The social and historical construction of social constructionism: Prof. KJ Gergen in dialogue

BW: As far as I know, you were trained to do empirical research in your early years. It seems to me that you once were influenced by positivistic version of psychology. As you (1997) yourself stated, you “could establish experimental settings in which precise causal linkages could be traced” (p. 113). Further, “highly sophisticated and well-tested theoretical accounts” generated by these experiments “would not be biased by any particular ideology, political position, or ethical commitment” (p. 114). But then there was a major turning point in your study. How do you explain your theoretical transformation to social constructionism?

KG: I began my training as a social psychologist and was schooled in the principles of empirical science and methods of experimentation. However, as a result of experimental work I was conducting with grants from the National Science Foundation, I found myself reflecting about the assumptions underlying my work. At the request of the editor of social psychology’s flagship journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I published an article in 1973 entitled, “Social psychology as history.” In this article, I questioned the potential for the field to accumulate knowledge of human action. It seemed that scientific descriptions and explanations are inherently value-laden, and by educating the population about social patterns, the grounds are established for altering these patterns. That is, research on conformity subtly warns people against the dangers of conforming; research on obedience is critical of obedience, and so on. I termed these effects of social knowledge on cultural life, enlightenment effects, a concept later articulated by the philosopher Ian Hacking as “looping effects.” If you extend these views you begin to see that knowledge about social life does not accumulate, so much as reflect cultural ways of life at a given point in history. My reflections created enormous controversy at the time, and in many ways placed me under attack. However, in replying to my critics, I also began to think far more deeply about the short-comings of a foundational approach to knowledge. And too, as I began to survey what was taking place elsewhere in the intellectual world, I began to find that I was scarcely alone in my questioning the very idea of foundations of knowledge.

With significant inspiration from the linguistic turn in philosophy, along with developments in the history of science, the sociology of knowledge, and post-structural literary theory, in particular, the rudiments of a social constructionist view of knowledge began to take form. Among other things, it became clear that research could only begin with at least some form of rudimentary theory already in place. Facts do not drive theories; without shared theoretical assumptions, there are no facts. Further, I proposed, the source of this theoretical a priori is not located in individual minds, but in social interchange. In effect, all that we take to be knowledge emerges from and is dependent upon agreements established within social groups. And, given the values inherent in any social group, there is no fundamental separation between fact and value. Scientific inquiry thus becomes a pragmatic endeavor, subject to value-based reflection, and inviting unconstrained creativity.

BW: How would you define social constructionism?

KG: I generally try to avoid the term social constructionism, as that term seems to treat the ideas as complete and fixed. What I see, in contrast, is an array of dialogues about issues of truth, objectivity, values, the nature of persons, and so on that are continuously unfolding—around the world. So there is no fully shared dictum or set of fixed theorems. With this said, I tend to emphasize the way in which our understandings of the real, the rational, and the good—along with the ways of life in which these understandings emerge within the process of relating.

BW: Who has had the greatest impact on your theoretical studies in social constructionism?

KG: By far the most important influence on my work was the later philosophic writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and most centrally his book, Philosophical Investigations (2009). If you understand the implications of this work, you will see that it not only transforms our understanding of philosophic and theoretical inquiry, but the entire concept of social science. Many other theoretical writings have been important. In philosophy, both Dewey and Nietzsche have figured significantly in my constructionist work. In Psychology, Wolfgang Kohler and Sigmund Koch have been especially important, in part because of their ability to look beyond the narrow boundaries of the discipline, and to see psychology in a cultural and historical context. Among my “textual friends” in the social constructionist domain, I would also single out Kuhn, Foucault, Derrida, and Latour. There are so many others ….

BW: The influence of social constructionism has spread beyond academic and national boundaries. How do you understand the dissemination, influence and the future of social constructionism in North America and around the globe?

KG: Constructionist ideas move rather easily around the globe, but struggle for recognition in the US and parts of Europe. They are welcomed for one because they are inclusive. That is, in psychology for example, all forms of theory and research can claim legitimacy; nothing is ruled out. All approaches are equally subject to critical limitations. Everyone has a voice at the table. Such a view invites understanding and collaboration across cultures, instead of division and hegemonic striving.

They are also welcomed because of the way in which they support the activities of psychologists to work collaboratively with the culture in trying to solve its problems. Especially in poorer countries, psychologists have felt they could not engage in laboratory work because they had neither the time nor resources. Thus, they could not become productive professionals. From a constructionist standpoint, working actively with people in our communities is more important than most laboratory research. Writing a research article that is buried in the shelves of a library, and read by almost no one, is far less significant for example, than helping a community to solve its conflicts.

BW: Sure. It is a very important theoretical commitment to solve problems collaboratively in accordance with local practice while being self-conscious about one’s own context. So I was wondering considering China’s specific situation and the problems faced by Chinese psychology, first, what do you think of the growing popularity of your theories in China? Second, how do you understand the possible connections between social constructionism and Marxism? Can social constructionism be in a dialogue with Marx’s critique of political economy?

KG: You must know that I am most pleased to see such growth. I am pleased, for one, because it means the Chinese are wise in seeing the severe limits of mainstream theory and research in Western psychology. The Western attempts to use experiments to reveal the truth about human functioning have offered the world very little of any utility, and in many ways imprisoned the imagination, and promoted an arrogant orientation to the needs of society. I am also happy, because constructionism will invite Chinese culture to explore its own intellectual riches and wisdom, and the ways these riches may fuel theory and research of utility in this country. These same developments will mean that China will expand the resources of the world more generally, and will foster mutually illuminating international exchange.

In addition, there is an important way in which the constructionist dialogues owe a major debt to Marxist thought, and it is largely tied to his critique of political economy. The Marxist argument that capitalist economic theory masked a self-serving ideology of capitalism ultimately offered the form of argument adopted in most Critical School writings across the disciplines. These same arguments also served as one of the major building blocks for social construction, demonstrating as they did (1) the possible ideological basis of virtually all truth claims, including those shared within the sciences and (2) the specious belief that propositions about the world function as pictures or mirrors of this world.

BW: A similar question. In your magnum opus “Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community” (2009), you mentioned that “It should be clear that I do not embark on this journey into relational being as a lone thinker.” (p. xvii) So you presented “The Social Science Legacy” including William James, Erich Fromm, Mary Gergen, and Carol Gilligan, etc., and “Philosophic Inheritance” including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, the later Wittgenstein, and Mikhail Bakhtin, etc. as your intellectual resources. But as we know, Marx’s Thesis VI on Feuerbach argued, “Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”(Marx, 1992, p. 423) It means the theoretical emphasis on social relations in this regard is the opposite of the isolated individualistic image of the human being represented by the figure of Robinson Crusoe and presupposed by the classical economists such as Adam Smith. In The German Ideology, Marx (1845) also claimed that “My relation to my environment is my consciousness” (Marx then crossed it out though). Is this also a form of relational being? Or could we count Marx as one of your “textual companions”? Actually in the same book, you clearly identified the problem of “disciplining” by saying “in a broad sense, the effect of disciplining is the elimination of most of the potentials of its participants.” “An economist must be cautious in exploring literary theory; a physicist who turns to theology is suspect; a psychologist who fancies Marxist theory is looking for trouble.” (Gergen, 2009, p. 209) But if Marx is excluded from the ideal of “Relational Being,” is that another form of “Disciplining” and cause of “Debilitation” as you mentioned?

KG: I appreciate your comments here, and perhaps Marx should have been one of my textual companions in developing the ideas for relational being. I think my hesitation to explore Marxist theory is the result of the way in which its emphasis so often seemed to be on the commune (community or circle of comrades). Yet, as I saw it, by placing the community in the center of concern you essentially repeat a major problem of individualism. That is, both orientations are built around a conception of bounded entities, fundamentally divided. The conception I am trying to develop is that of an unbounded relational process out of which the very concepts of the individual and the community emerge.

BW: If so, namely if we count Marx in, then how could we differentiate Marx’s conceptualization of “relations” and yours?

I read that in your book “The concept of coordinated action, or co-action, was pivotal.” “As proposed, it is through coordinated action—not individual minds—that meaning originates.” (p. 397) “Relational scenarios are coordinated actions extending over time” (p. 107). Even “terms such as ‘thinking,’ ‘remembering,’ ‘experiencing,’ and ‘feeling,’ do not refer to events inside the head of the individual, but to coordinated actions within relationship” (xxviii). In addition, you considered “therapy as Relational Recovery.” “The Power of Coordinated Action” plays an important role in it. “Relational responsibility must itself issue from coordinated action” (p. 365). That being said, it occurs to me that one of Marx’s theoretical opponents, namely, Moses Hess (1812–1875) began to elaborate his own “relational theory” by taking the communication (Verkehr) species-essence (Gattungswesen) of human beings and their co-actions characterized by social relation (Zusammenhang) as the “real being (wirkliches Wesen) of individuals and real ability (wirkliches Vermgen) of human beings” as early as in the 19th century (Hess, 1845). Would you please let us know the difference between Hess’s relational theory and yours? Marx disagreed with Hess’s idea by proposing a new form of “relational theory,” namely the relation of “sensuous-objective (gegenständliche) activity.” In his opinion, the “relation” here has its own definitions rather than a generalized and abstract one. And human social communications or co-actions are but a decided level by a certain form of “mode of production.” In brief, for slaves, being aware of their relational being and how they should be immersed in co-action will not necessarily bring about their own liberation.

KG: I think it could be very interesting to explore the concept of relations embedded in the corpus of Marx’ work, and indeed, within the spectrum of neo-Marxist writing. Again, I have my reservations. Particularly, if you take the position that our forms of relationship are ultimately governed by our material conditions. This form of structuralist explanation lies in contrast to the post-structural form of explanation that I adopt in trying to make sense of relational process.

BW: So, perhaps we could further articulate relational process with historical consciousness. It implies that a new possibility of thinking may be advanced as to how we should deal with the usefulness of theories such as “relations” as an outcome of historically contingent construction. As you also pointed to the role of history, noting that “Silenced is discussion of the historical and cultural processes of meaning-making, processes that define what counts as a problem and a solution.” (Gergen, 2009, p. 281)

KG: My concerns with history and theory certainly began in the 1970s, and while they have not fundamentally changed, new dimensions have been added since those times. The original argument was that the attempt to establish historically transcendent theories of social behavior was misguided. This was an argument against the hypothesis testing form of research in which the goal was to establish something equivalent to fundamental or timeless truth about human social behavior. As I argued, our research is based on actions at a given point in history, and since behavior changes across time, it is impossible to accumulate knowledge; most research either reflects the current or past cultural conditions. In my subsequent writings, I became interested in the fact that there is little psychological theory that takes into account cross-time change. Our research is primarily involved in providing snapshots of human activity at a given time in history. Needed, then, is a historical psychology. In this vein, I edited a book together with Dr Mary Gergen entitled, Historical Social Psychology (1984). When my constructionist work began, however, my concerns expanded. Here, I first joined with critical psychologists whose critiques were aimed at the negative effects of various popular theories (e.g. behaviorism, cognitivism, neuro-psychology) on society. I also began to explore the potential for using theory for the very purpose of altering social consciousness. I wrote about generative theory, that is, theory specifically designed to unsettle existing assumptions and to open new and more promising possibilities for human functioning.

BW: But it seems the possibilities of altering social consciousness are usually attributed to the individual level according to mainstream psychology. Individual subjects observed and manipulated by psychologists in the experiment have always been a typical “Model Animal” of mainstream psychology. It finds an echo with the often (mis)quoted neoliberalist line: “There is no such thing as society! There are individual men and women and there are families” (Thatcher, 1987). How do you articulate social constructionism with the critique of social nominalism of this kind? What do you think of the possible relevance for social constructionism to resolve the “individualized trend” which is dominating psychological studies?

KG: As one of the nominalist critiques goes, constructionists reduce the world to words (e.g. “there’s nothing outside language”) and thus fail to grapple with real-world issues. This would be to misunderstand constructionist ideas. Constructionists point out that together we create understandings of what exist (which are often but not always reflected in language), and these shared understandings guide our actions. As you can also see, this orientation doesn’t rule out individualism, as this is one construction of human action, and useful for many purposes. But we are simultaneously invited to view this tradition critically, and to open a space for creating alternative conceptions.

BW: I once exchanged ideas with Prof Henderikus Stam at the University of Calgary about the dissemination of social constructionism around the world (Wang, 2013). He said that North American social scientists spent a considerable time working through the implications of social constructionism in the 1990s. In his opinion, first, it must be acknowledged that there are several versions of social constructionism both inside and outside psychology. The term came into popular use through the work of Berger and Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality, 1966) and later evolved into what we now take to be social constructionism through the work of you, Rom Harré and John Shotter, among others. However, there are also versions of social constructionism outside of psychology that are different again, particularly in sociology. Some people think that debates about social constructionism will be short-lived since there are two features of social constructionism that are important to note. First, it allows us to recognize that without language and a community of users we cannot locate ourselves in a world. We are in some sense prisoners of language, as Nietzsche had it, but it is working out what is meant by some sense that is the difficult part. Being caught in language does not necessarily mean being a prisoner to it. And recognizing the importance of our socially constituted existence does not mean we cannot try to explore it, alter it, recapture it for alternative meanings, and so on. Second, recognizing the importance of our socially constituted existence is not a research program; it is merely a backdrop or background to our further explorations. Hence, social constructionism is notoriously difficult to elaborate in a forward looking and expansive research enterprise. This may not matter for all concerned, but there is a sense among psychologists that it is always backward looking, ever pointing to what is and saying “ah, but that is merely a social construction.” This is not fair of course to the work of people such as Rom Harré or John Shotter who have attempted to articulate alternative versions of social constructionism. But it does appear as a limit to social constructionism. Do you have any comments to make about these arguments?

KG: Social constructionist ideas did come into prominence in the 1990s, primarily because many of the ideas were central to other intellectual developments, including the replacement of foundational philosophy of science with social accounts of knowledge, the replacement of structuralism with post-structuralism in social theory, the linguistic turn in philosophy, all related to the general postmodern shift in the intellectual and cultural worlds. In a sense, while Berger and Luckmann were an important prelude, their work did not reflect any of these movements, and thus played a less central role in the later trajectory of constructionist thought. It is the case that the predominance of constructionist writings in the early decades were critical, illuminating the constructed character of virtually everything we took for granted, scientific truths among them. However, while this work continues, the newer work is far more constructive, attempting to build new theories, foster new forms of inquiry, and directly engaging with society in creating new practices. For example, I just visited a school system in Wuxi in which they have used constructionist ideas to transform relations among teachers, among administrators, and between teachers and students. These new practices are most exciting. This is but one example among many hundreds I could point to around the world.

BW: I’d like to shift briefly: looking back on your career, what kind of influence does social constructionism have on your personal life?

KG: The effects are enormous, and especially when you add the relational dimension I referred to earlier. At the outset, because I understand what people do in terms of the multiply constructed worlds in which they live, I become much more tolerant and curious than I had been in my “essentialist” days. I don’t jump so quickly into judging whether they are right or wrong but try to understand the worlds in which they live; I may even gain from this curiosity in terms of seeing new ideas or values worth exploring. I also see people’s behavior as more contingent, that is, tied to the conditions in which they live—both physically and in terms of their constructions. This lends itself to an increased optimism in the possibility for change, and a search for creative ways to being about change. Ideas like this are relevant not only to my home life but to the educational institutions in which I work, my relations with colleagues, and in my community.

BW: What would you say to Chinese scholars and practitioners, if they decide to pursue social constructionism in China?

KG: Personally speaking, I think there are enormous potentials. First, you shift away from the traditional view of psychological science as a means of mirroring the world for what it is, that is, giving us a “true picture” of human behavior. The search for The Truth is both divisive and limiting. Psychologists begin to compete as to who has “the real truth,” and when any group believes they are superior to others in this regard, they stop listening. Consider, for example, the wars between cognitivists and behaviorists, and now between the neuropsychologists and virtually everything else psychological. These are more like paradigm clashes, simply different ways of making sense of the world, and each offers certain possibilities while suppressing the others. So, we open new vistas of theory and research practices. This has been especially important in the US with the rapidly expanding interest in qualitative research. As I have argued in recent papers, constructionist ideas also invite us to develop research practices that go beyond reporting on what is now the case, to creating new futures. Here, we move toward pursuing psychological theory and research as a means of bringing about a better world. You don’t separate yourself from the society, with an attitude of “I will observe you and know the truth about you,” but work with people collaboratively to develop multiple understandings, and to take actions that contribute directly to better conditions. Good examples of such research are provided by the many forms of action research, a very important movement in the West.