Social Constructionism

Andy Lock is Professor of Psychology in the School of Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand. Tom Strong is a Professor in the Division of Applied Psychology at the University of Calgary, Canada.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Giambattista Vico; 3. Phenomenology; 4. Hermeneutics; 5. Marxism and language; 6. Lev Vygotsky; 7. Meanings and perspectives: George Herbert Mead and Jakob von Uexküll; 8. Ludwig Wittgenstein: 'shewing the fly out of the bottle'; 9. Gregory Bateson: a cybernetic view of communication and human interaction; 10. Sociologies - micro and macro: Garfinkel, Goffman and Giddens; 11. Sources of the self; 12. Michel Foucault and his challenges; 13. Discourse analysis; 14. Ken and Mary Gergen; 15. Rom Harre; 16. John Shotter; 17. Concluding remarks.

'An amazing accomplishment. Andy Lock and Tom Strong succeed in drawing together an enormous range of scholarship to shape current dialogues on social construction. With their articulate, well-balanced, and personalized accounts of these wide-ranging contributions, this impressive work will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students alike.' Kenneth J. Gergen, Swarthmore College and author of Relational Being