Essay: Qualitative Research Methods

Constuctionism
Hans Peter Lhrs

Is social constructionism taking social

construction seriously?
To answer the question I posed in the headline we first have to have a look
very briefly at what social construction means and what the position of
social constructionism entails. At its very basics social construction is
something all social scientists accept, something that is entirely
unproblematic. This is pointed out by Alvesson and Skldberg (2009: 34),
when they write:
Most social scientists probably adhere to the idea that society and its institutions
are not given, but in some (wide) sense socially created. In this way, most of us are
social constructionists.

So what this passage tells ours is that social construction at its core
means that there are things in reality which are not just there to be
studied but are produced by humans in social activity and thus brought to
be in existence. This bringing into existence of something through social
human activity is what is being referred to by social construction. Of
course this is not her concise definition of social construction. So for the
moment lets move on with this pre-understanding of what social
construction means and have a look at what social constructionism
entails and thereby put the light on how its understanding of social
construction looks like.
Social constructionism - just like Constructivism in general, to which it
belongs - is not a unified program. But there are certain commonalities as
Flick (2004: 88) points out:
What is common to all constructivist approaches is that they examined the
relationship to reality by dealing with constructive processes in approaching it
examples of constructions are to be found at different levels. Social
Constructivism in the tradition of Schtz (1962), Berger and Luckmann (1966) and
Gergen (1985, 1999) enquires after the social conventionalizations, perception and
knowledge in everyday life.

This this picture can be made clearer if one looks at the social
constructionist program on different dimensions I want to briefly look at
four dimensions of central importance and what function social
construction has for social constructionism on these dimensions. In
elaborating on these dimensions I will follow Alvesson and Skldberg
(2009: 35) as well as Morgan and Snircich (1980: 492-495).
These dimensions can be ordered from the less radical to the more radical
ones: On the level of the critical or ethical dimension social
constructionism tries to uncover that many things we held to be naturally
given actually socially constructed, which implies that they can be
changed and should be changed for the better. On the level of the
dimension of sociality or human nature the point is that society is in some
sense produced and reproduced by shared meanings and conventions and
thus socially constructed (Alvesson and Skldberg 2009: 35). By
interacting with one another in the daily lives humans bring into existence
the social world as the continuous process and thus create and recreate it
all the time. On the level of the dimension of epistemology all human
knowledge is socially constructed. This implies that what we know doesnt
need to be in that there is little reason to assume that at this in any way
correct representation of reality. And finally on the level oft he ontological
dimension all of reality is a social construction.
At face value, social constroctivist take social construction thus as serious
as one possibly can. From single phenomena to all of reality is explained
by them as social construction. How then, do they not take social
construction serious?
It becomes obvious if one looks at how social constructionists study social
construction(s): Social constructionists hold that since social reality is a
social construction, the only thing worth investigating is how this
construction is carried out. () Social constructionists tend, unfortunately,
as Bourdieu has pointed out about micro sociologists generally, to stop
where the real fun begins, instead of posing questions such as: 'Why do
people construct society in the way they do?' and 'How do these
constructions function, as patterns of social reality, once they have been
constructed'? (Alvesson and Skldberg 2009: 37)
On an even deeper level many social constructionists hold the patterns
they study not as something not just to be studied in how they arose, but
as something bad or evil which should be changed or abolished. Once one
has made clear how these are socially constructed, it is then, according to
social constructivist, clear that they are entirely contingent on our
constructing of them and thus at least once we are aware oft hat easily
put away with, which they then should or at least be radically altered.
It is thus clear that the socially