Strict Constructionism

Those whom Best (1989) calls "strict" constructionists have attempted to chart the types of argument and appeal used by social problems claims-makers without making reality claims of their own (Ibarra and Kitsuse, 1993). Correspondingly, they have sought to deconstruct all reality posits about social problems, including those by other social constructionists. Woolgar and Pawluch (1985a) have identified what they allege is a recurrent pattern of inconsistency by their constructionist colleagues. Claiming to be anti-objectivist, their colleagues nevertheless presuppose some imputed realities in the vary act of calling others into question. For example, Gusfield (1989:431), in the process of putting forth a "culturalist" perspective, nevertheless assumes the existence of certain out-there "conditions":

It is part of how we [in modern society] think and how we interpret the world around us, that we perceive many conditions as not only deplorable but as capable of being relieved by and as requiring public action, most often by the state. The concept of 'social problem' is a category of thought, a way of seeing certain conditions as providing a claim to change through public actions. (italics mine)

Gusfield stops short in this commentary of treating the "conditions" themselves as socially constructed. Indeed, his claims about the novelty of what "we" (in modern society) think and perceive seems to depend on these other posits about the real world being taken for granted. This same pattern of alleged inconsistency is exhibited in research reports, according to Woolgar and Pawluch. How, for example, do we know that the imputed "dangers" of marijuana have been socially constructed? Because ascriptions of harm are historically fluctuant while the "nature" of marijuana remains the same. How do we know that an alleged heroin crisis was socially constructed? Because there was "not really" an increase in heroin use over the time period in question. Woolgar and Palwluch (1985a:216) call the process of portraying statements about conditions and behavior as objective while relativizing the definitions and claims made about them "ontological gerrymandering." It is, they claim, a common feature of all empirical social problems research reports that "one category of claims is laid open to ontological uncertainty and then made the target for explanation in terms of the social circumstances which generated them; at the same time, the reader in asked to accept another category of claims on faith" (Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985a:218)(1).

For Woolgar and Pawluch (1985a), then, rhetoric is chiefly verbal sleight-of-hand. As regards social problems explanations, it is a strategic means of managing "inevitable inconsistencies of argument" (225). For example, the western world came to regard "child abuse" as a real social problem through a process, in part, of disquotation (Woolgar & Pawluch, 1985a): i.e., discourse about child abuse became so routinized that few readers noticed or cared that the quotation marks around the term had been removed.