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p.222 The constructivist or interpretivist believes that to understand this world of meaning one must interpret it. The inquirer must elucidate the process of meaning construction and clarify what and how meanings are embodied in the language and actions of social actors. To prepare an interpretation is itself to construct a reading of these meanings; it is to offer the inquirer's construction of the constructions of the actors one studies.
p.225 interpretivism holds that human behavior is purposive (Bruner, 1990; Magoon, 1977)... Social agents are considered autonomous, intentional, active, goal directed; they consume, construct, and interpret their own behavior and that of their fellow agents... The means or process by which the inquirer arrives at this kind of interpretation of human action (as well as the ends or aim of the process) is called Verstehen (understanding).
p.227 [Schutz] The thought objects constructed by the social scientist, in order to grasp this social reality, have to be founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thinking of men, living their daily life within their social world. Thus the constructs of the social sciences are constructs of the second degree... constructs o the constructs made by actors on the social scene. (p. 59)
p.228 Taylor... claims that if our interpretations seem implausible or if they are not understood by our interlocutors, "there is no verification procedure we can fall back on. We can only continue to offer interpretations; we are in an interpretive circle" (p. 75).
p.231 Geertz (1973) claims, "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" (p. 5). The actions of members of a culture (and the actions and writing of the anthropologist qua ethnographer) both construct and signify meaning.
p.231 For Geertz (1973), there is no world of social facts "out there" waiting to be observed, recorded, described, and analyzed by the inquirer. Rather, the inquirer constructs a reading of the meaning-making process of the people he or she studies.
p.233 Drawing on the work of G. H. Mead, Herbert Blumer (1969, p. 2) claims that symbolic interactionism rests on three premises: First, human beings act toward physical objects and other beings in their environment on the basis of the meanings that these things have for them. Second, these meanings derive from the social interaction (communication, broadly understood) between and among individuals... in communicating we create or produce significant symbols. Third, these meanings are established and modified through an interpretive process: "The actor selects, checks, suspends, regroups, and transforms the meanings in light of the situation in which he is placed and the direction of his action... meanings are used and revised as instruments for the guidance and formation of action" (p. 5).
p.233 The Blumer-Mead version of symbolic interactionism regards human beings as purposive agents. They engage in "minded," self-reflexive behavior (Blumer, 1969, p. 81); they confront a world that they must interpret in order to act rather than a set of environmental stimuli to which they are forced to respond.
p.233 symbolic interactionism requires the inquirer to actively enter the worlds of people being studied in order to "see the situation as it is seen by the actor, observing what the actor takes into account, observing how he interprets what is taken into account" (p. 56).
p.234 As Denzin (1971) explains, symbolic interactionists begin with a "sensitizing image of the interaction process" (p. 168) built around such concepts as... social setting... and joint act. The inquirer then "moves from sensitizing concepts to the immediate world of social experience and permits that world to shape and modify his conceptual framework [and, in this way, the inquirer] moves continually between the realm of the more general social theory and the worlds of native people" (p. 168). [JLJ - continuing the Denzin quote: "Such an approach recognizes that social phenomena, while displaying regularities, vary by time, space, and circumstance. The observer, then, looks for repeatable regularities. He uses ritual patterns... as indicators" Note that Denzin in his notes intends "native people" as a generic term that covers all people studied by the sociologist] Symbolic interactionists seek explanations of that world, although, like Geertz, they view explanatory theories as interpretive, grounded, and hovering low over the data (Denzin, 1989c).
p.234 Pragmatism informs the philosophical anthropology, epistemology, and social philosophy of the Blumer-Mead version of symbolic interactionism... [Mead and Blumer] view human beings as acting (not responding) organisms who construct social action (Blumer, 1969).
p.236 Constructivists are deeply committed to the... view that what we take to be objective knowledge and truth is the result of perspective. Knowledge and truth are created, not discovered by mind.
p.236 [Diana Fuss] what is at stake for the constructionist are systems of representations, social and material practices, laws of discourses, and ideological effects. In short, constructionists are concerned above all with the production and organization of differences, and they therefore reject the idea that any essential or natural givens precede the process of social determination.
p.237 we are all constructivists if we believe that the mind is active in the construction of knowledge. Most of us would agree that knowing is not passive... but active; mind does something with these impressions, at the very least forms abstractions or concepts. In this sense, constructivism means that human beings do not find or discover knowledge so much as construct or make it. We invent concepts, models, and schemes to make sense of experience and, further, we continually test and modify these constructions in the light of new experience.
p.237 one need not be an antirealist to be a constructivist. One can reasonably hold that concepts and ideas are invented (rather than discovered) yet maintain that these inventions correspond to something in the real world.
p.238-239 "worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking" (Goodman, 1978, p. 6). These "remakings" are not simply different interpretations of the same world, but literally different world versions... He proposes that we adopt the more pragmatic notion of "rightness," a term with "greater reach" than truth. Rightness is defined as an act of fitting and working but "not a fitting onto... but a fitting into a context or discourse or standing complex of other symbols"... "We can adopt habits, strategies, vocabularies, styles as well as statements"... cognition is reconceptualized as the advancement of understanding wherein we begin "from what happens to be currently adopted and proceed to integrate and organize, weed out and supplement, not in order to arrive at truth about something already made but in order to make something right - to construct something that works cognitively, that fits together and handles new cases, that may implement further inquiry and invention"
p.240 To know is "to possess ways and means of acting and thinking that allow one to attain the goals one happens to have chosen" (von Glasersfeld, 1991, p. 16).
p.240 The social constructionist approach is predicated on the assumption that "the terms by which the world is understood are social artifacts, products of historically situated interchanges among people" (Gergen, 1985, p. 267).
p.241 According to [Stanley] Fish, reality is the result of the social processes accepted as normal in a specific context, and knowledge claims are intelligible and debatable only within a particular context or community.
p.242 The social, dialogic nature of inquiry is central to the constructivist thinking of Gergen and Gergen (1991) and Guba and Lincoln (1989)... as well. For them, inquiry methodology requires attending both to the inquirer's own self-reflective awareness of his or her own constructions and to the social construction of individual constructions (including that of the inquirer).
p.243 The act of inquiry [for Guba and Lincoln] begins with issues and/or concerns of participants and unfolds through a "dialectic" of iteration, analysis, critique, reiteration, reanalysis, and so on that leads eventually to a joint (among inquirer and respondents) construction of a case (i.e., findings or outcomes).
p.248 Recall that the constructivist makes the claim, in Eisner's (1991) words, that there is no "pristine, unmediated grasp of the world as it is" (p.46) and, further, that no sharp distinction can be drawn between knower and known, between accounts of the world and those doing the accounting... It is a belief that knowledge is not simply the impression of sense data on the mind, but instead is actively constructed.
p.249 many constructivists... argue that knowledge does not discover a preexisting, independent, real world outside the mind of the knower, that the process of making or constructing meaning cannot be connected to an "independent world 'out there,' but [only] to our own constructing processes" (Steier, 1991, p. 2). [JLJ - Ok, so that would mean that a machine playing a game is merely manipulating symbols in a way the programmer desires, constructing knowledge in just such a way that happens to play a strong game. There are an infinite number of ways it could manipulate symbols to construct knowledge that plays a bad game. We are not interested in that. We see only the high-quality moves played, not the human-written knowledge construction script (code), and conclude that the machine is "playing" the game. Go figure.]
The Production of Reality: Essays and Readings on Social Interaction (O'Brien, 2005)
xx Anyone who wants to make sense of her or his own life needs an understanding of the underlying patterns and material conditions that make up the particular cultural milieu in which she or he lives.
p.52 Two main points are worth underlining. One is that stable patterns of interaction among human beings can be observed. These patterns, which include relationships of power, affection, exchange, and so forth, give meaning to social existence - they constitute social structure. The second point is that, enduring as these patterns may seem, they are fragile in that they require constant coordination by and shared understanding from the people involved to maintain them.
p.61-62 Symbolic interactionism is conducted at the intersection of individuals and society. From this perspective, it is not possible to make sense of one without incorporating the other. The challenge for symbolic interactionalism has been to represent society in a way that avoids reification - in other words, to model social patterns and relationships as the products of ongoing individual activity. At the same time, symbolic interactionism must account for the observation that existing social patterns do influence and constrain individual actions... Social life is conceived as a dynamic web of reciprocal influences among members of a social group. This web is made up of the interactions of individuals. Individuals spin and respin the web. At the same time, they are influenced by the existing patterns of previously spun strands... in reality individual existence and social patterns are mutually constitutive - the relationship between the individual and society is reciprocal.
p.318 Dominick argues that most personal homepages show nothing but superficial self-expression. It is perhaps no wonder that some critics will say that many personal homepages lack creativity and thoughtfulness, since many homepage authors build their websites not for self-presentation or identity construction, but for instrumental reasons like passing time, learning HTML, distributing information to peers, and so on.
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