Conformism or critique?

It would seem important to distinguish accounts of constmctionism where this social dimension of meaning is at centre stage from those where it is not. Using ‘constmctionism’ for the former and ‘constructivism’ for the latter has echoes in the literature, even if the terminology is far from consistent. For example, after referring to the objectivist view that the facts of the world exist independendy of us as observers, Schwandt (1994, p. 125) states that constmctivists ‘are deeply committed to the contrary view that what we take to be objective knowledge and truth is the result of perspective’. Constructivists, he adds, ‘emphasize the instrumental and practical function of theory construction and knowing’.

This constructivism is primarily an individualistic understanding of the constructionist position and Schwandt contrasts it with a genuinely social constructionism:

Kenneth and Mary Gergen also challenge the idea of some objective basis for knowledge claims and examine the process of knowledge construction. But, instead of focusing on the matter of individual minds and cognitive processes, they turn their attention outward to the world of intersubjectively shared, social constructions of meaning and knowledge. Acknowledging a debt to the phenomenology of Peter Berger and Alfred Schutz, Kenneth Gergen (1985) labels his approach ‘social constructionism’ because it more adequately reflects the notion that the world that people create in the process of social exchange is a reality sui generis.

Contrary to the emphasis in radical constructivism, the focus here is not on the meaning-making activity of the individual mind but on the collective generation of meaning as shaped by the conventions of language and other social processes. (1994, p. 127)

It would appear useful, then, to reserve the term constructivism for epistemological considerations focusing exclusively on ‘the meaning­making activity of the individual mind’ and to use constructionism where the focus includes ‘the collective generation [and transmission] of meaning’.

We might apply this distinction to the views of Giddens and Blaikie which we have just been discussing. In these terms, Giddens and Blaikie seem to have a constructivist view of scientific knowledge of the natural world but a constructionist view of scientific knowledge of the social world. The natural scientist constructs knowledge of the natural world by engaging with it in scientific mode, but the social world is already interpreted ‘before the social scientist arrives’. What our considerations to date support is a constructionist view of both.

Whatever the terminology, the distinction itself is an important one. Constructivism taken in this sense points up the unique experience of each of us. It suggests that each one’s way of making sense of the world is as valid and worthy of respect as any other, thereby tending to scotch any hint of a critical spirit. On the other hand, social constructionism emphasises the hold our culture has on us: it shapes the way in which we see things (even the way in which we feel things!) and gives us a quite definite view of the world. This shaping of our minds by culture is to be welcomed as what makes us human and endows us with the freedom we enjoy. For all that, there are social constructionists aplenty who recognise that it is limiting as well as liberating and warn that, while welcome, it must also be called into question. On these terms, it can be said that constructivism tends to resist the critical spirit, while constructionism tends to foster it.

Developing a critical spirit vis-a-vis our inherited understandings is no mean feat. For a start, there is the phenomenon of reification to be reckoned with. We tend to take ‘the sense we make of things’ to be ‘the way things are’. We blithely do that and, just as blithely, hand on our understandings as quite simply ‘the truth’. Understandings transmitted in this way and gaining a place in our view of the world take deep root and we find ourselves victims of the ‘tyranny of the familiar’. Inherited and prevailing understandings become nothing less than, in William Blake’s time-honoured phrase, ‘mind-forg’d manacles’.

Another aspect of the process can be described as sedimentation. Layers of interpretation get placed one upon another like levels of mineral deposit in the formation of rock. No longer is it a question of existential engagement with realities in the world but of building upon theoretical deposits already in place. In this way we become further and further removed from those realities, our sedimented cultural meanings serving as a barrier between us and them. For this reason, Ortega y Gasset describes inherited and prevailing meanings as ‘masks’ and ‘screens’ (1963, pp. 59-63) and warns us that, instead of engaging with the world, we find ourselves ‘living on top of a culture that has already become false’ (1958, p. 100).

Culture, the purest product of the live and the genuine, since it comes out of the fact that man feels with an awful anguish and a burning enthusiasm the relendess needs of which his life is made up, ends by becoming a falsification of that life …

Thanks to culture, man has gotten away from himself, separated himself from himself; culture intervenes between the real world and his real person. (Ortega y Gasset 1958, pp. 99-101)

Kurt Wolff agrees: our received notions blind us to reality (1989, p. 326). For Gabriel Marcel they are ‘closed systems in which thought imprisons us’ (1964, p. 35). John Wild, using the same metaphor, speaks of our ‘imprisonment in a world of our own construction’ (1955, p. 191).

As we shall see in the next chapter, it is awareness of this restrictiveness inherent in cultural understandings that drives the phenomenological endeavour to go ‘back to the things themselves’.

The critical tradition, encountered today most markedly in what we know as critical theory, is even more suspicious of the constructed meanings that culture bequeaths to us. It emphasises that particular sets of meanings, because they have come into being in and out of the give- and-take of social existence, exist to serve hegemonic interests. Each set of meanings supports particular power structures, resists moves towards greater equity, and harbours oppression, manipulation and other modes of injustice and unfreedom.

Not everyone acknowledges the restrictive and oppressive aspects of our cultural inheritance. Many rest content with celebrating the boon without recognising the burden. For some, in fact, the social origin of our ways of understanding the world and living within it is enough to guarantee their objectivity and validity. Nurse researcher Patricia Benner writes in this vein:

No higher court for the individual exists than meanings or self­interpretations embedded in language, skills, and practices. No laws, structures, or mechanisms offer higher explanatory principles or greater predictive power than self-interpretations in the form of common meanings, personal concerns, and cultural practices shaped by a particular history. (1985, p. 5)

Such an optimistic reading of culture stands in sharp contrast to the suspicion of culture found in the critical tradition and in large segments of the phenomenological movement. John Brenkman draws our attention to the ‘resdess consciousness . .. that senses in every work of culture the fact and the effects of social domination’ (1987, p. 3). Here Brenkman is expressly reflecting the attitude of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s own language (1969, p. 256) is even more trenchant: There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’.

Already we are seeing the bifurcation that occurs within constructionist social science and in research emanating from it. We shall be exploring the interpretivist paradigm in the next two chapters. Notwithstanding the critique immanent in some hermeneutics and central to the traditional phenomenological movement, interpretivism is overwhelmingly oriented towards an uncritical exploration of cultural meaning. In contrast, critical theory, along with many streams of feminist

and postmodernist research, invites us to a much more critical stance.

This tension within constructionist research reflects its tortuous history.

The term ‘constructionism’, particularly ‘social constructionism’, derives largely from the work of Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) and from Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1967). The ensuing development took the form of a ‘sociology of knowledge’. Nevertheless, the idea already had a long history when Mannheim, Berger and Luckmann took it up and can be found, for example, in both Hegel and Marx.

Marx’s premise is to the effect that ideology is linked to the economic ‘base’ of society. Those who own the means of production in any society have the power to effect the kind of consciousness that obtains in that society. In his 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx insists:

The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness. (1961, p. 67)

Social being determines consciousness. Marx’s focus on economic power imbues his maxim with a note of radical critique. This critical spirit continues in the phenomenological movement emerging around the turn of the twentieth century. Of this movement Franz Brentano was the precursor, Edmund Husserl the founder, and Martin Heidegger an eminent exponent. Thoroughly imbued with—indeed, predicated upon— the spirit of social constructionism, the phenomenological movement declared itself from the start a philosophy of radical criticism, albeit with none of the economic determinism with which orthodox Marxism is so often charged. Phenomenology became existentialist in purpose and orientation after it was taken up by Ortega y Gasset, a self-professed existentialist (O’Connor 1979, p. 59) and Heidegger, who consistendy denied that he was existentialist but presented human beings in existentialist terms for his own purposes. Existential phenomenology, spearheaded in France by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is militantly anti-objectivist and thoroughly constructionist.

The critical thrust of constructionism was also maintained with vigour in parallel developments on the other side of the Adantic. The early exponents of American pragmatism—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey—were constructionist and critical. Unfortunately, pragmatism came to be popularised in forms that may have left it constructionist but effectively obscured its critical character. So effectively, and so quickly, was this accomplished that at various points the earlier pragmatists themselves came to be charged with the sins of their followers.

Thus we find Lewis Mumford describing the pragmatism of James and Dewey as an ‘attitude of compromise and accommodation’—as ‘pathetic’ acquiescence, even (1950, pp. 39, 49). Social critic Randolph Bourne, himself a pragmatist and an associate of Dewey, similarly deplores the uncritical character he sees pragmatism assuming in his contemporaries, including his erstwhile mentor. He wants pragmatism’s openness, optimism and progressivism to be tested ‘inch by inch’. It is not enough, Bourne claims, merely to clarify the values we hold. We ‘must rage and struggle until new values come out of the travail’ (Bourne 1977, p. 345). In Bourne’s view, as Walzer makes clear (1989, p. 58), ‘mere eagerness for action and effectiveness, the realist’s search for “influence”, is a vulgar pragmatism’. Mumford too looks for ‘the values that arise out of vision’ and deplores the inability of a pragmatism like Dewey’s ‘to recognize the part that vision must play’. The lack of vision and the consequent lack of values mean ‘a maceration of human purposes’, Mumford claims (1950, p. 48). ‘We are living on fragments of the old cultures, or on abortions of the new.’

Bourne made his comments in the context of the United States’ entry into World War I. Much later, during World War II, Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer accused pragmatism of being ineffective and accommodating even vis-a-vis the Holocaust. Horkheimer directed this 1944 diatribe at Dewey in particular, as the source of the ‘most radical and consistent form of pragmatism’ (1974, p. 48). According to Ross Posnock, Horkheimer succeeded in ‘creating a rift that has reified into a general assumption among historians that pragmatism and critical theory are irreconcilable’ (1991, p. 79).

These charges against pragmatism are harsh and, insofar as they are levelled against the founders of pragmatism, betray a simplistic and distorted reading of pragmatism. Still, it needs to be noted that many followers of Peirce, James and Dewey have themselves been simplistic and distorting in what they put forward in the name of pragmatism. In their case, allegations of conformism and compromise can be said to be well founded. It must also be said that the rhetoric of some of the earlier pragmatists readily lent itself to misinterpretation.

One of the great names in the history of pragmatism is philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863-1931). It is from the thought of Mead that symbolic interactionism was bom. Symbolic interactionism is pragmatism in sociological attire. In Mead’s thought every person is a social constmction. We come to be persons in and out of interaction with our society. The ‘Me’—the self as constmcted via the ‘generalised other’—plays a central role in the process. Mead’s social behaviourism embodies a thoroughly social point of view. In the Meadian analysis, human behaviour is social in origin, shaped by social forces, and permeated by the social even in its biological and physical aspects. Consequendy, Mead wants us to ‘see the world whole’. Our ability to do that is developed socially through ‘entering into the most highly organized logical, ethical, and aesthetic attitudes of the community’ and coming to recognise ‘the most extensive set of interwoven conditions that may determine thought, practice, and our fixation and enjoyment of values’ (Mead 1964, p. 337). While Mead’s thought is carefully nuanced, it has proved only too easy for his followers to slip from this account of the social genesis of the self to the grateful, unquestioning stance towards culture adopted by most interpretivist researchers today.

Here, then, is the dichotomy we discover within constmctionist research. Whatever Mead’s own thought, the symbolic interactionism that derives from him envisages a world far removed from that of critical inquirers. The world of the symbolic interactionist, like that of pragmatism as commonly conceived, is a peaceable and certainly growthful world. It is a world of intersubjectivity, interaction, community and communication, in and out of which we come to be persons and to live as persons. As such, it contrasts with the world that the critical theorist addresses. The world of the critical theorist is a batdeground of hegemonic interests. In this world there are striking disparities in the distribution of power: some people have dominant power; others have far less power; most have no power at all. This is a world tom apart by dynamics of oppression, manipulation and coercion. Research methodologies basing themselves on the one and the other of these two envisaged worlds will be very different methodologies addressing very different purposes.

It may need to be re-emphasised that the chasm in constmctionist thought being pinpointed here is between the critical approach and popularised versions of pragmatism. In its origins and its high points, pragmatism has more than enough in common with both phenomenology and critical theory for fruitful dialogue to take place. There are signs that a dialectic of this kind is emerging.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.