ABSTRACT
Constructionism is well removed from the objectivism found in the positivist stance. In some areas it seems to have replaced objectivism as the dominant paradigm. As writers like Merleau-Ponty have pointed out very tellingly, the world and objects in the world are indeterminate. They may be pregnant with potential meaning, but actual meaning emerges only when consciousness engages with them. Giddens’s purpose in making this distinction is to offer a basis for his concept of the ‘double hermeneutic’ in which social scientists have to engage. Social scientists have the task, first of all, of ‘entering and grasping the frames of meaning involved in the production of social life by lay actors’ as well as the subsequent task of ‘reconstituting these within the new frames of meaning involved in technical conceptual schemes’. The critical thrust of constructionism was also maintained with vigour in parallel developments on the other side of the Atlantic.
