The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
might build a new form of dialogue inspired by practices in organizational development, education, and collaborative action research. A therapist whose practice has traditionally relied on verbal exchange may find it inspiring to incorporate Buddhist meditational practices and role playing. In effect, with an open ear to the many voices of the world, a new wave of innovative practices is spawned.
Values in Action
As outlined, in challenging the assumption of value-free knowledge, the constructionist dialogues thrust issues of human value back into the center of social science concern. Where positivist science had seen moral and political values as biasing research outcomes, scholars began to place values at the center of their efforts. Scholarly work could serve as a vehicle for social transformation. One of the most visible results was the emergence of curricula in critical studies – in education, psychology, economics, management studies, sociology, cultural theory, race theory, social work, and nursing among them. These were accompanied by relevant innovations in research methods, including critical discourse analysis, feminist methodology, critical text work, decolonized methodologies, and more. For some scholars, the chief goal of qualitative research is equated with social justice.
As this recognition of the values inherent in otherwise commonplace practices circulated among practitioners, a new source of innovation was unleashed. No longer, for example, were therapists content to embrace a therapeutic practice by virtue of its evidence base. Rather, they pressed on to develop new forms of therapy that might favor a more just, compassionate, or egalitarian society. Practices aimed at supporting and empowering women, minorities, and immigrants, are illustrative, along with practices that legitimated spiritual beliefs, and non-Western ontologies. Both narrative therapy (White and Epston, 1990), and social therapy (Holzman, 2014) indeed functioned as consciousness-raising practices, tracing individual ills to societal problems. In many schools, these ideological energies gave rise to new practices of inclusion, critical pedagogy, restorative justice, environmentalist curricula, and anti-bullying activities. For many businesses, a range of new initiatives began to emerge, variously invested in environmental sustainability, social equality, and the well-being of the laborers who served them. The Business as an Agent of World Benefit initiative is emblematic, in its efforts to support just such activities.
Regenerating Conceptual Tools
The constructionist dialogues liberated both academics and practitioners from the demands of authority, invited appreciation of multiple traditions, and opened the way to cementing values to innovation. At the same time, however, the constructionist dialogues drew from across multiple intellectual traditions – philosophy, literary theory, political theory, rhetoric, symbolic anthropology, micro-sociology, and the history of science among them. Most all these sources were absent from mainstream social science itself. Thus, as constructionist dialogues spilled across the professions, so was a rich repository of new logics and concepts introduced.
The concept of narrative is illustrative. While largely a child of literary theory, the idea of narrative played an important role in constructionist dialogues. As outlined earlier, in representing the world in spoken and written language one must follow the conventions or rules of language itself. There are strong conventions for describing events across time. Informally, these are conventions for telling a good or plausible story; most relevant, the rules of narrative are pivotal to our constructions of the world. The logic of narrative construction has subsequently made its way across the worlds of practice. Narrative therapy (Freedman and Combs, 1996), narrative mediation (Monk and Winslade, 2013), and narrative medicine (Charon, 2006), are among the most obvious derivatives. Closely related, the concept of the storyteller has also made its way into practices of pain management, organizational leadership, educational pedagogy, and peace building.
Yet, while the constructionist dialogues have unleashed energies of innovation in professional practice, the relationship between scholarship and practice is also synergistic. Innovations in practice have also fueled the fires of theory. As constructionist scholars have directed their attention increasingly to consequential action, often working side-by-side with societal change makers, new theorizing has been inspired. For example, in just this way one may justifiably understand developments in the theory of coordinated management of meaning (Pearce and Cronen, 1980; Wasserman and Fisher-Yoshida, 2017), dialogical self theory (Hermans and Kempen, 1993), positioning theory (Harré, and Moghaddam, 2003), relational theory (Gergen, 2009), performance and arts-based research theory (Gergen and Gergen, 2012; Leavy, 2019), actor-network theory (Latour, 2005), practice theory of leading (Raelin, 2016), process theory of organizations (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019), embodiment theory (Shotter, 2010) and feminist constructionist theory (M. Gergen, 2001). The same may be said for a plethora of powerful new concepts, such as the discursive mind, radical presence, generative moments, relational responsibility, withness as opposed to aboutness, poetic activism, and phonetic capacity. Increasingly, however, this cross-fertilization between scholar and practitioner groups becomes an ever-blurring line. The term scholar practitioner does not specify the location of one's occupation.
The Return of Optimism
As outlined, the optimism that sparked the early development of the social sciences can be traced in part to the promise that scientific research could solve social problems. We have glimpsed some of the reasons that the sciences could not realize these promises. However, the logics of positivist science also came to inform the attempts of practicing professionals to bring about change. One of the central logics has proved deeply problematic for practitioners, namely the logic of causality. As most educated professionals could agree, an individual's actions are neither random nor the result of voluntary whims but are determined by conditions – either environmental or hereditary. As proposed, our social institutions such as education, government, and business are similarly governed by causal conditions. Thus, as the logic goes, in order to bring about change, one must devise means of controlling or manipulating the causal conditions. Among the most visible illustrations of this orientation are Fordism in the world of work, the behaviorist movement in therapy, curriculum-centered education, the use of punishment to reduce crime, and the new public management practices of today.
Yet, while the logic is compelling, the results have been largely disappointing. In large measure, the problem with a causal approach has stemmed from the resistance and/or cleverness of those whose actions are being ‘improved’ or ‘corrected’. In the attempt to change others, a distance is often placed between the change agent and the ‘object’ of change. The former may be seen as coercive, manipulative, calloused, and dehumanizing. Feelings of resentment, suspicion, and distrust may be set in motion, triggering the development of counter-strategies – resisting or punishing those in power, or attempting to profit from the situation. Work slow-down, resistance groups, whistleblowing, cheating on tests, selling one's prescriptions, or colluding with the powerful to game the system, are all common.
From a constructionist perspective, the concept of causality is a cultural construction, one form of explanation among others. Whether a change-making practice is based on such a logic is a matter of deliberation – both pragmatic and ideological. Informed by this view, many practitioners have shifted their logic from causality to the co-construction of meaning (McNamee and Hosking, 2012). If together we co-construct and sustain our ways of life, it is reasoned, then this same process may be key to transformation. As many constructionists put it, if we change the conversation, we may change the future. This is indeed an optimistic vision, and has played a major role in the creation of dialogic practices for change – in organizations, therapy, peace building, education, medicine, and elsewhere. It is at the heart of movements such as the New OD (Marshak and Bushe, 2015), brief therapy (de Shazer, 1994), Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005), and creativity by design (Lipmanowicz and McCandless, 2013).
Challenges to Full Flowering
We find ourselves, then, in a condition of considerable consequence. With an exhilarated sharing of ideas and practices across a wide range of professions and nations, a burst of innovative activity has followed. Can we anticipate a continuing cascade of contributions to human well-being? By bringing potential