Suchergebnisse

Constructivist IR scholars study the ways in which international norms, culture, and identities-all intersubjective phenomena-inform foreign policy and affect the reaction to and outcomes of international events. Political psychologists similarly investigate divergent national self-conceptions as well as the individual cognitive and emotional propensities that shape ideology and policy. Given their mutual interest in human subjectivity and identity politics, a dialogue and synthesis between constructivism and political psychology is long overdue. The contributors to this volume discuss both theoretical and empirical issues of complementarity and critique, with an emphasis on the potential for integrating the viewpoints within a progressive ideational paradigm. Moreover, they make a self-conscious effort to interrogate, rather than gloss over, their differences in the hope that such disagreements will prove particularly rich sources of analytical and empirical insight

If evaluators do not borrow from the natural and social sciences for their methods, what do their enquiries look like? Many who seek to answer that question pursue naturalistic or case study or qualitative approaches, conceived of as a reaction to scientism to produce a more faithful response to the social and political nature of the world being evaluated. Among those approaches is constructivism, familiar in the philosophy of science, science education and psychology. This is a general critique of science for its failure to acknowledge that theories and realities are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered or uncovered, but are constructed in the minds of individuals or in the discourses of groups. This article looks critically at constructivism as it has appeared in the field of evaluation and presents it as an overreaction to the problems of objective reality.