chapter 5 - constructivism and interpretive theory

Question 1

social construct

Answer 1

ideas, beliefs, norms, identities or some other interpretive filter through which people perceive the world

constructivism pays attention to the role of interpretation (social construct) in action

Question 2

origins of constructivism

Answer 2

late 19th century

• Durkheim: societies held together by ‘social facts’ of culture rather than ‘natural/material facts’
• Weber: ideas and culture define what people see as their interests (e.g. Protestantism indirectly led to the rise of capitalism)

popular/big by the turn of the century, got labeled ‘‘constructivism’’
- Parson: ‘political culture’ (criticism: it is tautological)

many different strands of constructivism -> sign of strength (displays range of tools and logics that could be developed from its basic insights) + fierce fights over what constructivism is and how it is distinctive from other approaches

Question 3

explanation vs understanding

Answer 3

Weber

explanation = causal level: show how someone’s action followes predictably from certain conditions

understanding = level of meaning: how well it captures how the actor interpreted what they were doing (traces how people arrived at their action)

Weber: a valid causal interpretation always covers both

Question 4

constructivism and insider vs outsider accounts

Answer 4

development/hardens explanation/understanding line:

• outsider accounts: present natural science-style causal explanations of patterns in action
• insider accounts: interpret meanings, perceptions and he process of action

*some constructivists argue that there are always 2 stories to tell
*some constructivists argue that there are only insider/understanding accounts applyable to people (they don’t act automatic stimulus-response)

Question 5

David Hume

Answer 5

argued that causality isn’t actually observable

to explain = to provide a set of patterns across cases in which A always precedes B
- establishing correlation rather than causality

this is the definition of explaining that Weber uses in is understanding/explaining distinction

! this is not the definition most political scientists use today: they want to see some proof of causality, not just note correlation

Question 6

causal arguments vs constitutive arguments

Answer 6

Wendt

causal-explanatory scholarship asks: Why?

constitutive (constructist-style) scholarship asks: How? What?

Constructivism is mainly interested in constitutive argumentation and not in causal argumentation (establish static identity, not causality)

some constructivists argue that people invented new ideas and that these ideas lead to new actions in a rather traditional, dynamic, causal-explanatory way

Question 7

deepest point of constructivism

Answer 7

the natural world is meaningless and indeterminate for human action until we begin to socially construct some shared meanings about it

Question 8

non-constructivist theorists about ideas and norm

Answer 8

ideas an norms we appear to believe in are congealed rationalisations of some set of roughly rational responses to some real/non-socially constructed incentives and constraints

so:
ideas and norms aren’t constitutive of anything, they are by-products of rational political action (Marx: superstructure)

Question 9

main debate constructivism and non-constructivists about norms and ideas

Answer 9

about whether people arrived at ideas or norms as a roughly rational reaction to objective conditions
or through a process of social construction

Question 10

contingency

Answer 10

onvoorspelbaarheid

contingency puts constructivism in a special position:

• non-constructivists explanations are enemies of contingency: not an integral part of theorising
• constructivists: root their arguments in contingency: there some set of real conditions, but one only arrives at a course of action as they adopted certain social constructs (it did not have to be this way: other constructs could have led to other actions)

Question 11

epistemological variations within constructivism

Answer 11

about subjectivity of academic observers

Modern constructivists:
- we can posit social construction among actors but still manage to make some acceptable claims about how the socially constructed world really works
- being aware of our bias helps us to solve the problem
- we can show how much the world is socially constructed

Postmodern constructivists: interpretivism
- social construction means that science itself is political, power-focused rather than objective about a real world

Question 12

modern constructivism

Answer 12

• we can posit social construction among actors but still manage to make some acceptable claims about how the socially constructed world really works
• being aware of our bias helps us to solve the problem
• we can show how much the world is socially constructed

Question 13

Postmodern constructivists

Answer 13

interpretivism

• social construction means that science itself is political, power-focused rather than objective about a real world

Question 14

socialisation

Answer 14

suggests that norms or ideas spread in a relatively incremental, evolutionary way generated by repeated interaction within groups

socialisation can be seen as the way social construction operates

socialisation suggests a diffused, decentralised, collective and consensual process in which a group of people work their way to certain norms or ideas

it implies relatively low levels of contestation and variation within groups

social construction as something that evolves almost without the consciousness of the actors

Question 15

persuasion

Answer 15

entrepreneurial people: invent ideas an sell them to others
- are carriers of norms and idas

persuasion argumentation sees social construction as relying on explicit advocates

carriers purposefully manage to spread ideas due to persuasion, force of new concepts or the indirect ‘fit’ of the new ideas with existing ideas or norms

Question 16

mechanisms of social construction

Answer 16

• persuasion
• socialisation
• bricolage

Question 17

bricolage

Answer 17

bricolage: to tinker

we tend to develop ideas and norms and practices to suit rather discrete problems and goals -> complex landscape of overlapping realms of action + social constructs

believes in a world of incoherence (not consensual, collective identities), a world with an ‘externalised’ relationship to ideas and norms

socially constructed change is decentralised, incremental: people placed at intersections of a landscape of incoherent norms and ideas generate new lines of action in an entrepreneurial way, but don’t necessarily persuade or impose, instead they simple feed back to alter future possibilities in the shared toolkit (of different social constructs?)

Question 18

different methods

Answer 18

Different with constructivists

• constructivists with IR-focused training: proces-tracing over time to show how ideas or norms inform actions
• comparative political economy: small-N cross-national comparisons to show how ideas or norms generate modes of action across cases
• poststructural: discourse analysis and deconstructionist critique
• social institutionalists: multiple methods, build around quantitative analysis of changing patterns in norms, models and action over time
• IR-trained constructivists + poststructuralists rely on counterfactual comparisons (arguing that certain people could/would have acted differently given the presence of other imaginable social constructs)

proces tracking is a central part of every constructivist methodology, but it isn’t as distinctive to constructivism as many scholars tend to think

demonstration of constructivist claims through large-N comparisons is beginning to appear in political science + is common in sociology

Question 19

process-tracing

Answer 19

to seek evidence of the pressures, incentives, motivations and decision-making calculus in any given instance of action

instructs to provide ‘within-case’ evidence of mechanisms (mostly: what evidence do we have that the actor held … views)

! note that this doesn’t distinct constructivism from other approaches: they seek some evidence of mechanisms and processes

Question 20

constructivism substantive?

Answer 20

yes, it offers a distinct substantive view of how and why the political world forms and hangs together: a landscape of ideas, norms, identities and practices

people only arrive at certain actions due to their adoption of certain social constructs to interpret their world

Question 21

Parsons

Answer 21

writer of this chapter

argues (with some other constructivists) that constructivists must engage with non-constructivist approaches, not to find some middle ground, but to highight how constructivism tells another story

Question 22

constructivism as a distinctive competitive within the social science vs as a separate scholarly endeauvour

Answer 22

debatable
- Why? / What?

separate scholarly endeavour: human action can’t be studied like other scientific topics, scholarship about politics should aim at interpretations of actors’ interpretations, not the chimerical lures of causality and explanation
- kind of denies other approaches

distinctive competitive within the social science: constructivism next to other approaches that offer alternative explanations + adressing non=constructivist approaches to highlight how constructivism is different, we must adress the view that social construction doesn’t shape the world to proof/show/investigate it does shape the world