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Research and Social Change
This book bridges scholarly forms of inquiry and practitioners' daily activities. It introduces inquiry as a process of relational construction, offering resources to practitioners who want to reflect on how their work generates practical effects.
There are hundreds of books on research, but in keeping with social scientific traditions, many emphasize method and neglect broader, overarching assumptions and interests. Further, most are written in ways that speak to those in the academic community and not to a wider audience of professionals and practitioners. The present text lays out relational constructionist premises and explores these in terms of their generative possibilities both for inquiry and social change work. It is applicable for professionals in the fields of social services, education, organizational consulting, community work, public policy, and healthcare. Using accessible language and extensive use of case examples, this book will help reflective practitioners or practice-oriented academics approach inquiry in ways that are coherent and consistent with a relational constructionist orientation.
This volume will be useful for undergraduates, graduate students, and practitioners engaged in professional development, with particular use for those scholar-practitioners who want to reflect on and learn from their practice and who want to produce practical results with and for those with whom they are working. It is also aimed at those scholar-practitioners who want to contribute to a wider understanding of how social relations (groups, organizations, communities, etc.) can work effectively.
eBook
Exploring the Social Representations of Social Work in the Sri Lankan Cultural Context: A Qualitative Study
This preliminary study examines the social representations of social work relevant to the Sri Lankan cultural context while considering indigenous social work discourses. Under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, six Sri Lankan social workers participated in online semistructured interviews. The interview data underwent thematic analysis, from which four main themes emerged: social work views and positionality; the relation between social work education and practice; contexts and distinctive practices; and issues and challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviewees’ narratives detailed how social work is represented in sociocultural contexts, emphasising community work and comparing local practices with Western-rooted professional social work discourses. Some interviewees’ accounts also reported challenges surrounding social work education and the issues of social work practice in a multiethnic and multireligious society. The findings suggest the need for further research, with dialogue and reciprocal exchanges by stakeholders, to explore the diverse social representations of social work in the global and local contexts.
Journal Article
Giving Voices to Jamaican Canadian Immigrant Women: A Heuristic Inquiry Study
The Heuristic Inquiry (HI) qualitative method applied in this study explored the role of Pentecostal faith in the post-migration lived experiences of Jamaican Canadian immigrant women (JCIW). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven JCIW whose Pentecostal faith helped them to reconstruct their cultural identity post-migration. The creative flexibility of HI allowed for the integration of the primary researcher’s (i.e., first author's) voice into the study alongside those of the co-researchers. Positioning the study within a postmodern social constructionism theoretical framework created space for multiple realities to emerge that were constructed through social interaction and language. These realities were evident in the unique ways in which the JCIW used faith to reconstruct their cultural identity during the migration process. Results revealed four key categories and 10 salient themes which were used to inform theory, research, and practice for counseling professionals. Recommendations for future research in using HI and the topic of cultural identity are discussed.
Journal Article
The Reality of Social Construction
'Social construction' is a central metaphor in contemporary social science, yet it is used and understood in widely divergent and indeed conflicting ways by different thinkers. Most commonly, it is seen as radically opposed to realist social theory. Dave Elder-Vass argues that social scientists should be both realists and social constructionists and that coherent versions of these ways of thinking are entirely compatible with each other. This book seeks to transform prevailing understandings of the relationship between realism and constructionism. It offers a thorough ontological analysis of the phenomena of language, discourse, culture and knowledge, and shows how this justifies a realist version of social constructionism. In doing so, however, it also develops an analysis of these phenomena that is significant in its own right.
eBook
World ordering : a social theory of cognitive evolution
\"Drawing on evolutionary epistemology, process ontology, and a social-cognition approach, this book suggests \"cognitive evolution,\" an evolutionary-constructivist social and normative theory of change and stability of international social orders. It argues that practices and their background knowledge survive preferentially, communities of practice serve as their vehicle, and social orders evolve. As an evolutionary theory of world ordering, which does not borrow from the natural sciences, it explains why certain configurations of practices organize and govern social orders epistemically and normatively, and why and how these configurations evolve from one social order to another. Suggesting a multiple and overlapping international social orders' approach, the book uses three running cases of contested orders, Europe's contemporary social order, the cyberspace order, and the corporate order, to illustrate the theory. Based on the concepts of \"common humanity\" and \"epistemological security,\" the author also submits a normative theory of \"better\" practices and of bounded progress\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Societalization of Social Problems
This article develops a theory of “societalization,” demonstrating its plausibility through empirical analyses of church pedophilia, media phone-hacking, and the financial crisis. Although these strains were endemic for decades, they had failed to generate broad crises. Reactions were confined inside institutional boundaries and handled by intra-institutional elites according to the cultural logics of their particular spheres. The theory proposes that boundaries between spheres can be breached only if there is code switching. When strains become subject to the cultural logics of the civil sphere, widespread anguish emerges about social justice and concern for the future of democratic society. Once admired institutional elites come to be depicted as perpetrators, and the civil sphere becomes intrusive legally and organizationally, leading to repairs that aim for civil purification. Institutional elites soon engage in backlash efforts to resist reform, and a war of the spheres ensues. After developing this macro-institutional model, I conceptualize civil sphere agents, the journalists and legal investigators upon whose successful performances the actual unfolding of societalization depends. I also explore “limit conditions,” the structures that block societalization. I conclude by examining societalization, not in society but in social theory, contrasting the model with social constructionism, on the one hand, and broad traditions of macro-sociological theory, on the other.
Journal Article