This special issue invites a reflection on and reformulation of options for social construction as a theoretical and practical approach to studying communication as continuously emergent in relationships, constitutive of social reality, consequential to communicators, experienced through the bodily senses, and afforded by their material circumstances. Authors are encouraged to take stock of our predicted and actual accomplishments, consider the tensions between the promised and actualized changes brought about by social construction work in communication, and project the impact of social construction on the discipline in the next five to ten years. The focus is not only critical, but reflexive: How do we wish to reconstruct social construction? Relevance: The articles in the journal critically address social construction, taking on issues of its possibilities, shortcomings, and practical applications in psychotherapy, communication, and medicine.

In the Western world we have become accustomed to thinking of the body as a purely physical entity, which is separate from the mind and from culture. There are many debates about whether culture affects the body and, if it does so, in what ways and to what extent. However, in this piece I want to explore some of the ways in which the body has been seen as a social construction; that is, as a malleable organism which is open to reformation through its location within historically variable social relations. My position will be slightly different to recent varieties of social constructionism which focus on the discursive production of bodies and, following Foucault, see the body as a surface for textual inscription. From this standpoint the body is theorized as disciplined, regulated and turned into the subject of power. Instead of the metaphor of textual inscription, I want to consider the ways in which the body is made active by social relations: that is, how it is brought into being and mobilized by its positioning in the interweaving networks of interdependence. In this, I adopt a similar outlook to Hirst and Woolley (1982) who argue that social relations have a decisive influence on human attributes, which cannot be characterized as either natural or social, but are both: human attributes are socio-natural. I also share their view that social relations need not form one interconnected whole, but may be fragmentary and disparate (1982: 24). This means that bodily dispositions and capacities will not be uniform or even within cultures, because within any group we will find people of different characters, skills, beliefs or abilities, due largely to the varied influence of social relations upon them.

If the idea that crime is a social construct is commonsensical in various sociologically informed criminologies, sociological apprehensions of criminal law are still quite reluctant towards its implied epistemological stance. The main objective of this contribution is – by focusing on the idea that crime is a social construct – to examine some of the main contours of what a radically constructivist conception of (criminal) law could be. The paper identifies two potential problems, which can be avoided, in perspectives on crime as a social construction. It is proposed to break down any aprioristic relationship between deviance, abnormality and crime, and that we may decompartmentalize law from the juridical in a quite flexible way.

Key words: crime, social construction, law, difference, constructivism

The purpose of this study was to identify knowledge construction patterns in a local learning community. Observation, documents, and semistructured interviews were employed to collect data. Twenty learners were interviewed. Data were analyzed inductively using the constant comparative method. Five major patterns – radiation, circulation, simulation, socialization, and contextualization – were generalized from an analysis of the data, and their applications in practice were discussed. These patterns concretize the ideas of social construction and emphasize the different aspects of learning in the process of constructing knowledge. The five patterns indicate how knowledge is socially constructed when learners interact with others and their surroundings. This article reveals the main factors that play significant roles in knowledge construction, such as social interactions, social relationships and social connections, knowledge relevance, and knowledge and its social entities.

Key words: knowledge constructionism, patterns, lifelong education, learning community, collective learning, sociocultural learning.

A review of eleven volumes in the Sage series, Inquiries in Social Construction, reveals a field that is marked by a great variety of positions, fundamental disagreements, and few common themes. Among the more important of the latter is an emphasis on the discursive constitution of knowledge and the related demystification of scientific authority. Fundamental disagreements exist on the meaning and scope of ‘discourse’. For some, discourse is essentially conversation and its reach more or less unbounded. For others, relationships of power, whether displayed at social or at somatic sites, constitute an irreducible reality beyond discourse.

Key words: constructionism, discourse, postmodernism, science critique.

Upshot: During the late 1990s’ “Science Wars,” the concept of “social construction” was hotly debated between postmodernist scholars and realist scientists. In this context, Paul Boghossian delivers a concise critique of a Rortyan constructivism. Yet in doing so, he excludes the majority of constructivisms and relativisms from his analysis, fails to engage in the existing literature on those arguments he analyses, and, occasionally, misreads his opponents.

Excerpt: To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Berger and Luckmann’s book The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most cited sociological books of the 20th century, is an absolute must – and truly deserving such appreciation. Proclaiming “social constructivism” a paradigm, however, as done by the title of this anniversary publication – although tentatively and with a question mark – seems fairly courageous, and this is so for several reasons: First, the label “social constructivism” covers a multiplicity of different theoretical approaches and, therefore, has many different meanings and connotations – can it be re-specified to just one of them? Second, both Berger and Luckmann distance themselves explicitly from constructivism; Luckmann said that they both were “very much annoyed” when “being labeled ‘social constructivists’” (Dreher & Vera 2016: 31). Is it apt, then, to call their approach “social constructivism”? Third, we have been witnessing a countermovement during the last decade in philosophy as well as in the social sciences – social constructivism has come under attack. How big is the chance to revive and consolidate it in spite of these criticisms? The goal of this chapter is to respond to these questions by shedding some light on the variations of constructivism (while keeping Berger and Luckmann’s approach center stage).

The social constructionism perspective says that we never know what universal true or false is, what is good or bad, right or wrong; we know only stories about true, false, good, bad, right or wrong. The social constructionism abandons the idea of constructivist that individual’s mind represents a mirror of reality. The constructionism is focused on relations and sustains the individual’s role in social construction of realities. „Maps for the same territory” seems to be the essence of constructivist. The social constructionism is not interested to create maps; it surprises the processes that maps form. Our maps are formed from our experience and how we perceive them. All our maps are differing maps of the same world. Each of us creates our own worlds from our perceptions of the actual world. The social constructionism sees the language, the communication and the speech as having the central role of the interactive process through which we understand the world and ourselves.

Constructivism has become an important referent for research and practice in science education. A variety of more or less divergent forms of constructivism have developed: discussion between these is occasionally heated. Six such forms are briefly described in order to provide an overview of the held of constructivist theory. A scheme for characterising constructivist writing on the basis of its relative emphasis on (a) personal versus social construction of knowledge and (b) objectivist versus relativist views of the nature of science is suggested. Issues of theory creation and reflexivity, central to constructivist practice, are discussed. It is suggested that debate about the “best” form of constructivism is counterproductive. A more powerful approach to epistemology is that described by Feyerabend, the holding in dialectical tension of a variety of incompatible perspectives.

This paper analyses the paradigm of constructivism, relating it to current theoretical and empirical developments within social science. I am meeting the demand for describing social and cultural phenomena beyond correspondence-theoretical approaches by critically discussing various forms of constructivism and elaborating on the epistemological position of ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ (Berger & Luckmann). I argue that Berger and Luckmann are epistemologically ‘unscrupulously’ and, subsequently, show analytical weaknesses. This critical discussion forms the backdrop of an unfolding of the position of practice theories and a discussion of their innovative potential to social science research. In this context, the question of how to deal with media as artefacts and technologies is evaluated. I discuss this relationship and analyse it from a communication studies point of view, by means of two prominent analysis concepts, namely the ‘actor-network-theory’ of Bruno Latour and the ‘boundary objects’ approach of Susan Leigh Star from the field of science and technology studies. Finally, I outline central theoretical challenges and analytical perspectives for communication and media research.

Key words: Constructivism, practice theory, actor-network-theory, science and technology studies, boundary objects, communication analysis, media analysis