Good in a crisis: the ontological institutionalism of social constructivism

Colin Hay

New Political Economy, 2016, vol. 21, issue 6, 520-535

Abstract: This paper seeks to recover and establish the distinct (and distinctly) institutionalist social ontology that underpins social constructivism as an approach to political economic analysis. It views social constructivism as a profoundly normative mode of political inquiry which seeks to discern, interrogate and elucidate the contingency of social, political and economic change – restoring politics (broadly understood) to processes and practices typically seen to be inevitable, necessary and non-negotiable. More controversially, perhaps, it also sees social constructivism, after both Berger and Luckmann and Searle, as ontologically institutionalist. Social constructivism, it is argued, has its origins in the attempt to establish the ontological distinctiveness of institutions as ‘social’ (as distinct from natural or ‘brute’) facts. This leads it to a distinct understanding of the relationship between actors and the environment (both natural and social) in which they find themselves and to its characteristic emphasis on the ideational mediation of that relationship. That in turn leads it to a particular type of analytic purchase on political economic realities, reflected in its distinctive emphasis on interpretive ambiguity, the social construction of political and economic imperatives and on disequilibrium. The argument is illustrated and developed further through an elucidation of the implications of such a social constructivism for the analysis of the period of crisis through which we now acknowledge ourselves to be living.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2016.1158800 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:21:y:2016:i:6:p:520-535

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cnpe20

DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2016.1158800

Access Statistics for this article

New Political Economy is currently edited by Professor Colin Hay

More articles in New Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().