Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

the 1970s, the dominant paradigms in the social sciences were three:
functionalist theory, the Marxian-inspired conflict theories, and the
interactionist theories. The debate in these social theories oscillates
between structural determinacy and individual agency. Functionalist
theory explains social phenomena in terms of their contribution to
the operations of a larger social phenomenon, institution, or society.
Metaphorically, it typically compares society to a biological organism
or system made up of many interdependent and co-operative parts.
Functionalism was at its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s until it was
challenged by the conflict theorists. The Marxist conflict theories
emphasise the role of structure, primarily economic structure, as the
overall explanatory framework for society. This means that educational
institutions and knowledge are sites either for the maintenance of
existing power relations or of resistance to them (reproduction versus
resistance theories). Weberian-inspired interpretive theory offers an
alternative explanation to mechanistic and deterministic models found
in certain forms of Marxian and functionalist theories. It highlights the
role of human agency and focuses on the observation and theoretical
interpretation of the subjective ‘states of mind’ of human actors.
Middle ground theories that give primacy neither to structure nor to
agency are identified as the broadly structurationist approaches 2 (e.g.
Giddens, Bhaskar, Bourdieu, Archer, Bernstein). The structurationist
theorists generally argue that the process of social change is achieved
via the operation of both structure and agency (“Structuration School”
in Encyclopedia of Social Theory).
A strong agency-oriented position stresses the capacity of individual
agents to construct and reconstruct their worlds. This epistemological
position denotes a shift from the previous dominantly materialist realist
stance to a constructivist stance. This is particularly pronounced in a
third type of social theory: interactionism and social constructionism 3 ,
which focus on meso- and micro-level analysis of individual behaviour,
placing emphasis on the face-to-face interactions of individuals in
school contexts and on the nature of the construction of meanings.
Of particular relevance to the issue of the nature of knowledge is the
work of Berger and Luckmann (1966), The Social Construction of Reality,
which offered the first comprehensive theoretical work on the process
of social construction. Social constructionism encompasses a range of
perspectives that view the social world as not having essential, given
2 Theories of structuration are interested in overcoming four dualisms which have
plagued social theory: static/dynamic, synchronicity/diachronicity, action/structure,
and subject/object. These dualisms can be dissolved by the idea of structuration –
that is, the interplay of structure and actor in action conceived as societal praxis.
Actors are seen as practical conscious human beings equipped with bounded rationality,
producing actions in a given opportunity structure, thus reproducing structural
context. (“Social change”, Encyclopedia of Social Theory, p.555).
The equivalent term in social epistemology is constructivism.
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