This paper consistently sticks to the term “social constructionism” rather than “so-cial constructivism”, with the latter commonly being used in theories of learning and personality. There are instances of the terms being used interchangeably as synonymous and there are authors who stress relevant differences between the two (Ackermann 2001). A Dictionary of Sociology (Marshall & Scott 2009) states both terms, noting that constructivism is customary in psychology and constructionism in sociology. However, the Sage Dictionary of Sociology (Bruce & Yearly 2006) makes use of only “social constructionism” with zero appearances of the term con-structivism. Given this terminological situation, there is a need to justify the concep-tual choice made here. Firstly, the term social constructionism is used throughout the paper to avoid association with constructivism as a line of thought in avant-garde art in early 20th century, and secondly to put accents on the process of construction rather than on the product.
A multitude of theoretical approaches that can critically be seen as social construc-tionist share certain similarities: they insist on critically distancing themselves from assumed and unquestionable knowledge (they problematize the perspective which claims that knowledge is founded upon objective and unbiased observation of the world), they take into consideration the historical and cultural specificity of the cat-egories and concepts we use, and of the ways in which we interpret the world, they
think our versions of knowledge are created in everyday interaction and that our constructions about the world are tightly linked to the relations of power because they have different implications for social action (Burr 2003, 2–5). Andy Lock and Tom Strong (2010, 6–9) enumerate several basic tenets that hold different “schools of social constructionism” together. Firstly, all “schools” are interested in meaning and interpretation as the central characteristics of human activity, which is why the focus is put on language and even private activities can be studied from this per-spective, because they have conversational structure. Secondly, meaning and inter-pretation (understanding) stem from social interaction i.e. the consensus on what symbolic linguistic forms mean. Thirdly, the ways of creating meaning, inherently embedded within socio-cultural processes, are specific to a certain place/space and time. Fourthly, the majority of social constructionists refuse the idea that people possess essential characteristics that science is supposed to discover, because they see people as self-defined and socially constructed participants in shared living. Social constructionists are thus interested in the research on the processes at work in so-cio-cultural spaces that produce discourses within which or through which people are constructed. The result of this affiliation of social constructionism with anti-es-sentialism is the uneasy connection with ideas on realism and consequently science, which is why it tends to be pejoratively seen as relativism. The question has therefore moved from the main enlightenment epistemological concern about the best way to reveal the essence of the world to a post-enlightenment ontological concern and the issue of the creation of new worlds (McHale 1989). Finally, the fifth shared assump-tion of social construcassump-tionist approaches is the critical perspective in the sense of their shared interest in changing social relations in addition to only understanding and explaining them. The roots of such designation of critical science are in Marx’s philosophy, but the entire neo-Marxist reinscription is referred to here as well. This is not to say that Marxism is characterized by social constructionism, but that they share a sensibility, which Ken Gergen described as a move from the search for gen-eralized Truth to research on how what we consider to be true actually functions, what procedures it facilitates and what it disables, who profits from it and who loses (1994, 53).
There are many other classifications of social constructionism. Danzinger (1997) divides it into “dark” continental, which significantly relies on Foucault and subse-quent poststructuralist and postmodern thought, and is interested in power, articu-lation of subjectivity, relativity of knowledge, and “light” Anglo-American, which is
embedded in pragmatic interests and predominantly empirical tradition, but with-out the Carthesian impedimenta. It is important to stress the multiplicity of the sources of the idea of social constructionism, because it is a par excellence example of an idea whose genealogy keeps being distorted. There is often an impression that social constructionism is a Foucauldian idea (Jackson 1999), resting on the obliv-ion that the idea of social constructobliv-ionism was developed in sociology in works of for example George Herbert Mead, Charles Wright Mills, Berger and Luckmann, and in works on social construction of sexuality (e.g. McIntosh, Gagnon), as well as that feminist sociologists like Ann Oakley, Liz Stanley and Christine Delphy had a radical anti-essentialist understanding of gender before Judith Butler and Denise Riley for instance. Such oblivion of various contributions deprives a perspective of its vital analytical tools. The fact that sociological perspectives in feminist theory were once central but have ceased to be so reflects the growth and diversification of disciplines as well as the change of disciplinary hierarchies and intellectual fashion connected with the so called linguistic and cultural turn (also cf. Jackson 1999). A shift from things to words or in other words a shift in formulations of research in-terests from household, labor market and violence to language, representation and identity (politics) does not mean one should lose the materiality of sociological ideas from sight, but only accentuates that issues of language and representation and con-sequently research reflexivity must also be taken into consideration. Maybe many of the approaches would be better described as cultural or linguistic constructionism, because social constructionism takes both micro and macro, social structure and ev-eryday practice into consideration. Our identities are products of individual socially located biographies, socialization, memories and stories around us, but also of the objectives formulated for future.
It is important to reveal extensive intellectual contributions to the development of this idea that many see as causing a Copernican turn in social sciences and human-ities (Lock & Strong 2010, 11). In the overview of the sources of the idea of social constructionism, Lock and Strong (2010) list Giambattista Vico, Husserl’s phenom-enology, Alfred Schütz’s attempt to incorporate philosophical phenomenology into sociology, then Heidegger Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas, Levinas and other her-meneuticians, Marxism, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Mead, Wittgenstein, Bateson, sociol-ogists Goffman, Garfinkel, Giddens and Elias, Foucault, linguist Labov and some discourse analysts, Ken and Mary Gergen, and many more contributors. It is inter-esting for example to single out Vygotsky, because both anti-constructionists and
constructionists rely on his work in their respective argumentation: Ratner (2005, paragraph 30) claims that Vygotsky worked in the tradition that aimed to attain objectivity, together with Marx and Durkheim, while Lock and Strong (2010: 104–
121) see him as significantly influencing the development of social constructionism.
Thus, it is clear that the theoretical background of social constructionism is broad and goes way back in the history of ideas on society. Still, it has only recently been recognized in the fashion of structurally dominant ideas that the phenomena of our experience cannot reveal to us their implications and meanings in an objective way, that they are not neutral tools. Researchers in this tradition mainly use qualitative research methods. However, the disciplines within which they work, that define themselves as scientific, put such researchers in a secondary position, because they pervasively stick to experimental, quantitative and hypothetic-deductive models.
Science has maybe advanced and improved the conditions of our lives, but there is a contradiction in the root of its preference of the experimental approach – at least in the sense that such preference and valuation itself cannot be experimentally es-tablished. Even if it could be, there remains the issue of responsibility for research outcomes. The time we live in confronts us with the questions of human rights, cli-mate change, terrorism and only seemingly arbitrary changes in human lives. The way people experience the world and give it meaning is a product of socio-cultural processes. This means there is a political component of social sciences: facts are dis-cursively constructed in fields of activity and the way they are constructed may em-power some and disemem-power some other actors. This possible political status of facts is of key significance in the globalized world of today.
The problematic (not neutral) academic status of qualitative methodology, leaned against critical tradition, may be well illustrated by debates between researchers who occupy different methodological positions. One such example is elaborated in the following chapter.