-level of all social interactions, often using qualitative, ethnographic field methods that allow for a direct empirical contact with content.5 Only by understanding (Verstehen) time and place specific cultural peculiarities of interaction, i.e. their meaning, “the institutional structures in which experiences are realized” (Rock, 1979, p. 98) become visible for the interactionist sociologists. This section shows how Simmel’s methodological focus on everyday interaction, which implies a relational, dynamic perspective on the social without granting explanatory primacy neither to the individual nor to societal dimensions, feeds into symbolic interactionism, a sociological tradition that focuses on the interpretation of social meaning. In this section we sketch an analytical lineage from Simmel to relational sociology via Park’s human ecology, Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, Goffman’s interaction order to Strauss’ negotiated order and Fine’s group culture6. These strands all contain Simmelian ideas on the content of social interaction and how content relates to its manifestation in forms.7

5 For an explicit call to use Simmel’s formal approach for ethnographic field work, see Zerubavel (1980). 6 Another lineage, which cannot be elaborated here but which is running through parts of Simmel’s thinking, symbolic interactionism’s foundations and relational sociology, is the philosophical tradition of pragmatism (e.g. Emirbayer, 1997; Helle, 2001; Rock, 1979). 7 Park, Blumer, and Goffman indicated direct linkages to Simmel, either by showing signs of appreciation or distinction. Yet, Low argues that Simmel has rarely been credited (or cited) in the empirical works of interactions due to “collective amnesia” (2008, p. 337). Similarly, Dingwall (2001) follows Rock who states that it “is as if no thought of consequence preceded the work of the Chicago School […] Kant, Hegel and Simmel are forced to assume a largely invisible presence which has led to a frequent misreading of the origins and nature of their impact on interactionism” (1979, p. 45). Oriented towards the present and future, Low adds: “So perhaps the most intriguing question is not why Simmel is unacknowledged by symbolic interactionists but how is it that his work has survived and continues to be the subject of repeated renaissance by a variety of interpretist researchers, micro-sociologists, postmodernists, and cultural theorists” (2008, p. 337).

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To be sure, Simmel’s first impact on U.S. sociology did not occur at Columbia University but rather at the Department of Sociology at Chicago University. Mainly, the so-called first but also some of the second generation of the “Chicago School” were influenced by Simmel’s general interactional approach and specific work on urban life (Bulmer, 1986; Levine et al., 1976; Low, 2008). Moreover, they were also instrumental in bringing Simmel’s work to the U.S. Albion W. Small, founder and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago since 1892, published nine of Simmel’s papers in AJS between 1896 and 1910. Some of them Small’s own translations, they had been foundational for Simmel’s reception in early U.S. sociology.

Also important was Robert E. Park, a sociologist who had attended some of Simmel’s lectures at Berlin University and joined Chicago’s Department of Sociology in 1914. He took Simmel’s concept of Wechselwirkung and rendered it into English, marking the beginning of a sociological paradigm focusing on the study of “interaction”. Park’s sociology shows many traces of Simmelian thinking, e.g. Park argued that social circles produce the “marginal man” (Park, 1928), yet over time Park shifted his focus from abstract forms to “types of concrete collectivities” (Shils, 1996). Park’s analytical interest in the emergence, stability, and change of norms and values (Levine, 2010, liii), echoed Simmel’s interest in conflict. In his uptake of Simmel’s focus on interaction, Park introduced a concept to U.S. sociology, which together with Mead’s ideas would become one building block of the interpretive school of symbolic interactionis. 8 Herbert Blumer, trained by Mead and Park amongst others, proposed three principles of “the nature of symbolic interactionism” (Blumer, 1969, p. 2): The first premise is that human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them. […] The second premise is that the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows. The third premise is that these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he [sic] encounters.

In addition to its name, it is the proposed relational perspective on the social that echoes Simmel. Blumer does not only regard interactions between

8 Due to its much larger popularity and spread, this text will focus on the Chicago School strand of interactionism. There are also others, such as the so-called Iowa school, which was much more structurally oriented and less reluctant to explicitly build on Simmel’s work (Smith, 2017, p. 49).

14 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. human beings as central, but equally the interdependence of meaning and interaction. Yet despite these obvious parallels, Blumer hardly mentions Simmel. What seems to prevent the direct crediting of Simmel in these foundational statements of symbolic interactionism is Blumer’s curious reading of Simmel as a representative of a substantialist perspective.9 Blumer did in fact cite Simmel in his work on fashion, but criticized him for not being “able to depict the operation of the modern fashion mechanism” (Pyyhtinen, 2018, p. 170). Despite this misunderstanding, Blumer and Simmel in fact share the evaluation of the “importance of context in understanding meaning in social life” (Low, 2008, p. 329).

With Simmel from Micro/Macro to Meso

Simmel’s work has also been important for micro-sociological inquiries. In fact, in some of his writings Simmel explicitly distances himself from what he perceived to be an outdated perspective on the totality of social life and which he attempts to replace by a “micro-scopic inquiry” (Simmel, 1907). In his “Sociology of the Senses”, for example, Simmel intends “to pursue the meanings that mutual sensory perceptions and influences have for the social life of human beings, their coexistence, cooperation and opposition“ (Simmel, 1907/2006, p. 113). Simmel’s analytical interest not only lay in pure forms of interaction but also in their meanings, their contents, which can only be understood by paying attention to the “small insignificant units or ‘threads’ of sociation” (Frisby, 2002). Yet, pursuing a microscopic perspective, Simmel also explicitly “sought to avoid dissecting life to the point of being unable to see its unique combination of properties” (Beer, 2019, p. 52). As his duality of form and content proposes, interactions on the micro-level with their specific contents are an empirical access point for the observer. At the same time, Simmel is also interested in their crystallization into forms as elements of social structure: “In his early work, Simmel uses the rich concept of Verdichtung which means condensation, coalescence and crystallization. Cultural artefacts created out of the contents of human experience can achieve their own objective existence in distinctive forms that may be temporary but which may also persist over time in, say, cultural traditions” (Frisby & Featherstone, 2006, p. 4).10

9 “Thus, when Blumer came to use Simmel, he did so in a manner that extracted a few sociological ideas stripped out of the philosophical context that lent those ideas sophistication and subtlety” (Smith, 2017, p. 61). 10 Martin (2009) indicates how the duality between the form and content of relationships can be translated into the possibility to “transform an account in terms of form into one in terms of content and vice versa” (17) by analytically focusing on relationships at the local level.

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Especially his last book “The view of life” (Simmel, 1922/2010) focuses on the interrelationship of “subjective culture” on the micro-level and “objective-culture” on the meso-level cumulating in Simmel’s diagnosis of “the tragedy of culture”. Through interaction, meaning from micro- situations (“subjective culture”) can stabilize and therefore become part of the meso-structure (“objective culture”), with the capacity to develop a momentum on its own and even constrain subjective culture in reverse. This development, from the start at the micro-level, observing the negotiation of meaning through the interaction of individuals, to the emergence of meso- forms and macro-structures out of these micro-interactions, analogously describes the intellectual development of symbolic interactionism.

As a colleague of Blumer, a student of Everett Hughes, Erving Goffman was at Chicago at a time in which “Simmel’s sociology constituted a significant element of the intellectual milieu” (Smith, 1989, p. 22). Once called “the unacknowledged reincarnation of Georg Simmel” (Rock, 1979, p. 45; for a similar notion also see Smith, 2017), Goffman did not give much credit to Simmel’s work.11 Nevertheless, in the Preface to Presentation of Self Goffman states: “The justification for this approach (as I take to be the justification for Simmel's also) is that the illustrations together fit into a coherent framework that ties together bits of experience the reader has already had and provides the student with a guide worth testing in case studies of institutional social life” (Goffman, 1959, xii). Like Simmel’s focus on “microscopic molecular processes”, Goffman argued for the observation of an “interaction order” at the micro level of interactions since “it is in social situations that most of the world's work gets done” (Goffman, 1979, pp. 5–6).

Focusing his own analysis on face-to-face interaction and embodied social interaction, Goffman developed a theory of interaction among co-present individuals. His interest in social order stemming from interaction, led him to analyze a great variety of hitherto unnoticed “forms of sociation”, e.g. basic kinds of face work, forms of alienation from interaction, publics, performances and teams. However, while Simmel’s formal sociology was interested in larger institutional analyses, Goffman’s forms stay dependent on specific cultural, local and temporarily factors of the situational context of interaction. Moreover, while interested in detecting social forms, Goffman’s methodological approach was not formal-mathematical.

11 Goffman is known for a sparse acknowledgment of the sources of his sociology Smith (1989, p. 21) and was just as reserved in citing Simmel in his works as Park and Blumer were.

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Anselm Strauss went further than Goffman in moving the focus from micro to meso-structures as he widened the symbolic interactionist approach to the study of social organizations. Building on Shibutani’s (1955) “reference groups”, Becker’s (1984), Hughes’ and his own theory of social worlds (1978b), Strauss proposes the processual concept of “negotiated order” (1978a) to grasp stabilization of social interaction in social organizations. This version of interactionism holds that it is through interaction that structures are enacted, but in that process, “interaction becomes conditional interaction” (Maines, 1982, p. 278). Strauss’ concept of social worlds and arenas is also used by Adele Clark in her situational analysis. It “dwell[s] at what Simmel (1955/1964) called the ‘intersection of multiple social circles,’ and people participate simultaneously in many social worlds, depending on their ‘web of group affiliations’” (Clarke, Friese, & Washburn, 2018, p. 66).

A last scholar to be mentioned in this line of interactionists related to Simmelian ideas is Gary Allen Fine. As a student of Goffman, his work focuses on small group culture, or idioculture, highlighting how the contingent form of a small group comes about due to shared meanings, behaviors, and beliefs, thus combining considerations on form and content (e.g. Fine, 1979; Fine, 1987). While Fine’s form of focus is the group, he nevertheless is keenly aware that “focusing exclusively on the group, a structure that depends on the immediacy of interaction and strong ties, ignores how social relations and cultures reverberate throughout society. A group operates within complex arrangements that extend beyond its boundaries” (Fine, 2012, 168). Fine also considers the roles of networks to understand the interplay of groups, their subcultures and larger social structure and culture. Moreover, in a seminal article, Fine and Kleinmann (1983) suggest to insert more of interactionist approaches into structural network analysis. While much of “network analysis ignores how respondents conceive of their social networks and define their relationships” interactionist perspectives of social structures conceives actors’ meaning as central (Fine & Kleinmann, 1983, p. 98). Later works point to the fluidity of both social relationships and their meaning (Fuhse, 2009; Ikegami, 2005; Salvini, 2010).

With Simmel from Substantialism to Processual Relationalism

With his focus on social forms, Simmel has often been identified as a substantialist scholar. Yet, particularly the second chapter of his last book (1922/2010) can be read as a statement against substantialists’ understanding of the world—including the methodological approach of dissecting the world in representative parts to infer abstract knowledge about the whole. It is indeed the “relationality of the parts [that] is crucial,

17 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. so viewing life in unity is what Simmel sees as being the key problem” (Beer, 2019, p. 34).

Such anti-substantialist stance is at the core of symbolic interactionism, which works with a processual perspective, i.e. never taking any social order for granted but observing the constant negotiation of meaning. This fluidity of meaning and order, the constant work it takes to produce, re- produce or change them is the main interest of interactionists (e.g. Tavory, 2016).

In addition, in his late work Simmel also elaborates on “questions about how symbolic systems work to channel and redirect human life” (Simmel, 1922/2010, p. 28). He turns to the socially construed nature of classificatory systems and their importance for meaning making. He argues that the way such systems are categorized is important for understanding the relational properties of the social and individual (Beer, 2019, p. 106). In this sense, not only social forms, but also cultural meaning needs to be understood relationally. Much of the sociology of culture’s work on classification, categorization, and boundary work (e.g. Abbott, 1995; Bowker & Star, 2000; Fourcade & Healy, 2017; Gieryn, 1983; Lamont & Molnár, 2002) takes this understanding as its starting point.

Thus, Simmel’s sociology has not only directly influenced the tradition of SNA that contemporary relational sociology draws on. A relational sociology that interrelates structure and culture is also rooted in a microscopic, interpretative perspective, which similarly goes back to Simmelian ideas.

5. With Simmel’s Formal Sociology towards a Relational Sociology

The term formal sociology led to a decoupling of Simmel’s remarks concerning form and content and gave rise to their own history of reception carried by different strands of past and contemporary sociology.12 Current readings of Simmel suggest this to be a misinterpretation of his actual intentions when defining sociology’s unique jurisdiction. “[F]or Simmel, the form/content distinction was not a dualism; instead, it was a duality” (Lizardo, 2019). Simmel never meant to imply that forms could be investigated without appreciating content - indeed this is one of the “pitfalls of formal analysis” (Martin, 2009, p. 9). Rather, any social structure needs to be understood with a dual focus on form and content as

12 On the theoretical problems stemming from this two-fold reading of Simmel as a formal and relational sociologist, see Erikson (2013).

18 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. well as a processual view as “sociation continuously emerges and ceases and emerges again” (Simmel 1950a, p. 10). This process perspective on form necessarily includes content (Simmel, 1908/2009, p. 23) : In every existing social phenomenon, content and social form construct a united reality; a social form can no more exist disconnected from content as can a spatial form exist without some material, the form of which it is. Taking this seriously, even a formal sociology cannot ignore content in sole focus on form. And indeed, while early programmatic works in structuralist SNA explicitly bypassed the issue of cultural content and meanings of ties (White et al., 1976, p. 734), it soon became evident, that the avoidance of cultural understandings and behavioral assumptions was difficult to sustain when analyzing relations, since any relation between social actors entails several and changing meanings in particular cultural and intersubjective contexts (Brint, 1992; DiMaggio, 1995). Beginning with the late 1980s, an increasing number of network research included culture in network analyses. At that time, studies on semantic and emotional networks (e.g. Carley, 1986; Carley, 1994; Krackhardt, 1987), historical networks (e.g. Bearman, 1993; Gould, 1991; Padgett & Ansell, 1993) and artists’ networks (e.g. DiMaggio, 1987; Faulkner & Anderson, 1987) began to address how relations shape cultural practices and how, in turn, cultural practices might affect relations. This research considered cultural aspects and relational structure as related though separate realms. Others, engaged in discussions with relational thinking pointed out that empirical networks are relational webs of meaning, discursively constituted in processes, and essentially cultural products (Emirbayer & Goodwin, 1994; Somers, 1994). Beginning in the mid-1990s, network research in this vein also began to expand the notion of who counts as a network actor and started to include concepts (e.g. Carley, 1997; Mohr & Lee, 2000), categories (e.g. Martin, 2000; Mohr & Duquenne, 1997) and narrative clauses (e.g. Bearman, Faris, & Moody, 1999; Bearman & Stovel, 2000) as nodes. Such analyses of semantic or conceptual networks indicated particular cultural patterns between those non-human units that in turn were seen to shape human actors’ perceptions and behavior. Capturing the development of cultural and network thinking up to that point, Emirbayer identified a movement for “a relational sociology” (1997).13 In contrast to substantialist accounts, in which variables or pre-defined actors relate to each other and do the acting, Emirbayer argued for a particular

13 To be sure, Emirbayer’s perspective brings together a range of studies under the heading of relational sociology, also including and analytically building on Tilly (1978); Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992); Abbott (1995).

19 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. transactional approach. Relational sociology sees “relations between terms or units as preeminently dynamic in nature, as unfolding, ongoing processes rather than as static ties among inert substances” (289). Moreover, it rejects “the notion that one can posit discrete, pregiven units of analysis such as the individual or society as ultimate starting points of sociological analysis” (287).14 In effect, Emirbayer not only captured ongoing developments at the time, but also issued an agenda-setting call for analysts to study culture and structural networks as interrelated. An increasing amount of research is spanning the boundaries between culture and networks (for an overview see DiMaggio, 2011; Mische, 2011; Pachucki & Breiger, 2010). Key cultural sociologists now argue for network analysis “as the natural methodological framework for empirically developing insights from leading theoretical approaches to cultural analysis” (DiMaggio, 2011, p. 286). In turn, key network analysts consider how “culture prods, evokes, and constitutes social networks” as an integral part of their analysis (Pachucki & Breiger, 2010, p. 219). These lines of work have shown that cultural meanings shape social structure (e.g. Lizardo, 2006), and that social networks are also culturally constituted and interwoven with meaning (Mische, 2003, 2008).

Central references in the latter movement to intersect network and cultural thinking as entangled are the programmatic writings of Harrison White. White’s Identity and Control (White, 1992) pushes sociological theory beyond rational choice, structuralist, mechanistic, and variable-based sociologies towards a more dynamic and contextual model by considering how meaning shapes a relational context and, dually, how relations create meaning. White presents a reconceptualization of how we understand actors, action, and social relations, by analyzing how identities, relations and their social formations with all their ambiguities emerge. White starts off with the observation that we live in a world of contingencies and social chaos, which we as social actors are able to maneuver, because we are able to couple and uncouple social ties across multiple social contexts. White’s work on the constitution of markets highlights the dual discursive and structural interrelation (Mützel, 2016; White, 2000, 2002; White & Godart, 2007).

6. Simmelian Ideas in Current Relational Sociology

On the one hand, relational sociology’s relation to Simmel is obvious: Both understand and explain the social by analyzing the relations of its basic

14 These ideas have been productively expanded for a range of fields, e.g. Emirbayer and Johnson (2008), Mutch, Delbridge, and Ventresca (2016) on organizational analysis, Moody and White (2003) on structural cohesion, and Lamont and Molnár (2002) and Wimmer (2008) on the study of boundaries.

20 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. elements, instead of focusing on isolated elements and their attributes. For relational sociology in the tradition of social network analysis Simmel is perceived to be the classic sociologist who already thought in network terms. On the other hand, given his focus on form and content, on structure and meaning, Simmel’s work can also serve as classic references to support the cultural turn in relational sociology. This last section will thus show how Simmel’s push for content and form has been realized in different part of current relational sociology. The relation of form and content, of structure and meaning and the methodological access to both are still being negotiated among current scholars of relational sociology. Some have indicated different ways how meaning has been conceptualized and, subsequently, how this has been translated into empirical studies (e.g. Fuhse, 2009; Fuhse & Mützel, 2010). A central reference for the study of meaning is Mohr’s review (1998).15 Not taking a network perspective per se, but rather a relational perspective, which more broadly includes different ways to conceptually and empirically get at dual relationships of structure and content, Mohr’s work outlined ways to formally “measure meaning structures”. As the title indicates, this was a call to quantify the study of cultural meaning vis-à-vis hermeneutic and interpretative methodologies (Mohr, 1998, p. 345).

One way to read the cultural turn away from formal SNA is to read it also as a formal turn away from interpretative cultural studies. The early “measuring meaning” review highlights works which focus on meanings using formal methods to show structures of cultural items. In the twenty years following this call, scholarly disputes continue along how much and which formal vis-à-vis interpretative procedures in measuring meaning through its structure and vice versa are necessary. In that sense, we find that a binary rather than a recombinatorial logic is prevalent within relational sociology. Even though relational sociologists aim to take structure and meaning into consideration, they do not necessarily agree on the boundary between both and how to detect them. In that sense, they are – again – close to the old reading of Simmel of either formal sociology or cultural analysis. The developments over the past two decades can be fractually grouped into two strands: one the one side those who argue for more formal modeling, on the other side those who argue for more interpretative approaches.

Formally Measuring Meaning

15 Also see the special issue of “Theory and Society” (2014), Vol 43 (3-4) on “Measuring Culture” and the special issue of “Poetics” (2018), Vol. 68 on “Formal studies of culture”.

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Mohr’s suggestion that textual analysis will offer new possibilities in the formal, relational modeling of culture was prescient. Indeed, much empirical work has been conducted over the past 20 years using large-scale textual data for cultural analyses (e.g. Bail, Brown, & Wimmer, 2019; Kozlowski, Taddy, & Evans, 2019; Rule, Cointet, & Bearman, 2015). Focusing on text as data, such types of work can overcome limitations of resources that interpretative traditions of text analysis face confronted with large corpora of text. At the same time, drawing on the toolbox of natural language processin and network analysis applied to text allows the detection of complex meaning structures.

Defending a formal perspective, Lee and Martin (2015a; 2018) argue very much according to Simmel’s attempt to demarcate sociology’s jurisdiction as a science that has to abstract from the empirical complexity of meaning to get access to its basic, and in that sense reduced structure. Contributing to the field’s discussion on the “adequate” method of the sociological study of culture (Lee & Martin, 2015b), they propose a “cartographic approach” in their study of textual data (Lee & Martin, 2015a). For sociology to be a legitimate science, it needs to abstract in a formal and therefore standardized way with results that can be replicated in contrast to the “craftsmanship” of hermeneutics (Lee & Martin, 2015b). However, “measuring meaning” does not free analysts from interpretation. Rather, it only shifts at what moment in time interpretation becomes necessary. One example is topic modelling (Blei, 2012; Blei & Lafferty, 2006) which groups together words of large text corpora based on their co- occurrences in the texts over the whole corpus. These resulting word groups can be understood as “topics” of the corpus. They can yield rich insights into processes over time and entire fields (e.g. DiMaggio, Nag, & Blei, 2013; Fligstein, Stuart Brundage, & Schultz, 2017; Light & Adams, 2016; Mützel, 2015). However, finding plausible “meaning” in those word groups and delivering an interpretation of the topics is impossible without a deep understanding of the texts and a domain knowledge of the field of study (e.g. Mohr & Bogdanov, 2013; Mützel, 2015). Making such interpretative uncertainties of “measuring meaning” more explicit and acceptable could be one possible strategy to recombine anew structure and meaning. Summing up, this line of current relational sociology does relate to Simmel’s focus on interaction and relation, it also appreciates that sociological analysis needs not only to measure structure but also to operationalize meaning. However, in doing so, the understanding of meaning is strongly based on formal measurement, an abstraction of the intersubjective access to meaning that a humanistic tradition and surely Simmel’s own cultural analysis would prefer. In this sense, scholars who are

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“measuring meaning” continue to use Simmel’s notion of the scientific discipline of sociology that investigates culture but attempts to keep culture out of its own work.16 Interpreting Meaning Another line of current relational sociology studies structure and patterns with formal, network analytic techniques and meaning with interpretative methods. It calls for “mixed-methods social network analysis” (Crossley & Edwards, 2016; Domínguez & Hollstein, 2014) as well as for the inclusion of theoretical concepts of interpretive traditions, such as symbolic interactionism in form of social worlds, together with social network analysis (Crossley, 2015; Fine & Kleinmann, 1983). Mixed methods approaches working with network concepts vary in their specific implementation of “mixed”, sometimes referring to the type of data being analyzed or to the chosen procedure of analysis. They share an understanding that formal measures have their limits in their access to social meaning, despite their use in the examination of social structures. Insights into various characteristics of structures, i.e. forms, like time and space etc., need to be combined with “different perceptions, interests and lifeworld orientations”, which can primarily be conceptualized empirically by use of “mixed-methods designs” (Hollstein, 2008, p. 102) in order to capture form and interpretation.

Yet again others try to combine automated, formal text analysis with the classic hermeneutic tradition of interpreting texts (e.g. Baumer, Mimno, Guha, Quan, & Gay, 2017; Breiger, Wagner-Pacifici, & Mohr, 2018; Mohr, Wagner-Pacifici, Breiger, & Bogdanov, 2013; Nelson, 2017; Wagner- Pacifici, Mohr, & Breiger, 2015). This line of work illustrates that within the tradition of relational sociology a basis for a fruitful combination of formal and interpretive methods is possible—while reflective and lively discussions on theoretical concepts and methods for the study of form and content will continue.

7. Conclusion

The theoretical perspective of current relational sociology concerning what to look at when studying the social is surely closer to the symmetric reading of Simmel as a formal sociologist and philosopher of culture, as a scholar who paid attention to form and content, not excluding one over the other. In

16 Lee and Martin chose a different wording by differentiating between “two means of interpreting, formal and substantive. Further, make a parallel distinction between two objects of interpretation, form and content”. In that sense, the “[t]raditional interpretation is a substantive interpretation of content” and their own approach equals to a “substantive interpretation of form” (Lee & Martin, 2015a, p. 16)

23 1a128a98-18c4-461a-9a48-9ae4e72d6a1a This manuscript will be part of the forthcoming The Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. that sense, relational sociology is closer to the sociological classic than formal SNA. In the genealogy of ideas, relational sociology can be traced back to Simmel via SNA, but equally via the interactionist studies of culture. However, concerning the question of how to approach this interest of study, distinctions in the tradition of formal sociology are still being drawn by some scholars claiming that sociologists have to commit to formal approaches only. We have argued that the theoretical, relational perspective on the social in principle links them all; and this certainly does occasionally become apparent in discussions concerning the combination of interactionism and network analysis. Although sociologists have been interested in Simmel’s work on form and on content in the past as well as in his sociological and philosophical texts, this chapter has argued for a stronger linkage of both lines of work and their related different conceptual and methodological perspectives on the interest of study.

This richness in conceptual approaches and innovative methods resonates with the richness and breadth of Simmel’s work. The current use of his ideas underscores him a classic. Simmel’s conceptual ideas, his fundamental relational understanding of the social, his “sociological” interest in stable social forms but also his “philosophical” insights into cultural meaning, specific in space and time, have enriched the whole of current relational sociology. Looking at sociology’s history of the past 120 years, we see that disciplinary boundaries are just as fluid as any other social boundaries. Bearing this in mind, the past readings of two Simmels with only one informing formal and later relational sociology appears to be a very limited use of Simmel’s contribution to all the concepts that still today shape relational and cultural sociology, which range from interaction to social forms, boundaries, and identities.

This chapter has shown that Simmel’s work is more multiplex than the formal sociology, so foundational for SNA, or the focus on interactions, so foundational for symbolic interactionism, may suggest at first. Indeed, contemporary relational sociology, which intends to interrelate structure and meaning, can benefit from Simmel’s own ideas.

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