Diana L. Ascher, PhD, MBA

Constructionist or discourse-analytic approach

With both humanities and social sciences roots, in which it is assumed that the discourse of a society predominately conditions the responses of individuals within that society, including the social understanding of information. According to Talja, Tuominen, & Savolainen (in press), constructionism sees "language as constitutive for the construction of selves and the formation of meanings." Further, "We produce and organize social reality together by using language." This metatheory arose from the work of Bakhtin (Holquist, 2002) and Foucault (1972), among others. Frohmann (1994) and Talja (1999) have expounded on the use of this approach in LIS. This approach has been applied in LIS by Budd & Raber (1996), Frohmann (2001), and Talja (2001), among others. A non-LIS, but highly relevant example can be seen in Hayles (1999).

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