Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism

Ian Parker

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780761953777
• eBook ISBN: 9781446236611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Sozialpsychologie

This book charts a clear and accessible path through some of the key debates in contemporary psychology. Drawing upon the wider critical and discursive turn in the human sciences, Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism explores comprehensively the many claims about what we can know of `reality? in social constructionist and discursive research in psychology.

Relativist versus realist tensions go to the heart of current theoretical and methodological issues, not only within psychology but across the social and human sciences. By mapping the connections between theory, method and politics in social research and placing these within the context of the broader social constructionist and discursive debates, the internationally renowned contributors offer the reader an invaluable survey of the debates.

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Realism, Relativism and Critique in Psychology

Ian Parker

This book explores disputed claims about what we can know of reality in social constructionist and discursive research in psychology. Among the questions the contributors address are the following: should pragmatic and relativist views of meaning and the world necessarily be adopted by discourse analysts?; where is ‘the real’ in contemporary critical research in psychology?; and how does the turn-to-language affect, encourage or inhibit perspectives for change? The book explores connections between theory, method and politics in social research, with particular reference to social constructionist and discursive debates in psychology.

Context for the Debates

The last ten years have seen an increasing interest in social constructionist perspectives in psychology in general, and in approaches which locate the stuff of psychology in discourse in particular (Gergen, 1985, 1994; Harré and Gillett, 1994; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Shotter, 1993, Wetherell and Potter, 1992). This represents a critical reflexive movement away from mental paraphernalia in each individual’s head towards a socially mediated and historically situated study of action and experience. Social constructionism makes it possible to conceptualize human psychology as an ‘ensemble of social relations’, and the turn to discourse helps us to reflect on the discipline as part of the powerful ‘psy-complex’ in modern culture which helps constitute and regulate subjectivity (Burman et al., 1996).

There are also, however, serious risks in this social constructionist reworking of psychological concepts. The theoretical resources that critical and discursive researchers have drawn upon are part of a wider discursive turn in the human sciences that carry conservative as well as progressive prescriptions for social activity. At the same time as deconstruction, discourse theory, pragmatism and postmodernism cut away the positivist ground from beneath traditional psychology and relativize their claims about the nature of human nature, these theoretical currents also relativize the truth claims of the critics and sabotage principled resistance to abuses of power in the discipline (Burman, 1990; Gill, 1995). Relativism in social constructionism or discourse analysis could make it difficult for us to sustain the project of a critical psychology.

Realism would appear to provide the solution to this problem, for it both exposes positivist psychology’s pretensions to model itself on what it imagines the natural sciences to be, and it grounds discursive accounts of mentation in social practices whose underlying logic and structure can, in principle, be discovered (Harré, 1983, 1986). Realism and critical realism run alongside the social constructionist attacks on the discipline while preventing a wholesale collapse into discourse idealism (Bhaskar, 1986; Collier, 1994). This solution is not as clear-cut as it seems, however, and ‘realism’ of different varieties is already being mobilized by those sympathetic to mainstream psychology to warrant it as a science and to rebut social constructionist critiques (e.g., Greenwood, 1989, 1991; Rantzen, 1993). It would seem, in this light, that even ‘critical’ realists may end up falling into the arms of science as they look for certainties in this confusing landscape, and only critical relativists who go all the way can really resist the truth claims of psychology (e.g., Curt, 1994; Stainton Rogers et al., 1995).

Many researchers in psychology now perceive a two-fold threat to critical work in the discipline. On the one hand, too many colleagues in the human sciences now assume that a discursive or social constructionist approach necessarily entails a thorough relativist suspicion of radical political engagement in psychology, in and out (Callinicos, 1995; Eagleton, 1991; Geras, 1995; Norris, 1996). On the other hand, too many colleagues in psychology now assume that a realist approach to research necessarily entails our participation in the accumulation of a corpus of knowledge in the discipline and of at least some of the ‘facts’ psychologists think they know about individuals and culture. Our engagement with relativism and realism in this book, in contrast, looks to an account of how psychological facts are socially constructed, how subjectivity is discursively reproduced within present social arrangements, and for an analysis of the underlying historical conditions that gave rise to the ‘psy-complex’ (Burman et al., 1996; Rose, 1989).

The contributors to this book do not represent the whole spectrum of relativist and realist positions that psychology now houses and uses to buttress its disciplinary practices. We have not included conservative relativists who care nothing for the social implications of their arguments or who imagine that everything in the world and human nature can be made and remade at will, or conservative realists who simply care for the scientific status of psychology and for the philosophical arguments that can be recruited to support it against those who wish to change it. Our contributors’ starting point is a critical, or what some would prefer to term ‘reflexive’ inquiry into psychology which is sympathetic to radical research and which would want to situate critical debates in the broader context of debates occurring in the human sciences. There is between them, though, a range of arguments and disagreements about how best to be critical or reflexive. The structure of the book provides one way of making sense of the differences.

The book also explores the way the range of positions represented is also cross-cut by a number of different preferences and aversions. The different degrees of acceptance of a social constructionist argument or a critical realist position also entail a series of contrasting positions over, for example, the integrity of the self (whether constructed or given), the role of psychoanalysis as an interpretative system (whether as corrigible or empirically grounded) which may undermine psychology, or the extent to which psychology reflects or constitutes the ways in which individuals as members of social classes (imaginary or real) understand themselves. The stakes of the realist/relativist debate for a critical perspective in psychology (warranted, perhaps, by realism), or for a multiplicity of critical perspectives (warranted, perhaps, by relativism) are high, and entail a review of many of the positions that traditional psychology takes for granted. One of the tasks of the book is to disambiguate and explore some of the overlaps and confusions of perspective that provoke and then inhibit critique in the discipline.

Mapping the Terrain

Various metaphors are deployed in the following chapters to divide the advocates of different positions (most often the game-plan in Part I) or to bring them together (the main rhetorical strategy in Part II), so that we then see our task as being able to distinguish ‘truth’ from ‘fiction’, for example, or ‘absolutism’ from ‘pluralism’. One of the virtues of social constructionism in general and discourse analysis in particular is that systems of metaphors are revealed to be the stuff of psychology and the social world, they furnish the places where we study the mind and provide us with ways of speaking about what we find (Danziger, 1997; Soyland, 1994). When we remember this, we are then able to step back and understand that we are actually presented with three tasks.

First, we should notice that these distinctions construct particular maps of the problem and perform distinct functions as they attempt to win us to a certain vantage point. If we imagine that relativism is concerned only with fictions as accounts which are patently false, for example, we may then be tempted to find something more certain in ‘truth’, and if realism is presented as a form of absolutism, we may well prefer to opt for something more open in ‘pluralism’. This advice applies as much to those who generously open up a place where the different positions could live alongside each other happily as those who are determined to fight their corner. What sense, for example, would a realist or a relativist make of the possibility of a plurality of truths? Critical realists are happy to accept that scientific inquiry operates in a climate of ‘epistemic relativism’ in which knowledge is always provisional, open to challenge (Bhaskar, 1986; Collier, 1994), and relativists see many varieties of truth as constituted within different discourses or narratives (Burr, 1995; Gergen, 1994).

Secondly, we need to view the various sets of distinctions between realism and relativism made by the contributors, and the lists of associations, precursors and consequences that are grouped under each side as themselves making something when they appear to be clearing something away. Discourse analysis in psychology has been concerned with how systems of terms and turns of phrase are mobilized to make it seem as if things are inside the head as psychological mechanisms or properties rather than functions of discourse (Burman and Parker, 1993; Harré and Gillett, 1994) and to make it seem as if things are ‘out there’ with an uncontestable factual status (Edwards and Potter, 1992; Potter, 1996). It is difficult sometimes to uncouple some of the connections made between terms, in phrases like ‘liberal pluralism’ and ‘fixed truth’ for example, and it can seem as if they go naturally together. That decoupling effort – in a refusal to take existing forms of knowledge for granted, for realist or relativist ends – is something that drives many of the contributors to this volume.

Thirdly, we should appreciate that ‘realism’ versus ‘relativism’ is itself one of those metaphorical constructions, it is not the baseline which the others obscure as they depart from it. Many of the contributors in Part I of the book point out that the opposition between the terms does not accord with the way debates over the nature of reality and conditions of change have been conducted in other disciplines, and contributors in Part II comment on the false dichotomies that are set up if we feel we must view the issue using these terms. This attention to the socially constructed, thoroughly discursive character of the debates should not of itself lead us to one side or the other (or indeed induce us to collapse them both together). While relativists will emphasize the way in which these sets of debates could have been different, realists would want to understand how the terms have come to be fixed and how they position us when we use them.

The commentators in Part II have had to move into this strange terrain from outside. Their contributions are so valuable because they help us reorient ourselves in the debates and find different paths through these competing definitions. Discourse analysis sometimes seems to those outside Britain to be a peculiar local phenomenon and to have a strange grip on social psychology here, even though there are now a good number of examples of discourse analysis in other countries (e.g., Gordo-López and Linaza, 1996; Levett et al., 1997) and the main textbooks here are still firmly wedded to a laboratory-experimental paradigm. Because they are ‘outsiders’ and are concerned with the social consequences of psychological knowledge, the commentaries in Part II have been able to draw attention to the way some of the contours of this terrain are really rather peculiar, and even though all the contributors would think of themselves as being ‘critical’, the debates in Part I of the book are themselves ‘outside’ the strongest currents of critical psychology internationally (e.g., D’Adamo et al., 1995; Fox and Prilleltensky, 1997; Montero, 1987; Nicholas, 1993; Tolman and Maiers, 1991).

To talk about negotiating the terrain here is a metaphor, of course, and it is useful to help us set out realistic expectations as to what we can hope to accomplish. This collection will not ‘solve’ the problem or persuade us once and for all that one side is right. Rather, it helps us see better what the lie of the land is, so that when we meet the different combinations of arguments again we can make judgements about how far down the road we might want to go with them. Let us move into another metaphor, that of framing.

Framing the Debates

The arrangement of the chapters in the book reveals something of the history of these specific debates, located at a particular place and point in time and preoccupied with particular disciplinary concerns. Part I comprises worked-up contributions to a meeting in April 1996 organized by the Discourse Unit, and we have been able to make use of that opportunity for the contributors to set out their positions, discuss agreements and objections from the others and present here a reasoned case which anticipates a range of possible responses. Vivien Burr, who was discussant at that meeting, provides an overview of the different perspectives in which ‘the basis upon which moral and political choices are made’ is her main cause for concern, and she traces her own route from personal construct psychology to worries about how we should decide between a multiplicity of perspectives and where agency might be found in social constructionism. Despite her helpful review of the three ways ‘reality’ seems to function in the debates – as ‘truth’, ‘materiality’ or ‘essence’ – we might also notice an underlying sense in her account that ‘reality’ might serve as a source of certainty, and that the ‘agency’ she wants to save would be a sure point of reference in the uncertain world created by relativists.

As Jonathan Potter’s contribution makes clear at the outset, these arguments are occasioned by that day conference, and a sub-text perhaps is an awareness of what the social, ‘politically acceptable’ stakes might be for these arguments. His description of the variety of rhetorical devices that construct ‘realism’ to persuade us that it is something ‘out there’ and his plea for detailed transcription of everyday talk to represent accurately different kinds of ‘reality construction business’ returns to the question of the social consequences of these debates at the end of his chapter to argue that a more plural politics may be built out of relativism. Andrew Collier also foregrounds political implications, but from a realist perspective, and his defence of realism is taken further with an account of ‘critical realism’ in which explanation does not function simply as another description (which a social constructionist may then be happy to lay alongside other descriptions) but simultaneously as a critique (Bhaskar, 1986). Here Collier introduces a critical realist argument that may rebut relativism’s political quietude and radicalize accounts of how socially constructed things come to be the way they are.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Realism, Relativism and Critique in Psychology
• Part I: Debates
• Part II: Commentaries
• Index