This article extends Alan Page Fiske's Relational Models Theory beyond its traditional focus on functional coordination to analyze contemporary social crises through the lens of relational breakdown. It proposes a taxonomy distinguishing genuine relational coordination from degraded forms—where relationships maintain surface legitimacy while lacking mutuality—through asocial relationships treating others as purely instrumental means, to null relationships treating people as mere objects. The framework reveals how relational degradation operates recursively across scales: from intimate relationships through communities to international systems. Examining the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an institutional response to capitalism's commodification problem, the analysis demonstrates how this framework's limitations—protecting individual freedoms while struggling to sustain communities or constrain economic concentration—illuminate interconnected contemporary crises. East Germany's post-reunification transformation reveals how rapid relational change overwhelms adaptive capacity. Global loneliness patterns, concentrated in rapidly developing nations, reflect transformation without adequate protections for forming new bonds. Authoritarian backlash movements promise restored hierarchies to populations experiencing status loss and relational incoherence. International conflicts reveal how honor mobilization overwhelms legal frameworks. Techno-feudalism demonstrates how digital platforms systematically eliminate human recognition, enabling null relationships masked as market exchange. The convergence of these patterns suggests fundamental tensions in how contemporary institutions coordinate human social life, requiring interdisciplinary investigation and innovations that better integrate multiple relational models while creating material conditions for genuine coordination.
Beate Seibt (Tue,) studied this question.