Before eclecticism: competing alternatives in constructivist research

Abstract

Should constructivist research engage empirical debates with other approaches, especially non-constructivists? Recent calls for ‘eclectic’ and ‘pluralistic’ scholarship seem to encourage engagement, including across epistemological divides many constructivists have long perceived with non-constructivists. Yet this literature downplays competition between approaches, instead emphasizing that they answer different parts of questions. In seeming to evoke a division of labor, the eclectic turn actually strengthens a sense that approaches occupy distinct spaces. This article offers a sympathetic corrective to the eclectic turn, and to common accounts of older epistemological divides. Before eclectic combinations, empirical work necessarily begins from contrasting accounts on the same terrain. Only a naïve positivist imagines that meaningful scholarship tests solitary hypotheses against reality. Today’s scholars vary in how far they move toward more socially based epistemologies, with constructivists moving furthest – and the further we move, the more the shape and significance of our accounts depends on contrasts to others. Thus, all scholars should seek out competing alternatives, especially constructivists. After making this point, the article unpacks how it has been obscured by four arguments that limit competition between constructivist claims and alternatives, concerning constitutiveness, understanding, holistic methodology, and anti-foundationalism. Each view contains errors that can be corrected without undercutting the epistemological commitments of its proponents. This clears the way for introducing more competition into constructivism and into the eclectic turn more generally. All scholars, including all constructivists, working within their own epistemologies, will do their best work through contrasts to alternatives across our old divides.

Producing Food, Security, and the Geopolitical Subject

“…Beyond certain ontological foundations, however, constructivism in IR remains a rather wide umbrella within which there are a range of epistemological perspectives about how to study a socially contingent reality (Fierke 2021;Hopf 1998). This includes middle-ground or "conventional" constructivism that often works within a positivist epistemology, and which considers (inter-)subjective factors in more or less explicitly causal terms, sometimes even in terms of independent variables on political outcomes (Emanuel Adler 1997;Checkel 2006;Parsons 2002). Some writings in this vein also hold a "rump materialism" to state behavior and action (Ruggie 1982(Ruggie , 1998Wendt 1999).…”

“…Rather than taking one side of the so-called understanding and explanation divide, however, this thesis adopts a third, more pluralist perspective on constructivist IR scholarship, which sees the two as mutually informative tasks (Bennett 2013;Guzzini 2000;Parsons 2010;Pouliot 2007;Price and Reus-Smit 1998;Sil and Katzenstein 2010). That is, I combine a constructivist ontology that emphasizes the role of ideas, meaning-making, and inter-subjective factors in constructing social reality, with a more open epistemology that considers it both possible and beneficial for interpretive and explanatory research inquiries to work in tandem (Bennett 2013;Sil and Katzenstein 2010).…”

“…Indeed, while post-positivist perspectives often focus on meaning embedded in language, significations and the symbolic, they are also interested in the "manifest political consequences of adopting one mode of representation over another" (D. Campbell 1992: 7-8;Doty 1993;Hansen 2006;Milliken 2001). Efforts to interpret how a given phenomenon, norm, action, or discourse matters for politics thus often mimic the explanatory and causal endeavors of positivist approaches (Parsons 2015;Price and Reus-Smit 1998). As Price and Reus-Smit (1998) put it, analyses of variable representations per se that do not connect these representations to their generative effects on sociopolitical reality make little sense.…”

Transparency in Qualitative Research: An Overview of Key Findings and Implications of the Deliberations

“…Replicability makes 69 See, e.g., Lupia and Elman 2014. 70 Parsons (2015). sense as an evaluative standard from a hypothetico-deductive perspective in which social inquiry involves the use of evidence to falsify claims about observer-independent phenomena in the world.…”

Socialization and violence

“… 4 This problem extends beyond the literature discussed here. See Mearsheimer & Walt (2013), Checkel (2013b: 233–234), Wight, Hansen & Dunne (2013), and Parsons (2015). …”