Hubert Knoblauch

Communicative Constructivism and the Empirical Study of Social Reality

This book presents a new range of theoretical and empirical studies dedicated to Communicative Constructivism, a new approach in social theory developed from within the Sociology of Knowledge. Based on Social Constructivism and emerging from German-speaking social sciences, Communicative Constructivism integrates interpretive perspectives, poststructuralist theories, new materialism, actor network theories, and Science and Technology studies in a way which provides a systematic yet open theoretical frame for empirical studies. In doing so, it escapes the problems of postmodern arbitrariness of theoretical plurality, and of a too narrowly defined sociality. Instead, it presents clear elaborated theoretical premises and rich empirical studies, inviting an examination of relations to international research within ethnomethodology and interactionism. The theoretical chapters posit Communicative Constructivism within the field of social theories, illustrating its unique approach to subjectivity and helping to define a new field of research, while the empirical chapters ground the theoretical concepts of Communicative Constructivism in analyses across a range of fields from communicative actions, the role of violence, and religion and spirituality, to mediatization and the politics of knowledge. Providing a unique collection of the current state of the theory and serving as the first English-language publication of this kind, its foundational debates, and ongoing research in terms of theory formation and empirical analysis will appeal to scholars and researchers of sociology with interests in social theory, the sociology of knowledge, and the sociology of space.