Kenneth J. Gergen

Narrative and the Self as Relationship

Publisher Summary This chapter explores the nature of stories of self, both as they are told and lived in social life. It examines the story form—or more formally, the structure of narrative accounts. It then describes the way narratives of the self are constructed within social life and the uses to which they are put. As story advances, it become increasingly clear that narratives of the self are not fundamentally possessions of the individual; rather they are products of social interchange—possessions of the socius. This analysis set the stage for a discussion of lived narrative. The chapter proposes the traditional concept of individual selves is fundamentally problematic. What have served as individual traits, mental processes, or personal characteristics can promisingly be viewed as the constituents of relational forms. The form of these relationships is that of the narrative sequence. Thus, by the end of story it can be found that the individual self has all but vanished into the world of relationship.

Psychological science in a postmodern context.

Postmodern scholarship poses significant challenges to pivotal assumptions of individual knowledge, objectivity, and truth. In their place, an emphasis is placed on the communal construction of knowledge, objectivity as a relational achievement, and language as a pragmatic medium through which local truths are constituted. Although these developments in understanding may seem opposed to psychological science, they are not. Rather, they invite a new range of questions about the potentials of traditional research. These questions are vitally concerned with the significance of such inquiry in cultural life. More importantly, this emerging view of psychological science opens new and exciting vistas of theoretical, methodological, and practical significance. Increasing manifestations of movement in these directions suggest the possibility of profound change in the profession.

Organization Science As Social Construction: Postmodern Potentials

We critically examine three major assumptions of modernist organization science: rational agency, empirical knowledge, and language as representation. With these assumptions problematized, we are positioned for a postmodern turn in the discipline. From a postmodern standpoint, we are moved to replace rational agency with communal rationality, empirical knowledge with social construction, and language as representation with language as action. Outcomes for an organization science place special emphasis on reconstructing and enriching the aims and methods of research and on critical reflection, generative theorizing, and scholarly action within organizations.

Broken Hearts Or Broken Bonds: Love And Death In Historical Perspective

Psychological theories and practices frequently neglect the extent to which their subject matter is historically and culturally defined. This issue is explored in the context of theories and therapies related to bereavement. Contemporary orientations emphasize the importance of breaking bonds with the deceased and the return of survivors to autonomous lifestyles. Placing the orientation in cultural and historical context reveals that it is largely a product of a modernist worldview. Within the romanticist ethos of the preceding century, such breaking of bonds would destroy ones identity and the meaning of life. In light of contemporary variations in subcultural meanings and values, a postmodern view is suggested in which reflexive responsibility is focal.

Toward a postmodern psychology

Abstract During the present century psychological science has been largely guided by a modernist world‐view. The modernist perspective, as represented in the arts, sciences, and cultural life, is centrally concerned with locating foundational forms. This romance with essentials is manifest in psychologys assumption of a basic, knowable subject matter; universal psychological processes; truth by (empirical) method; and research as progressive. Yet, in broad sectors of the intellectual world — and elsewhere — one detects a defection from modernism and the emergence of a postmodern perspective. Dominant within postmodernism is a thoroughgoing perspectivism. All attempts at foundations are viewed, then, as reflections of particular perspectives, themselves without justification except by recourse to other perspectives. Postmodernism not only raises critical questions regarding the modernist project in psychology, but opens new vistas for study. Cultural critique and the construction of new and more practical...

Social Constructionist Inquiry: Context and Implications

The present volume brings together contributions to an increasingly active movement in social inquiry. It would be misleading to say that the movement is also a new one, as its roots may properly be traced to earlier eras. However, in its current metamorphosis this movement contains implications of substantial significance. Not only are broad vistas of inquiry opened for study, but the very foundations of psychological knowledge itself are thrown into critical relief. When the implications are fully explored, it becomes apparent that this form of social inquiry could become foundational for understanding the nature of human knowledge. Both the philosophy and the science of human knowledge might give way to social analysis. Of course, these are bold conjectures, and as we shall see, to make good on them one may have to relinquish much that is sacred. However, it is the plausibility of these conjectures that I attempt to demonstrate in that which follows, while at the same time clarifying the contours and origins of this, the social constructionist movement.

The Place of the Psyche in a Constructed World

The vast majority of social constructionist writings have been critical of psychological science-on both ideological and conceptual grounds. The constructionist emphasis on microsocial processes also functions oppositionally to psychological accounting. The existing animus grows, however, from a realist metaphysics and a correspondence view of language, neither of which constructionism endorses. Viewing the relationship between constructionism and psychological science in more pragmatic terms, we find three significant ways in which constructionism contributes to a more fully enriched and broadly effective psychology. First, critical constructionism functions to denaturalize psychological accounts, opening them to reflexive deliberation, and democratizing the field more generally. Second, constructionist metatheory invites a resuscitation of marginal or suppressed discourse within the field, and invigorates societally engaged efforts to forge new and more useful discourses of the mind. Finally, social constructionism offers the possibility for a fundamental reconceptualization of the self. Illustrative is the family of theories conceptualizing the self as either constituted by or constituting relationships.

On the Place of Culture in Psychological Science

Abstract Based on a positivist-empiricist mode of inquiry, mainstream psychology has been vigorously engaged in characterizing human lives in terms of mechanistic and individualistic constructions, with the aim of predicting and controlling the behaviour of acultural and decontextualized others. Committed to a belief in psychological universals, this enterprise is directed at verifying a peculiarly Western intelligibility. In doing so, it ignores the possibilities of other systems of understanding grounded in different cultures and “culture” remains margnalized in the psychological discourse. Viewed in terms of enablements and constraints, differing cultures may contribute a range of psychological intelligibilities, thus enriching the capacities for human relationship. This position is explored by contrasting an Indian with a Western conception of human functioning, with respect to grounding assumptions, and implications of a culturally informed psychology are discussed.

The rise of experimentation in American psychology

Laboratory experiments are the principal tools used by psychologists to formulate and test their theories of how the human mind works, yet few histories of psychology have studied the experimental method and how it has changed over time. In this book then distinguished scholars explore the rapid rise and spread of the experimental method from its origins in the early decades of the century. They deal with such topics as the first efforts to bring number and quantification into psychology; who the subjects of early experiments were and how experimenters and subjects related to each other; famous psychologists such as Lewis Terman and Edward Titchener; and how experimental strategies were extended beyond the laboratory to the larger spaces of everyday life. The book concludes with two essays that discuss contemporary concerns regarding psychological experimentation.

Construction in Contention Toward Consequential Resolutions

The present critiques are framed within a tradition that views argumentation as a pathway to truth, objectivity and purity of reason. The constructionist dialogues substantially refigure these criterial concepts, conceptualizing them as artifacts of historically and culturally situated communities. Troubles begin when any particular community begins to declare alterior realities null and void. The constructionist dialogues invite us to replace questions of truth in all worlds with communal deliberation on the future outcomes—both for psychology and global cultures—of varying forms of intelligibility. In this respect, constructionist discourse harbors the potential for enormous gains in creative collaboration, a condition I find far more promising than the bounded worlds of realism and rationalism favored by these critiques. A liberal constructionism would not abandon the traditions from which these critiques emerge, while the unbridled expansion of any of these traditions would eliminate all save its own.