An Excerpt: Introducing Constructivism in International Relations Theory (Sarina Theys)

Constructivism’s arrival in IR is often associated with the end of the Cold War, and event that the traditional theories such as realism and liberalism failed to account for…  Constructivism accounts for this issue by arguing that the social world is of our making (Onuf 1989). Actors continually shape – and sometimes reshape – the very nature of international relations through their actions and interactions.

The basics of constructivism

Constructivism sees the world, and what can know about the world, as socially constructed. This view refers to the nature of reality and the nature of knowledge that are also called ontology and epistemology in research language… This also entails that reality is always under construction, which opens the prospect for change. In other words, meanings are not fixed but can change over time depending on the ideas and beliefs that actors hold.

Constructivists argue that agency and structure are mutually constituted… If theses beliefs and ideas change, the social relationship can change… This stance differs considerably from that of realists, who argue that the anarchic structure of the international system determines the behavior of states. Constructivists, on the other hand, argue that ‘anarchy is what states make of it’ (Wendt 1992). This means that anarchy can be interpreted in different ways depending on the meaning that actors assign to it.

Another central issue to constructivism is identities and interests… Identities are representations of an actor’s understanding of who they are, which in turn signals their interests. They are important to constructivists as they argue that identities constitute interests and actions.

Social norms are central to constructivism. These are generally defined as ‘a standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity’ (Katzenstein 1996, 5). States that conform to a certain identity are expected to comply with the norms that are associated with that identity… This process is also known as ‘the logic of appropriateness’, where actors behave in certain ways because they believe that this behavior is appropriate (March and Olsen 1998, 951-952). To better understand norms, we can identify three types: regulative norms, constitutive norms, and prescriptive norms… A norm only becomes an expected behavior when a critical mass of relevant state actors adopt it and internalize it in their own practices.

Although all constructivists share the above-mentioned views and concepts, there is considerable variety within constructivism. Conventional constructivists ask ‘what’-type questions – such as what causes an actor to act… Critical constructivists, on the other hand, ask ‘how’-type questions such as how do actors come to believe in a certain identity… Language plays a key role for critical constructivists because it constructs, and has the ability to change, social reality.

Most constructivists, however, position themselves between these two more extreme ends of the spectrum.

Constructivism and Bhutan’s national interests

Bhutan is a Buddhist kingdom located in the Himalayas… Bhutan shares a national border with the two major powers in Asia: China in the north and India in the south. Bhutan’s location is geographically sensitive as the country serves as a buffer state between these major powers, which perceive each other as rivals rather than friends… To date there remains an ongoing border dispute between Bhutan and China… Likewise, India has had a hand in Bhutan’s foreign policy.

From a realist perspective, one would argue that Bhutan is in an unfavorable position as it is hindered by its geographical location and cannot compete for power with its neighbors… A constructivist view, on the other hand, would argue that these structural conditions do not necessarily constrain Bhutan’s ability to pursue its national interests since they are not the only conditions that influence sate behavior: the meaning given to these structural conditions also matters… A constructivist is well placed to detect and understand these changes since their object of enquiry focuses on the social relationships between states.

Bhutan has also developed a distinctive national identity that differentiates it from its larger neighbors. This identity projects Bhutan as ‘the last surviving independent Mahayana Buddhist Kingdom in the world.’ Bhutan’s national identity is socially constructed through a Bhutanization process that started in the 1980s…

As mentioned earlier in the chapter, a norm needs to go through a lifecycle before it becomes established.

Members of the Bhutanese elite have also created a second identity, which projects Bhutan as a leader in advancing a holistic and sustainable development paradigm.

Conclusion

Constructivism is often said to simply state the obvious – that actions, interactions and perceptions shape reality… Yet this seemingly simple idea, when applied theoretically, has significant implications for how we can understand the world. The discipline of International Relations benefits from constructivism as it addresses issues and concepts that are neglected by mainstream theories – especially realism. Doing so, constructivists offer alternative explanations and insights for events occurring in the social world. They show, for instance, that it is not only the distribution of material power, wealth and geographical conditions that can explain state behavior but also ideas, identities and norms. Furthermore, their focus on ideational factors shows that reality is not fixed, but rather subject to change.

An Excerpt: "Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction" from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

If there is any core idea of social constructionism, it is that some object or objects are caused or controlled by social or cultural factors rather than natural factors, and if there is any core motivation of such research, it is the aim of showing that such objects are or were under our control: they could be, or might have been, otherwise.

Social constructionist themes can be and have been picked up by naturalists who accommodate and appropriate the interesting and important cultural phenomena documented by constructionist authors while sidestepping more radical anti-scientific and anti-realist theses widely associated with social constructionism.

1. What is Social Construction?

Y is socially constructed.

X socially constructs Y.

1.1 What Constructs?

Many of the agents in social constructionist claims can be neatly divided into two groups: those that view the agents as primarily impersonal agents, and those that view the agents as personal agents (i.e., persons or groups).

Work in the first group emphasizes a causal role for impersonal causes like cultures, conventions, or institutions in producing some phenomenon.

A second group of constructionist claims emphasizes personal social agents that construct through their choices… Other constructionists—those we might call critical constructionists—emphasize personal choices not just to establish the contingency of the acceptance of some representation as to emphasize the role of an agent’s interests or power relations in determining the content of an accepted representation.

1.2 What is constructed?

Most uses of “construction”-talk… are directed at three very different sorts of entities: representations (e.g. ideas, theories, concepts, accounts, taxonomies, and so forth), (non-representational) facts quite generally, and a special sort of non-representational fact: facts about human traits.

It is useful to first distinguish global constructionist claims that hold that every fact is a social construction, from local constructionist claims that hold that only particular facts are.

1.3 What is it to Construct?

We can distinguish two importantly different sorts of relationship: causal or constitutive.

The first, and more straightforward idea is causal construction: X causally constructs Y if and only if X causes Y to exist or to persist or X controls the kind-typical properties of Y.

More obscure is the idea that X’s construction of Y is some sort of constitutive relationship. X constitutively constructs Y if and only if X’s conceptual or social activity regarding an individual y is metaphysically necessary for y to be a Y.

There is a different model of necessity for the constructionist, however, which is to hold that the necessity in question is revealed a posteriori by our investigations of the phenomenon in question.

Of course, there may well be other models of necessity available. For example, it is sometimes suggested that a neo-Kantian interpretation of social constructionism is possible, an interpretation on which our socio-linguistic activities could provide a transcendental basis for any knowledge of the world.

2. Naturalism and Social Construction

Above, we identified naturalism with a certain attitude towards science, and for present purpose, we develop this idea by identifying three naturalistic attitudes toward science that have been picked up by naturalists addressing social constructionist themes.

Epistemological Fundamentalism
Metaphysical Fundamentalism
Human Naturalism

These features characterize substantial threads of contemporary naturalist though—threads that arise repeatedly in discussions of constructionism.

3. Naturalizing Social Construction

3.1. The Social Construction of Representations

A number of commentators have noted that many provocative constructionist claims are, in the first instance, claims that some sort of representation is constructed…. Where we limit the objects of constructionist claims to representations (such as theories), the claims cease to be particularly metaphysically provocative though detailed constructionist accounts of how certain representations came to be selected may still teach us much about science.

Still some constructionists endorse a stronger claim as well—that in constructing the theories, the facts described by those theories are thereby made to be… The distinctive feature of social constructionist explanations of representation is that they explain how we came to have those representations not by reference to the facts in the world they represent (as in realism), nor by reference to associations among our sensations (as in some forms of empiricism), nor by reference to innate knowledge or concepts (as in rationalism), nor by reference to the conditions of our thought or experience (as in transcendental arguments) but rather by reference to social and cultural background facts.

In contrast to naturalistic response to the threat of scientific anti-realism, naturalistic responses to constructionist claims about representations (including beliefs) understood as human traits have been far more sympathetic to constructionist approaches… In contemporary naturalistic philosophy of science and psychology, the naturalistic explanation of culturally produced cognition is picked up by at least three distinct strands of work taking up constructionist themes of culture. The first is centered on the idea that culture can be understood by analogy with population genetics, and that cultural items might be understood to be more or less successful based upon their success in spreading in a population.

The second, overlapping strand of naturalistic inquiry also views culture as a system of representations upon which selection acts, but attempts to integrate this idea with the idea, common in evolutionary cognitive psychology, that the mind is comprised of a great many domain-specific mental mechanisms, and uses these as the selective mechanisms that act as a primary mechanism of selection.

A third, philosophically undeveloped strand naturalizes crucial elements of critical constructionist approaches by suggesting the influence of sometimes implicit evaluations on judgments and theoretical activities.

3.2 Construction, Human Kinds and Human Traits

Since the constructionist strategy explains a trait by appeal to highly contingent factors (including culture), partisans of these debates often come inquire whether a trait or cluster of traits is culturally specific, or can be found across cultures.

3.2.1 The Conceptual Project

This conceptual project is a philosophical project par excellence, and it has contributed a great deal to clarifying just what conceptual and empirical issues are at stake in constructionist work.

3.2.2 The Social Role Project

Such a causal model of the way in which social roles might shape behavior is at least arguably naturalistic in all of the above senses.

Insofar as these and similar processes prove to be important and pervasive, they may provide an account of underlying psychological mechanisms in virtue of which constructionist claims about human kinds might be true.

4. New Directions for Social Construction

4.1 Constructionist Explanation and Integrative Models

It is now common, especially among those sympathetic to evolutionary and nativist approaches to human psychology, to call for very general, integrative approaches that combine acknowledgement of a role for evolutionary forces in shaping human nature with a complimentary respect for the role of social constructionist mechanisms in producing human traits and their products.

4.2 Social Construction as Ultimate Explanation

The canonical way to understand social constructionism about human traits is as suggesting that human traits emerge from experience of the world and as emphasizing the role of culture in structuring the world so experienced. Such constructionism thus contrasts with nativist accounts of those traits.

Recent work suggests the possibility that culture might provide relatively more ultimate explanations of some evolved traits.

In a different vein, recent work on niche construction—the process by which organisms successfully modify their environments in ways that benefit themselves and their offspring—has also suggests a role for culture in altering natural selection… the niches may also be more or less structured by our cultural conceptions, including our conceptions of different kinds of person.

Such a hypothesis combines Kitcher’s suggestion of the biological significance of intracultural reproductive isolation that socially constructed racial classification may produce with the niche selectionist idea that culture may produce selective pressures resulting in biological adaptation.

5. Conclusion

Philosophical naturalists as well as working scientists have begun to take up this opportunity in ways that use the methods of philosophy and science to both state and evaluate social constructionist hypotheses (though not always under that label). Because of the powerful and central role culture plays in shaping human social environments, behaviors, identities and development, there is ample room for continuing and even expanding the pursuit of social constructionist themes within a naturalistic framework.

An Excerpt: “Constructivism at the Crossroads; or, the Problem of Moderate-Sized Dry Goods”

An Excerpt: “Constructivism at the Crossroads; or, the Problem of Moderate-Sized Dry Goods”

by Nicholas Onuf in International Political Sociology 2016: 10, 115-132

Constructivists are those scholars whose common ground is “the social construction of knowledge and the social construction of reality (Adler 2002, 111).”

Constructivism has both slowed down as a theoretical project and spread out as a research enterprise.

In this paper, I ask why constructivism in IR has slowed down as a theoretical project. One answer is that slowing down is normal (as in normal science); there is no problem. I propose a second answer, to the effect that constructivism has reached a crossroads… The slowdown and the crossroads point to a central feature of constructivist thinking. As constructivists, we do systematically what ordinary people do routinely—we furnish our world with moderate-sized dry goods. By now we have plenty of furniture; there must be something else we can or should be doing.

Metaphorically speaking, we can investigate the social construction of “stuff” that is either small, granular, and slippery or large, shapeless, and gassy, but in both instances hard to grasp. Either way, we grant materiality to appearances. Either choice has political implications, as does going ahead, however slowly, with the construction of moderate-sized dry goods. The politics in question is not, however, what most constructivists have taken it to be.

Going Places, Doing Things

The journey starts in people’s heads.

What, then, do people do in their heads? I suggest that they routinely engage in three highly generalized cognitive operations.

These cognitive operations are metaphorical constructions—social constructions—(re)produced in my head, (re)assembled as a simple model, and (re)drawn from familiar sources in Occidental philosophy and social theory. Kant is one inspiration for my model, Aristotle another. Of the three general cognitive operations that I choose to emphasize, the first comes first—has priority—at least for the purposes of the model. I draw it from Kant’s discussion of primary mental faculties in the Critique of Pure Reasons.

In Kant’s construction, the mind selectively simplifies sensory experience, puts its diverse elements together as a seamless whole, and projects the whole as the unity of consciousness—self-consciousness. This general operation is not itself consciously undertaken. Yet, it produces our naïve conviction that the world as sensed—as consciously experienced—is really and truly out there. Apperception gives us a world, a full-stuffed world at that. To say more about apperception would take us to phenomenology and its focus on intentionality (directedness and aboutness)—tasks for another occasion.

The second cognitive operation I have in mind makes discriminant things—objects—out of the “sensible intuitions” that our sensory experience produces in the mind. This operation depends on the faculty of judgment. Confusingly, Kant called sensible intuitions and the objects that judgement produces from such intuitions “representations.”

In my view representation is necessarily collective, intrinsically social; through representation we give each other some sense of what is on our minds.

Representation operates in three general ways that take form, and are thus distinguishable, as representations, even if they variously combine in my simple model of the mind at work. The first two Aristotle identified in the relations of parts and wholes: every whole has parts that are themselves wholes… By implication, the largest possible whole is the apperceived world in our heads.

The third form of representation as a cognitive operation is less clearly documented in Occidental thought than the other two. In my judgment, it is, however, the most important one for understanding how social construction works. It is implied in the relation of wholes or, more precisely, an asserted relation between wholes not dependent on the asserted relation of any part common to both. Neither Aristotle nor Kant identified a form of reasoning corresponding to the relation of wholes. It remained for C. S. Peirce to do so. “The whole operation of reasoning begins with abduction…”

If, as I have argued, reasoning relies on representation, and representation is a language-dependent operation, then abduction takes place in, or through, language. More specifically, I would argue that abduction links or “fits” (Aristotle’s term) wholes to wholes through the use of metaphors… As an operation, abduction and its realization through metaphor are the likely source of creativity as a “leap” in thinking (to revert to metaphorical journeys) and theory’s claim on our attention.

I turn now to the third of my generally formulated operations.

Making things whole would seem to be related to imagination, abduction, representation through metaphorical language. Making whole things moderate in size picks up where representation leaves off. I take it to be an autonomous cognitive operation—in this context, a moderate-sized good—and not just a generalized sensory propensity.

Turning the ineffable into the prosaic—into moderate-sized dry goods—is in my model a primary cognitive operation.

We might call this third cognitive operation scaling. In conjunction with apperception and representation, it gives meaning to individual experience and furnishes the world that we dwell in together. In Adler’s terms, scaling is indispensable to the subjective appreciation of reality and its social construction as an apparently objective condition. In other words, constructivism is distinctive by virtue of its emphasis on the problem of scale, scaling as a cognitive operation, and social construction as the making of things to human scale.

Construction Projects

International Relations is a field of study because we already think that the world sorts into fields of study; International Relations is a domain of social activity, or a subject of study, or a topic for discussion because we have already scaled the world’s contents in such a way as to be able to sort them into domains, subjects, and topics.

From now on in this essay, constructivism is a theory, approach, framework, frame of reference—a moderated-sized good—located in a field sized as it is for our collective convenience.

I prefer not to call constructivism a theory, since this term is either too gassy to be anything more than suggestive (social theory, for example) or so narrowly construed, as a set of logically related statements (rational choice theory, for example), as to exclude anything we might want to say about social construction in International Relations. Instead, I call constructivism a framework—not least for the term’s metaphorical associations… A framework constitutes a metaphorical place, a bounded whole, within which to examine the ways in which we—scholars, policymakers, ordinary people—turn the stuff of International Relations into the middle-sized dry goods that we know how to use for our respective, overlapping purposes. Within this frame, constructivists have concentrated attention on four topics… These topics are (1) identity, (2) rules and norms, (3) the paired logics of consequences and appropriateness, and (4) the co-constitution of agents and structures. I discuss them in turn, as they relate to the human disposition to scale the world’s contents for use, in order to point up constructivism’s strengths and raise questions about its limitations.

Identity

If positivists start off with small, hard things, then constructivists are disposed to put relations first.

Just how the mind manufactures a moderate-sized dry good called identity is a question to which constructivists have given a great deal of attention. Their answer is, quite simply, that it takes two minds… both minds must scale their apperceived sense of selves to fit the other’s sense of what another human being is, namely, a moderate-sized good. These goods take the form of a container stuffed with liquids, slimly things and, most elusively, ideas about other moderate-sized goods.

Extrapolating this interaction process to collectiveness is untenable. Collectivities do not have minds…

In short, minds “see” out into a world of moderate-sized dry goods better—more clearly and cogently—than they can “know” themselves. Only when we see ourselves as if from the outside (and this takes work) can we find identities for ourselves and put them to use. Identities are observers’ constructs. Scholars who find them useful constructs find them everywhere.

Norms and Rules

While norms would seem, then, to constitute the regime and rules to regulate behavior… Rules and norms perform a constitutive function—with language as a rule-governed activity, they contribute to the ongoing social construction of reality in the process of, or in addition to, regulating what Boulding’s behavior units do.

When constructivists talk about normative phenomena, at least in IR, most of them have focused on what they call norms, not rules.

For reasons addressed above, most constructivists are ill disposed to look at rules, even when they are easy to see.

If we locate rules, not in minds as storage lockers, but in the institutions that these rules constitute, then they are always available for someone’s selection and use… In my view, socialization is always about rules, and rules function as they do precisely because they are dry goods that we have scaled for our use—just as we scale all of what we then take to be the contents of the world.

Logics

Citing constructivists in IR (among others), they go on to say: “Identities and rules are constitutive as well as regulative and are molded by social interaction and experience” (March and Olsen 1989, 951, 2).

The problem here is not—as it might seem—one of reducing identity to rules, but of thinking that rules, even when they are binding, leave no choice.

It would seem, then, that the twinned logics of consequence and appropriateness “are not mutually exclusive” (March and Olsen 1998, 952).

We need “theories of the middle range” (Merton 1968, 39-72)—theories about the middle range—that are themselves quite likely to be “middle-range,” moderate-sized theories.

Co-Constitution

Agents constitute structures; structures constitute agents; both processes operate simultaneously and continuously… The co-constitution of agents and structures is general… In IR, many constructivists, myself among them, accept the co-constitution of agents and structures as a guiding concern. Yet, this seemingly simple formula has engendered debate from the time of its arrival in the late 1980s.

The term epistemology is code for philosophical idealism, and ontology for philosophical realism (and methodology for positivism as a species of philosophical realism).

If structure is a term so gassy, so misleading, for me to wish for its disuse and disappearance, I recognize that institution is a clumsy alternative when, for example, talking about gravity or rainbows.

In other words, people are not just institutions.

To say that the co-constitution of agents and structures depends on language and rules, functioning as constitutive media, to shape or “structure” the process (as I always have) is to replace agents and structures with rule complexes, or institutions, and (my critics will say) turn people into structural dopes stuffed into moderate-sized containers. Nevertheless, co-constitutive processes have us dopes acting in and on a world that we have together made to size and furnished for our use.

The Way Ahead

By studying the social construction of selected moderate-sized dry goods, we are as much use as we can hope to be.

For those for whom going ahead not very much, if at all, is not enough, there are two alternatives. To extend the metaphor, we carry the crossroads on our backs; we can always turn left or right. Staying the course, turning one way, or turning the other look like rational choices among three moderate-sized dry goods. These choices are often presented in methodological terms.

The social construction of moderate-sized dry goods is never politically neutral.

A fully realized constructivism—one that is fully articulated as a framework and thus a moderate-sized dry good—has many uses and (switching metaphors yet again) somewhere to go, but only when it joins up with micro-physics or global sociology (either works) and negotiates the space between them (both senses of negotiate, both metaphors). In the process, a fully realized constructivism affirms the postmodern inversion of politics of left and right. I would even propose that politically speaking, constructivism turns itself inside out. Attention to moderate-sized dry goods looks like a centrist policy, a politics of moderation. Fully realized, constructivism can show how moderate-sizing enables the skewed distribution of all those moderate-sized dry goods.

When we talk, we make rules. Where there are rules, there is rule appropriation (talking what the rules say is appropriate), exploitation. Where there are rules, there are institutional remedies. As moderate-sized dry goods, these remedies are not always appropriate, but they are always subject to appropriation and exploitive use.