Читать книгу The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 18

The constructionist dialogues liberated both academics and practitioners from the demands of authority, invited appreciation of multiple traditions, and opened the way to cementing values to innovation. At the same time, however, the constructionist dialogues drew from across multiple intellectual traditions – philosophy, literary theory, political theory, rhetoric, symbolic anthropology, micro-sociology, and the history of science among them. Most all these sources were absent from mainstream social science itself. Thus, as constructionist dialogues spilled across the professions, so was a rich repository of new logics and concepts introduced.

The concept of narrative is illustrative. While largely a child of literary theory, the idea of narrative played an important role in constructionist dialogues. As outlined earlier, in representing the world in spoken and written language one must follow the conventions or rules of language itself. There are strong conventions for describing events across time. Informally, these are conventions for telling a good or plausible story; most relevant, the rules of narrative are pivotal to our constructions of the world. The logic of narrative construction has subsequently made its way across the worlds of practice. Narrative therapy (Freedman and Combs, 1996), narrative mediation (Monk and Winslade, 2013), and narrative medicine (Charon, 2006), are among the most obvious derivatives. Closely related, the concept of the storyteller has also made its way into practices of pain management, organizational leadership, educational pedagogy, and peace building.

Yet, while the constructionist dialogues have unleashed energies of innovation in professional practice, the relationship between scholarship and practice is also synergistic. Innovations in practice have also fueled the fires of theory. As constructionist scholars have directed their attention increasingly to consequential action, often working side-by-side with societal change makers, new theorizing has been inspired. For example, in just this way one may justifiably understand developments in the theory of coordinated management of meaning (Pearce and Cronen, 1980; Wasserman and Fisher-Yoshida, 2017), dialogical self theory (Hermans and Kempen, 1993), positioning theory (Harré, and Moghaddam, 2003), relational theory (Gergen, 2009), performance and arts-based research theory (Gergen and Gergen, 2012; Leavy, 2019), actor-network theory (Latour, 2005), practice theory of leading (Raelin, 2016), process theory of organizations (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019), embodiment theory (Shotter, 2010) and feminist constructionist theory (M. Gergen, 2001). The same may be said for a plethora of powerful new concepts, such as the discursive mind, radical presence, generative moments, relational responsibility, withness as opposed to aboutness, poetic activism, and phonetic capacity. Increasingly, however, this cross-fertilization between scholar and practitioner groups becomes an ever-blurring line. The term scholar practitioner does not specify the location of one's occupation.