Social constructivism and the politics of meaning: Foundations of interpretive policy analysis

This chapter presents social constructivism as a theoretical foundation of critical policy inquiry and its method of interpretive policy analysis. After explaining the constructivist critique of neopositivism, Weber’s concept of Verstehen is introduced, followed by a discussion of Schütz’s social phenomenology and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Berger and Luckmann’s conceptualization of the social construction of reality is then sketched out, before concluding with a brief discussion of Kuhn’s social construction of science. Basic to the discussion is the importance of the role of social meaning in understanding social and political action, typically ruled out in neopositivist social science as subjective and irrational. This orientation to social meaning requires a turn to interpretive social science, geared to uncovering and analyzing the interactions between social meanings and the empirical world. The chapter concludes with a brief presentation of the methods and practices of a critically oriented interpretive policy analysis, focusing on framing, discourse, and narratives.