ABSTRACT
What Is Social Constructionism? Social constructionism has a long history, with its many instantiations dating back many
centuries. The postmodernist tradition grew out of social constructionism and shares its
blend of skepticism, nihilism, relativism, and its penchant for almost incomprehensible
prose (Einstadter & Henry, 2006). Postmodernism and social constructionism have
infiltrated criminology and strongly challenged its claim to be objective in any sense of
the term. For anti-science scholars, science is as irrational as any other system of human
thought. Like all terms ending with ism, there are many varieties of postmodernism and
social constructionism that range from the reasonable, most of which empirical scientists
can happily live with, to the outrageous. We are only concerned here with claims of social
construction as they apply to features of criminology, such as the nature of crime and
criminality.
