What is ‘reflexivity’ and what is ‘social constructionism’?: Writing in the postmodern as research practice
Research in the postmodern is often concerned with textual critique rather than formal experiment or ‘flesh and blood’ social investigation. Derrida famously claimed that there is nothing outside the text, although ‘text’ is taken to include social (linguistic, conversational, communicative and signifying) practices. Alvesson and Skoldberg (2000) refer to the postmodernists’ interest in ‘destabilising text’. An author who explicitly researches his own texts as he writes them, through persistent reflexivity, is the psychologist Kenneth Gergen. I have chosen some writing by Gergen (2001) on pedagogy, to illustrate how text that sets out to research a topic can also be seen to interrogate its own purposes. To ‘reflect’ is necessary but not sufficient for postmodernists, who talk about a more critical process of ‘reflexivity’ or ‘reflexive methodology’ (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000; Bleakley, 1999). Reflection may stay at the level of personal confessional account and description of events. Reflexivity involves a ‘second look’, re-search, or ‘re-vision’ (Hillman, 1992), in which, for example, the educational practice or textual practice that is reflected upon is ‘situated’ historically, culturally and socially. It is not taken as transparent, unproblematic or simply ‘given’, but as constituted. The conditions of possibility for the constitution of the practice (its emergence), its continuance (legitimacy), and consideration of other competing perspectives or practices that may resist the given practice, are taken into consideration as claims are made for the practice. In other words, a persistent self critique operates. This in its own right can be seen as an important capability in postmodern research.
Gergen (1999) is one of the leading exponents of social constructionism. This view, as I have already outlined, suggests that every phenomenon, including the ‘natural’ world, as well as the social world, is given meaning through human conversation and cultural process, or is ‘constructed’. Phenomena are not ‘discovered’ and then described, as positivists would suggest. Established communities of practice operate to legitimate and disseminate constructions, or to offer formal resistance to dominant constructions. Gergen challenges especially individualist cognitive constructivists (such as Piaget) who suggest that the world acquires meaning as it is filtered through internal, personal cognitive schemata, which are open to developmental process. Rather, the ‘schemata’, or constructions, giving meaning to acts, are ‘developed’ and held socially (historically and culturally) in texts, traditions and practices, and one of these constructions is the ‘personal’. A new movement in educational practice (primarily studying ‘cognitive apprenticeship’) calls this ‘distributed’ learning and knowledge (Wenger, 2000; Bleakley, 2002). A clear example would be a construct such as ‘intelligence’. There is no such ‘thing’ as intelligence, in the view of social constructionists. Rather, it is a construct that comes about through particular social groups (communities of practice, such as scientists or psychologists) generating talk and text about ‘intelligence’. Such groups do not ‘find’ intelligence, but constitute intelligence through their social practices concerned with the topic. This does not mean that the idea of a social construct such as ‘intelligence’ is wrong. It means that we should recognise that such constructs may be relative – not universal, invariant or transcendental (given conditions), but local and unstable.
Gergen’s (2001) chapter ‘Social Construction and Pedagogical Practice’, written with Stanton Wortham, offers a social constructionist alternative to contemporary pedagogy that challenges both ‘endogenic’, or mind-centred, and ‘exogenic’, or world-centred views. Advocates of mind-centred views stress the importance of nature over nurture, where advocates of world-centred views stress the importance of the environment over what is inborn. However, as Gergen points out, both espouse the same dualist epistemology, of subject-object opposition. Knowledge is neither ‘in’ the person, nor ‘in’ nature to be experienced, but is produced or constructed through social relations, dialogue and social practices, themselves embedded in changing (unstable) historical and cultural traditions. Further, they are problematic in that both positions are blatantly ideological. Gergen’s project is to offer an alternative model of pedagogy suggesting ‘new ranges of practice’ (p.115). He points out that if education is a preparation for participation in democracy, then discipline-driven learning confounds such preparation. Social constructionism recognises that ‘all claims to knowledge grow from culturally and historically situated traditions.’ (p.127) Values informing practices are contingent: ‘circumscribed and negotiable’. Disciplines should not be monologues to be mastered, but resources for particular conditions of living. By situating knowledge, a shift from monologue to dialogue (from hierarchy to heterarchy) is invited, as is deliberation, or reflexive consideration, of the subject matter. Disciplines invite the expression of one voice and form of life possibly at the expense of others, negating democracy. Gergen calls rather for a ‘polyvocality’. In crossing discipline boundaries, he suggests a postmodern research technique: students would be ‘free to roam across whatever domains are necessary in terms of their goals – ransacking, borrowing, extricating, annexing, combining, reformulating and amalgamating in any way necessary for the most effective outcome’ (p.129). This is usually referred to, drawing from artistic tradition, as a method of bricolage, where the researcher is the bricoleur.
Gergen is not specifically researching others’ texts or practices, although he quotes from texts and from textual representations of practices. Rather, he offers ‘reflexive deliberation’ within his own text (p.132). Pointing to the problems of ‘insulation’ of professional communities, leading to lack of collaboration and proper interdisciplinary activity, he suggests that this is because communities construct themselves in ignorance of reflexive deliberation about their discursive self-formation and continuation: the basis to their knowledge structure, ideologies and values. Gergen thus calls for what is effectively a research strategy underpinning a possible methodology: ‘means are required for opening the authoritative languages to reflexive deliberation.’ This is the ‘hidden curriculum’ of any discipline. Reflexive deliberation cannot be confined to critique, which tends not to appreciate, but to silence, the voice of the critiqued, and so must be supplemented by ‘appreciative inquiry’ (p.133), for ‘The point of reflexive deliberation is not to widen the chasm between cultural enclaves, but to enrich the forms of cultural life through processes of inter-weaving.’ Gergen thus implicitly refers to the repressed aesthetic and ethical dimensions in traditional research.
In his ‘Introduction’, Gergen (2001) sets out the social constructionist perspective and the research methodologies it has spawned: ‘constructionist dialogues are triggering dramatic developments in methodology; what is now referenced as the "revolution in qualitative research" can be traced directly to constructionist lines of thought. Narrative methods, collaborative methods, auto-ethnography and performance methods are illustrative.’ Such research agendas have been part of what has ‘brought constructionism into a productive self-consciousness’ (p.3). It is precisely this self-consciousness, as reflexive methodology, that is the crowning aspect to the constructionists’ work: to be meticulously, indeed obsessively, reflexive. First, any perspective must acknowledge and learn from effective criticism of its position. Thus Gergen readily points to the retort by scientists in particular that constructionism ‘undermines warrants for truth claims’. Ideologists see ‘constructionism’s moral and political relativism pallid if not reprehensible’, and ‘still others find that constructionism has been all too occupied with critique, and its substantive contribution to social understanding too narrow.’ (p.3).
That Gergen can introduce content and argument without ducking these criticisms is evidence of one kind of reflexivity at work. A second kind of reflexivity is to recognise where critique has its limits and where postmodern pluralism must also include tradition: ‘there is no attempt … to abandon traditions of longstanding. … constructionism makes no claims to being a first philosophy, a foundation upon which a new world may be erected.’ (p.124). A third kind of reflexivity is self-critique: ‘I sense that constructionist arguments (even my own) have too often functioned as a sword, with the elimination of empirical study, ethical foundationalism, realism and so on as its seeming goal. In my view there is nothing about constructionism that is so nihilistic.’ (p.4). Gergen points to the overdrawing of arguments and the overlooking of advantages in traditions constructionism appears to see as ‘bankrupt’: ‘I try to reflect critically on constructionist endeavours. Just possibly such reflexivity can encourage the antagonists to free up the voices of doubt they too inherit.’ (p.4)
Read ‘Introduction’ and Chapter 7: ‘Social Construction and Pedagogical Practice’ from Kenneth Gergen (2001) Social Construction in Context. London: Sage.
This summary of Gergen’s chapter, modelling reflexive research, may leave you thinking: ‘yes, I have "got" social constructivism, but I am still hazy about its central element of reflexivity as a methodology for inquiry.’
I think we need to cultivate two key ‘ways of being’ as a researcher to successfully research in the postmodern. These attributes, or attitudinal factors, can be taken as a method in their own right. The first is an ethical values stance of reflexivity. George Marcus (1998) warns against a ‘holier than thou’ stance of researchers in the postmodern, where ‘my reflexivity is more pronounced than yours’. While reflexivity is about relativising, it is not about moralising. Indeed, the reflexive stance is ethical because it offers an attitude of care within research. The researcher is careful to not impose, patronise, paternalise, refusing the emancipatory stance of politicised research for this very reason. Marcus (1998, p.394) suggests four ‘styles of reflexivity’:
First, a critical reflexivity of a subjective variety, following the introspective method of reflective practice. This however is limited precisely because it is subjective.
Second, an objectivity that distances the researcher entirely from the subjects of research. However, this differs from the traditional objective stance of science, where the researcher attempts an ‘objectivity of the objective’, or anatomises the position of objectivity as it is encountered through the identity of ‘researcher’. This kind of reflexivity, however, is limited precisely because it doubles the distance of the researcher from the researched.
A third form is for the researcher to run through the potential diversity and plurality of representations that s/he may have missed, by-passed, or lost through the research focus. For example, as the researcher reads through a transcript of an interview, what are other possible ways in which the interview content may have been represented?
A fourth form of reflexivity is for the researcher to consider how s/he is ‘positioned’ in relationship to the research(ed). What identity does s/he adopt, what historical, cultural and social ‘baggage’ does s/he bring to the research moment, such as gender, race, status, and so forth?
To Marcus’ list, I would add a fifth factor that is emphasised throughout this component:
Awareness of how adoption of a research methodology (method), epistemology (informing theory) and axiology (informing values) positions us as researchers, and constructs particular identities.
A second way of being as a researcher is aesthetic. This is to engage with research as a social act imbued with qualities such as sensitivity and elegance. An influential figure in this arena is Elliot Eisner (1991). Eisner sees educational research as an aesthetic activity involving close noticing, witnessing and sensitivity, calling for a ‘connoisseurship’ in two senses. The researcher must be a connoisseur of both researching (presentational arena) and writing up research (re-presentational arena). The first demands an educated ‘eye’, and the second imaginative writing. If knowledge is constructed rather than discovered, suggests Eisner, then let us construct beautifully and sensitively. Thomas Schwandt, (1998, p.244) suggests that Eisner’s ‘methodology is concerned with how different inquirers develop an enhanced capacity to perceive the qualities that comprise the educational experience and, further, how they can develop the skills to render those perceptions in representational forms that portray, interpret, and appraise educational phenomena.’ In his focus upon the importance of the aesthetic dimension to inquiry, Eisner reminds us that we are doing qualitative research, or dealing responsibly (that is, sensitively) to qualities.
In an essay ‘From Reflective Practice to Holistic Reflexivity’, I have attempted to develop a model of what a ‘critically reflexive’ rather than ‘reflective’ education practitioner might look like. I will not rehearse that model here, only to say that it reinforces the twin ethical and aesthetic dimensions outlined above. If you are interested particularly in the identity construction of an ethically sensitive and aesthetically aware postmodern researcher, then please read this article (Bleakley, 1999).
Alvesson, M. and Skoldberg, K. (2000) Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research. London: Sage.
Bleakley, A. (1999) From Reflective Practice to Holistic Reflexivity. Studies in Higher Education. 24:3, pp. 315-330.
Bleakley, A. (2002) Pre-registration house officers and ward-based learning: a ‘new apprenticeship’ model. Medical Education, 36:1, pp. 9-15.
Eisner, E. (1991) The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practices. New York: Macmillan.
Gergen, K.J. (1999) An Invitation to Social Construction. London: Sage.
Gergen, K.J. (2001) Social Construction in Context. London: Sage.
Hillman, J. (1992) Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: HarperCollins.
Marcus, G.E. (1998) What Comes (Just) After "Post"?: The Case of Ethnography. In: N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds) The Landscape of Qualitative Research: Theories and Issues. London: Sage, pp. 383-406.
Schwandt, T.A. (1998) Constructivist, Interpretivist Approaches to Human Inquiry. In: N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (eds) The Landscape of Qualitative Research: Theories and Issues. London: Sage, pp. 221-259.
Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.