Social Attractors: A Proposal to Enhance “Resilience Thinking” about the Social

Abstract

This article proposes social attractors as a way of addressing limitations in the functionalist sociology commonly applied to the social when examining ecological-social relations. It focuses on “resilience thinking” to argue the case. Resilience thinking is discussed (1) as an analytical strategy whereby ecological and social attractors perform analogous roles in a coordinated approach to ecosystems and social relations, and (2) as a social movement within the “new ecology” that institutionalized around the notion of resilence. The article begins by describing the institutionalization of resilience thinking. It then argues that functionalist assumptions about equilibrium contradict those of resilience thinking and lead to conflated views of social relations. The theoretical context of the social attractor, which stems from a synthesis of critical realism and Gramscian analysis of power, is outlined. Finally, the qualitative, nonlinear methodology that the social attractor facilitates is illustrated through a hypothetical example involving ecosocial relations.

Keywords:

• critical realism
• functionalism
• hegemonic mediation
• nonlinear analysis
• resilience thinking
• social attractors

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Bill Carroll, Kierstin Hatt, Jim Hills, and David Yetman for their collegial support; the editors and two reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions; and Paul Mirocha for graphic assistance.

Notes

In this regard, morphogenesis differs significantly from autopoesis. For example, Luhmann (1995, 181) proposes autopoesis whereby the social is understood a recursive system of communication that is self-referential and functionally differentiated. The environment, Luhmann says, “is only a negative correlate of the system. The environment is simply ‘everything else.'” Similarly, Urry (2003, 122) alludes to the notion of autopoesis, arguing that conventional notions such as society, nationalism, structure, and agency have become passé due to the mobility and fluidity of the social in contemporary life. Autopoesis appears similar to morphogenesis, yet it focuses on the social as a system of communication without attending to the forceful, obdurate, and restraining features of the material and social world—especially concerns of power (Hatt 2009).

Ecosocial realism is a term being used by the author to develop a way of using critical realist social science to integrate levels of social strata at the interactional, organizational, and structural levels with ecological strata of landscape, ecosystem and environment. Towards Ecosocial Realism is in preparation.