This chapter seeks to establish the ontological, epistemological, and methodological distinctiveness of social constructivism as an approach to social and political analysis. It views social constructivism as a profoundly normative mode of political inquiry which seeks to discern, interrogate, and elucidate the contingency of social and political change – restoring politics (broadly understood) to processes and practices typically seen to be inevitable, necessary, and uncontestable. 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 analytical purchase on social and political realities, reflected in its distinctive emphasis on the social construction of social and economic necessity. The chapter considers the contribution of social constructivism to the analysis of crisis dynamics in particular. It compares constructivism with interpretivism, asking whether all constructivists are interpretivists and, indeed, all interpretivists constructivists. It concludes by exploring the synergies between constructivism and contemporary interpretivist and institutionalist analysis. Constructivism, as Jeffrey Checkel has noted, is ‘trendy’ – and it is no less trendy today than

when these words were first published over a decade ago (2004: 229). And, perhaps partly as a consequence, it remains both highly controversial and, judging by the tone of their responses, intensely frustrating to its critics (for recent examples of such palpable exasperation see, for instance, Bell 2011, 2012; Marsh 2009). This should not surprise us. For constructivism challenges conventional approaches in some profound ways and yet, at the same time, is notoriously slippery and difficult to pin down precisely. It means different things to different authors (and sometimes, seemingly, to the same author even in the pages of a single contribution), it covers a multitude of differing (and at times seemingly incommensurate) positions and, even in what are taken to be its defining texts, it often lacks a clearly stated set of core claims. It is also treated, by its advocates, admirers, and detractors alike, as a normative theory, an ontology, an epistemology, and (if more rarely) a methodology. In what follows my aim is to attempt to inject some clarity into this confusion. The task is,

however, an ambitious one and one fraught with perils. Constructivism is difficult to specify

precisely because, in the end, it does mean different things to different people – and, to compound the problem, the content of such meanings has itself changed over time. There is no escaping this; nor is there anything inherently wrong with it – it is just how things are. Inevitably, then, some self-declared constructivists will empathize more closely with the account of constructivism that I offer here than others. And that perhaps makes it important to explain how I have gone about the task of clarifying and articulating as clearly and sympathetically as I can the constructivist position that I here outline and ultimately seek to defend.