Everyday practices and long term-processes: Overcoming dichotomies with the work of Norbert Elias

Abstract

One of the unique contributions of figurational or process sociology is its capacity to resolve —or rather: dissolve – oppositions like structure and agency, individual and society, micro and macro. Rather than artificially separating individual action from social process and looking for causal relations between two ‘levels’ in what really is the same occurrence, process sociologists look to see how social process happens in interaction, and how everyday relations and conversations make society. Drawing on the work of Elias, researchers can ask questions that seem quite impossible using other – more conventional – sociological paradigms: How do everyday interactions and long-term or large-scale processes interact? How can they be connected in one sociological story or analysis? How to look at both, without prioritizing one over the other? This special issue of Human Figurations presents five articles centrally concerned with such questions. These articles cover a range of topics, periods, geographical areas, and ranges – from a Dutch classroom to the global world of halal production. But they all touch on the same questions: how to connect the small with the large, the daily relations between people with long-term processes and global networks. In doing so, they all draw on the work of Elias and other figurational sociologists