John Shotter

Social Construction on the Edge: 'Withness'-Thinking and Embodiment John Shotter

This is a book for practitioners, for people who, like crafts-persons or sports-people, must continually shape or fashion their conduct both within the immediate allowances or opportunities for action afforded them by their circumstances, whilst at the same time, aiming at an overall goal of 'bettering' those circumstances, and their performances within them, in some way. The overall approach taken in this collection of essays is 'on the edge' of social constructionism in that - rather than emphasizing a "linguistic" or an "interpretative" turn - it emphasizes the spontaneous, expressive-responsiveness of our living bodies as providing the 'background glue' that holds us together in all our relationships, both with all the other people around us and with all the events also occurring in our surroundings. It thus emphasizes how our living, bodily embedding in this previously unnoticed background, and the ways in which events in it both 'call out' expressive responses from us, whilst leading us to 'resist' others, exerts much more of an influence on our actions than previous versions of social constructionism seem to allow.