What does this mean for traditional institutional boundaries?

Clearly constructionism cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries.  In many cases current boundaries are a product of particular views of the social and human sciences that were established during university expansion after the Second World War, particularly in the US and UK.  Lack of expansion in the late 70s and 80s during the proliferation of constructionist approaches has meant that there is often a disparity between the intellectual and bureaucratic structure of departments.  Constructionist researchers in psychology often have more in common with colleagues in areas of linguistics or sociology of science than they do with their colleagues who study ganglion sprouting or the ergonomics of car dashboards.  

One of the challenges for constructionists is to be able to thrive in the traditional structures while operating in a genuinely interdisciplinary manner.  This can cut both ways — at times it can be a struggle to establish to legitimacy of this kind of research with more mainstream psychological colleagues; yet at other times it can be a context that allows superficial theorizing and loose analysis.  

Is constructionism the same as social constructionism and constructivism?

In psychology work has normally proceeded under the title social constructionism with concern being expressed that social constructivism could be confused with the artistic movement known as constructivism (Gergen, 1985).  In contrast, in sociology of scientific knowledge constructivism is a well established perspective (with no concern about the artistic movement), but constructivism (without the social) is increasingly favoured over social constructionism (cf. Latour and Woolgar, 1979, 1986).  One reason for this is that social construction is associated here with rather limited perspectives which relate knowledge to scientists’ social background and group allegiances.  However, sociological constructionists often see such accounts as reductive (Mulkay, 1979; Woolgar, 1988).  Moreover, they may want to make recourse to processes in texts and rhetoric which are not social in this more traditional way (Knorr-Cetina, 1995).  More radically, they have started to question the coherence of the very distinction between the social and non-social (Latour, 1987). 

Is there something that could be called a constructionist method?

The short answer to this is no.  If anything there is even more variation of method than of theory.  For many of these approaches it is not clear that there is anything which would correspond to what psychologists traditionally think of as a method.  Perhaps the most appropriate consideration in many cases would be what Billig (1988a) calls scholarship.  That is, lack of method in the sense of a formally specified set of procedures and calculations, does not mean a lack of argument or rigour; nor does it mean that the theoretical system is not guiding analysis in various ways.

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For the rest of this chapter, I want to concentrate on discourse analysis which is an approach where it makes more sense to talk about research method.  Although even here method is understood very differently than is normal in psychology.  For example, one point of contrast is in the justification of ‘results’.  In much traditional psychological work, justification is provided by carrying out the procedure of analysis correctly and fully.  A sample is collected, some ‘variables’ operationalized, conventional statistical tests are carried out, and so on.   In contrast, in discourse analysis, the analytic procedure is largely separate from how claims are justified.

What is discourse analysis?

Discourse analysis focuses on talk and texts as social practices, and on the resources that are drawn on to enable those practices.  For example, discourse analytic studies of racism have been concerned with the way descriptions are marshalled in particular contexts to legitimate the blaming of a minority group (Potter and Wetherell, 1988), and with the resources (‘interpretative repertoires’) that are available in a particular cultural setting for legitimating racist practices (Nairn and McCreanor, 1991; Wetherell and Potter, 1992).  

Discourse analysts have focused on issues of stake and accountability, looking at the way people manage pervasive issues of blame and responsibility (Antaki, 1994; Edwards and Potter, 1993; Gill, 1993) and have studied the way descriptions are put together to perform actions and manage accountability (Potter, forthcoming).  For example, Edwards (1994) studied ‘script formulations’ in a set of telephone conversations, showing the way events could be described to present them as regular and routine, to treat them as a characteristic consequence of personal dispositions or, to make them out as an unusual result of outside pressures.  Such descriptions manage questions of fault and provide legitimation for courses of action.

Discourse analysts have rejected the traditional cognitive explanations of psychology.  Rather than try and explain actions as a consequence of mental processes or entities, their interest has been in how mentalist notions are constructed and used in interaction.  For example, instead of attempting to explain sexism, say, in terms of the attitudes of individuals, the concern is with how evaluations are managed in particular interactions, and either linked up with, or separated from, individuals (Gill, 1993; Wetherell, et al., 1987).

These are some of the characteristic strands of discourse work, but they do not define it.  New studies are being done, pushing back the limits of discourse work and the problematics of discourse analysis are providing a new take on a range of psychological issues.