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

groups of collaborators within a research area.
Equipped with these provisional definitions of disciplines and
fields founded on a realist epistemology, I now explore the constructivist
perspectives on the nature of academic knowledge. As
discussed above, the social constructionism introduced by Berger
and Luckmann (1966) has greatly influenced sociological theories
since the 1970s. The constructivist stance views the social world as
not having essential, given properties, but only those that become
‘objectivated’ through social practice. In the realm of disciplinary
knowledge, social constructivist assumptions underlie the position
of Young (1971), who challenges the ‘objectivist’ view of knowledge
as ‘truth’ external to its social production. A poststructuralist turn in
constructivist theories shifts the emphasis to discourse, where the
‘objective world’ emerges only in discourse, and where discourses
are external to and constituted through individual subjectivity. In the
realm of disciplinary knowledge, this means scepticism about the
foundations and hierarchies of knowledge leading to, or threatening to
lead to, a collapse of disciplinary boundaries. 7 Institutions, including
disciplinary knowledge, rather than being understood as reified, are
taken as socially constructed practices, and in a Foucauldian sense, as
a discursive community. Foucault’s genealogical discourse of fields of
study provides an alternative to established practices of intellectual
history. He unearths the artificiality and arbitrariness of dividing lines
in tracing the ensemble of historical contingencies that make up the
ancestry of a currently accepted theory.
Notions about the nature of academic disciplines and fields thus
vary depending on the epistemological lens in use. As discussed above,
constructivists’ (and poststructuralists’) concepts about disciplinary
nature and constitution differ radically from those of the realists’.
Whereas the latter perceive the universal and necessary epistemological
elements of a discipline together with its particular and contingent
sociological features, the former largely underscore the contingencies
and particularities of knowledge. Where the realists distinguish among
the object of knowledge, the knowing subject, and the concept (and
the word), the constructivists tend to blur the boundaries of objectsubject-concept-word,
giving primacy to the subject and, in the case
of the poststructuralists, to the word. Poststructuralism views the
objective foundations and hierarchies of knowledge with scepticism,
and thus tends to blur and erode disciplinary boundaries – perhaps in
favour of interdisciplinarity – thereby introducing a sensibility towards
perceiving institutions of knowledge as institutions of power. Both
perspectives – realist and constructivist – and the theoretical literature
7 This fits in with the emergent discourse on interdisciplinarity. The modern/postmodern
discourse on interdisciplinarity could very well be a reaction to modernity’s
positivism and scientificism, which contributed to a fragmentation of knowledge.
14