ABSTRACT
SHOTTER and Gergen claim that they “set out the central lineaments of social constructionism as they are relevant to communication studies” (p. 3). If this is their purpose, they do not succeed. If you are looking for a social constructionist perspective on communication, you will not find it here. What you will find is a rather glib characterization of conversation (“situated, devel- opmental, and relational”) as a way of giving a social constructionist account of epistemology. While I have nothing against an essay on epistemology, even in Communication Yearbook, it is not quite the same thing as the social construc- tionist account of communication that the first sentence promises.
