Dear Charles
Re suggest introductory texts on social constructionism . ..
David


Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen on Social Constructionism

From

The Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods. 2008. SAGE


Social Constructionism

The phrase social construction typically refers to a tradition of scholarship that traces the origin of knowledge and meaning and the nature of reality to processes generated within human relationships. The term constructivism is sometimes used interchangeably, but much scholarship associated with constructivism considers meaning-making as taking place in the individual mind, as opposed to a product of human relationships. Social constructionism has grown from three separate movements: a critical or ideological critique of dominating discourse, a literary-rhetorical critique of realism, and a social critique that emphasizes the communal origins of knowledge claims. The social constructionist position has significant implications for traditional research methods, both in questioning their authority and in opening up new possibilities, especially in the domain of qualitative inquiry. In qualitative research, social construction brings into specific focus three significant relationships: the researcher's relationships with the subjects of research, with the audience, and with society more generally.

Origins

Although one may trace the roots of social constructionism to early philosophers, such as Giambattista Vico, scholars often view The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Lukmann in 1966 as the landmark volume. Yet, because of its theoretical origins in social phenomenology, this work has largely been eclipsed by more recent scholarly developments, particularly three quite independent movements. In effect, the convergence of these movements provides the basis for social constructionist inquiry today.

The first movement may be viewed as critical and refers to the mounting ideological critique of all authoritative accounts of the world, including those of empirical science. Such critique can be traced to the Frankfurt School, as well as to other Marxist enclaves, but today is more fully embodied in movements associated with feminist, multicultural, anticolonial, gay and lesbian, and antipsychiatry groups. The second significant movement, the literary-rhetorical, demonstrates the extent to which scientific theories, explanations, and descriptions of the world are not so much dependent on the world in itself as on discursive conventions. Traditions of language use construct what one takes to be the world. The third context of ferment, the social, may be traced to the collective scholarship in the history of science, the sociology of knowledge, and social studies of science. Here the major focus is on the social processes giving rise to knowledge, both scientific and otherwise.

Basic Tenets

The aim in this entry is not to review the emergence of these three movements. Rather, what follows is a brief outline of several of the most widely shared agreements to emerge from these various movements. To be sure, there is active disagreement among participants in these various traditions. However, there are at least three major lines of argument that tend to link these traditions and to form the basis of contemporary social constructionism. This discussion will prepare the way for a brief account of the relationship between social construction and movements in qualitative methods.

The Social Origins of Knowledge

Perhaps the most generative idea emerging from the constructionist dialogues is that what one takes to be knowledge of the world and self finds its origins in human relationships. What one takes to be true as opposed to false, objective as opposed to subjective, scientific as opposed to mythological, rational as opposed to irrational, moral as opposed to immoral is brought into being through historically and culturally situated social processes. This view stands in dramatic contrast to two of the most important intellectual and cultural traditions of the West. First is the tradition of the individual knower, the rational, self-directing, morally centered, and knowledgeable agent of action. Within the constructionist dialogues, one finds that it is not the individual mind in which knowledge, reason, emotion, and morality reside, but in relationships.

The communal view of knowledge also represents a major challenge to the presumption of truth, or the possibility that the accounts of scientists, or any other group, reveal or approach the objective truth about what is the case. In effect, propose the constructionists, no one arrangement of words is necessarily more objective or accurate in its depiction of the world than any other. To be sure, accuracy may be achieved within a given community or tradition-according to its rules and practices. Physics and chemistry generate useful truths from within their communal traditions, just as psychologists, sociologists, and priests do from within theirs. But from these often competing traditions there is no means by which one can locate a transcendent truth, a "truly true." Any attempt to establish the superior account would itself be the product of a given community of agreement.

To be sure, these arguments have provoked antagonistic reactions among scientific communities. There remain substantial numbers in the scientific community, including the social sciences, which still cling to a vision of science as generating "truth beyond community." In contrast, scientists who see themselves as generating pragmatic or instrumental truths find constructionist arguments quite congenial. Thus, for example, both would agree that while Western medical science does succeed in generating what might commonly be called "cures" for that which is termed "illness," these advances are dependent on culturally and historically specific constructions of what constitutes an impairment, health and illness, life and death, the boundaries of the body, the nature of pain, and so on. When these assumptions are treated as universal- true for all cultures and times-alternative conceptions are undermined and destroyed. To understand death, for example, as merely the termination of biological functioning would be an enormous impoverishment of human existence. If a nourishing life is of value, there is much to be said of those who believe in reincarnation, the Christian dogma of "a life hereafter," or the Japanese, Mexican, or African tribal views of living ancestor spirits. The constructionist does not abandon medical science, but attempts to understand it as a cultural tradition-one among many.

The Centrality of Language

Central to the constructionist account of the social origins of knowledge is a concern with language. If accounts of the world are not demanded by what there is, then the traditional view of language as a mapping device ceases to compel. Rather, a Wittgensteinian view of language is invited, in which meaning is understood as a derivative of language use within relationships. Given that games of language are essentially conducted in a rule-like fashion, accounts of the world are governed in significant degree by conventions of language use. Empirical research could not reveal, for example, that motives are oblong. The utterance is grammatically correct, but there is no way one could empirically verify or falsify such a proposition. Rather, while it is perfectly satisfactory to speak of motives as varying in intensity or content, discursive conventions for constructing motivation in the 21st century do not happen to include the adjective oblong.

Social constructionists also tend to accept the view of language games as embedded within broader forms of life. Thus, for example, the language conventions for communicating about human motivation are linked to certain activities, objects, and settings. For the empirical researcher there may be assessment devices for motivation (e.g., questionnaires, thematic analysis of discourse, controlled observations of behavior) and statistical technologies to assess differences between groups. Given broad agreement within a field of study about the way the game is played, conclusions can be reached about the nature of human motivation. As constructionists also suggest, playing by the rules of a given community is enormously important to sustaining these relationships. Not only does conformity to the rules affirm the reality, rationality, and values of the research community, but also the central purpose of the profession itself is sustained. To abandon the discourse would render the accompanying practices unintelligible. Without conventions of construction, action loses value.

The Politics of Knowledge

Social constructionism is closely allied with a pragmatic conception of knowledge. That is, traditional issues of truth and objectivity are replaced by concerns with that which research brings forth. It is not whether an account is true from a god's-eye view that matters, but rather, the implications for cultural life that follow from taking any truth claim seriously. This concern with consequences essentially eradicates the long-standing distinction between fact and value, between is and ought. The forms of life within any knowledge-making community represent and sustain the values of that community. In establishing "what is the case," the research community also places value on its particular metatheory of knowledge, constructions of the world, and practices of research. When others embrace such knowledge, they wittingly or unwittingly extend the reach of these values.

Thus, for example, the scientist may use the most rigorous methods of testing intelligence and amass files of data that indicate differences in such capacities. However, the presumptions that there is something called individual intelligence, that a series of question and answer games reveal this capacity, and that some people are superior to others in this regard, are all specific to a given tradition or paradigm. Such concepts and measures are not required by "the way the world is." Most important, to accept the paradigm and extend its implications into daily practices may be advantageous or injurious to various people, depending on how they are classified.

This line of reasoning has had enormous repercussions in the academic community and beyond. This effect is so especially for scholars and practitioners concerned with social injustice, oppression, and the marginalization of minority groups in society. Drawing sustenance in particular from Michel Foucault's power-knowledge formulations, a strong critical movement has emerged across the social sciences, a movement that gives expression to the discontent and resistance shared within the broad spectrum of minorities. In what sense do the taken-for-granted realities of the scientist sustain ideologies inimical to a particular group (e.g., women, people of color, gays and lesbians, the working class, environmentalists, communalists, the colonized) or to human well-being more generally? Traditional research methods have also fallen prey to such critique. For example, experimental research is taken to task not only for its manipulative character and its value-neutral stance, but for its obliteration of the concept of human agency.

These three themes-centering on the social construction of the real and the good, the pivotal function of language in creating intelligible worlds, and the political and pragmatic nature of discourse-have rippled across the academic disciplines and throughout many domains of human practice. To be sure, there has been substantial controversy, and interested readers may wish to explore the various critiques and their rejoinders. However, such ideas also possess enormous potential. They have the capacity to challenge oppressive organizations, broaden the dialogues of human interchange, sharpen sensitivity to the limits of traditions, and incite the collaborative creation of more viable futures. Such is the case in qualitative research as it is in the global context.

The Liberation of Methodology

Given these themes in social constructionist scholarship, what are the major implications for research methods in the social sciences? There are two broadly resounding challenges: First, no authoritative statement about the nature of things stands on any foundation other than its own network of presumptions. All attempts to credit (or discredit) a given research practice rely on historically and culturally situated agreements within a given community. In terms of research methodology, nothing is required by the nature of things because all methods are born out of presumptions about such matters. In effect, it is the presumptive base, generated within a given community, that makes requirements on methodology. What is learned about the world through employment of a given method will necessarily construct the world in terms of its base. Thus, within the social sciences the subject-object dualism embedded within much logical empiricist metatheory is congenial with a concept of persons as responsive to causal inputs (e.g., behaviorism). Both the positivist metatheory and the associated theories (i.e., behaviorist, cognitivist) give rise to methods of experimentation. In contrast, the humanist assumption of personal agency is more congenial with phenomenological research methods. If persons are defined as harboring unconscious motives, as in psychoanalytic theory, then practices of interpreting dreams and fantasies are upheld.

In effect, the constructionist dialogues serve a profoundly liberating function. They remove the privilege of any group to establish the necessary and desirable in methods of research. In broader terms, they relinquish the grip of methodology as the royal road to truth. Methods themselves do not provide guarantees of objective knowledge, so much as they attest to one's commitment to the realities, values, and practices of a particular community.

Yet, there is a second major outcome of social constructionist ideas for research methods. It is not simply the demise of authority that is hastened by constructionism, but the creation of an open field of possibility. Thus, to understand all knowledge claims as socially constructed is not to render them false or insignificant. Again, it is to recognize that each tradition, while limited, may offer us options for living together. In this way constructionism invites a posture of curiosity, where new methodological amalgams are invited. In recognizing that the realities of today depend on the agreements of today, researchers realize enormous possibilities for methodological innovation.

These two outcomes of the constructionist dialogues have incited intense and broad-ranging controversy within the social sciences and have added force to an enormous creative surge in research methods. At present there are a myriad of questions, dilemmas, and possible trajectories that remain open. In the following section, several more specific implications for qualitative methodology are sketched.

Qualitative Research as Social Construction

Although constructionism makes no necessary demands on either theory or method, many researchers are drawn to the possibility of developing methods congenial with its premises. In particular, the constructionist emphasis on the relational genesis of intelligibility and action stands as a dramatic alternative to the individualist worldview dominating traditional social science. If methods are used to create a conception of the real and the good, is the world community not better served by methods that bring the importance of relationship into prominence as opposed to separation? In this context, there are three significant relationships: the researcher's relationships with the subjects of research, with the audience, and with society more generally. In each case, concerns with relationships lend themselves to particular innovations in qualitative methodology.

Relationship With the Subjects of Research

In traditional research, a strong distinction is drawn between the researcher and the subject matter under study. On the individualist account, the researcher should remain distant and dispassionate, and any relationship with the subject should be standardized and impersonal. In this way, an objective stance can be maintained, and the researcher's theoretical orientation will not bias the research outcome. Yet, as many see it, such relationships can be both alienated and exploitative in character. They also eliminate the subject's voice from determining the conclusions of the research. These concerns with relationships are highly congenial with a variety of innovations in qualitative methods. At the outset, the narrative movement in qualitative research was highly significant in opening a space for the voice of the subject to be heard. Removing the researcher's mediation altogether, autoethnographic methods enable researchers to use their personal experience to illuminate various life-worlds. In action research, it is largely the voices of those to whom the researcher offers services that determine its outcome.

Relationship With the Audience

Traditionally the relationship between researcher and audience is that of teachers to their colleagues. Researchers enlighten their colleagues through reports on their theories and findings. Although this tradition does build viable communities of practice, it is also problematic in its creation of boundaries between communities and in its discouragement of communication with the society at large. Further, the concerns of those under study are typically sacrificed to the conventions and values of the field. In effect, the professional guild uses its observations of society primarily to strengthen itself, with little offered to the society from which the research was taken. Such critique has fueled a variety of methodological developments. For example, some researchers have sought ways of writing collaboratively with their subjects. Others have turned to visual methods of expression, using photographs taken by participants. An active international research group now pursues performance modes of representation, live and on the internet, not only to enrich the rhetorical capacities of the sciences, but also to create forms that appeal to a broad general audience.

Relationship With Society

In traditional, truth-seeking research, the relationship of the science to society tends to be both distant and inconsequential. The researcher's task is to establish what is the case; applications are left to others (i.e., not creators, but users). In effect, communication with the outside world is minimal, as the concerns of the scientific community are not necessarily those of the society. Further, the traditional search for universal principles of human functioning carries with it a conservative politics. The focus is on what must endure as opposed to what can be changed. From a constructionist perspective all research serves the ends of those cultures or subcultures in which it is spawned. And, to the extent that intelligibilities can be transformed, so may patterns of societal life. Thus, for the researcher, the pressing concerns of the society may be prime stimulators of inquiry, and the methods may be tailored to achieve social change. For example, critical discourse methodology is exemplary of research growing from societal concerns and liberatory in its ultimate political goals. Similarly, the myriad methodologies of participatory action research (PAR) are tailored to the specific, change-oriented investments of various, often marginalized groups in society.

-Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen

Further Readings
Gergen, K. J. (1999). An invitation to social constructionism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gergen, K. J. , & Gergen, M. (2000). Qualitative inquiry: Generative tensions. In N. Denzin , ed. & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.) . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gergen, M. , ed. , & Gergen, K. J. (Eds.). (2003). Social construction: A reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

-----Original Message-----
From: The UK Community Psychology Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Marley Charles (NHS FORTH VALLEY)
Sent: Tuesday, 21 June 2011 4:38 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Introductory texts?

Hi all,

Sorry for creating another thread whilst one is on-going.  I was hoping members of the list could suggest good introductory texts on social constructionism and critical discourse analysis?  So far, I've been recommended Vivian Burr's book 'Social Constructionism' as a good introductory text to the area.

Thanks in advance,

Charles


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