The constructionist approach in Japanese sociology of family attracted a great deal of attention under the circumstances where the “nuclear family framework” based on the modern family model needed to be reformed. This approach was expected to address the question “what is family?” by paying attention to how laypeople define family.

However, although early constructionist family studies revealed a contextualized diversity of definitions of the family, they were never able to suggest how sociologists could define family or offer an answer to the question “what is family?” That these early studies focused on the rhetoric laypeople use to define family has led to the separation of research interests between constructionist family studies and other kind of studies. As a result, empirical studies based on the constructionist approach have not been accumulated in Japanese sociology of family. As a result, this approach has become quite thin in substance.

To overcome this situation, it is important for constructionist family studies to share research interests with other kinds of sociological family studies through focusing on how people experience their family lives and addressing the key question in the sociology of family, namely, “how has family changed and how will it change?”

The purpose of this paper is to review the history of social constructionist research in the sociology of education and to identify the future problems to be discussed.

Responding to the Ontological Gerrymandering Critique by Woolger and Pawluch, we assume that claims-making activities exist but we have no concern about whether some putative conditions exist or not. According to this assumption, the framework to classify realism or constructionism is set to achieve the goal.

First, Yamamura and Tokuoka's achievements and their contributions to the history of constructionist research in the sociology of education, which started in the 1980s, are examined. We then classify the stream of constructionist research in the sociology of education into two research programs, namely, the study of constructing the process of educational problems, and the discourse analysis of educational problems. We discuss the character of each of the two research programs based on the above framework.

In addition, we classify the discourse analyses of educational problems into critical analyses of discourse, which assume that social reality exists independently of language, and discourse analyses which assume that language shapes social reality.

The latter thesis should be applied not only to everyday life but also to constructionist research itself. Therefore a new analytic concept to contribute to the development of constructionism is indispensable.

By limiting comparisons to collective actions, we can perceive the following types of methodological differences between an explanatory approach (mobilization theory) and an interpretative approach (action theory).

The explanatory approach is an approach aimed at the construction of a comprehensive explanatory model for cause-and-effect mechanisms relating to the generation, development, and cessation of collective actions that are identified as social movements. An interpretative approach is an approach that aims to evaluate interpretatively the significance of certain social phenomena based on hierarchical macro-social and historical theories related to social movements.

Constructionism has influenced the explanatory theory (resource mobilization theory) and constructed the framing theory and the characteristics-analysis of collective action. It also has influenced interpretative theory (historical action theory), degraded the evaluation level and situated the action logic to be used by individuals to organize their action and experience.

Conversely, resource mobilization theory has redefined constructionism methodologically. Moreover, moderate sociological constructionism could relativize strategic constructionism and multiply constructionism. Lastly, this article examines the possibility that social movement research can include constructionism.

Social work may be seen as a major social institution which legitimates the power contained in modern capitalist states. Many social constructionists consider how social workers oppress clients and how practical social work occurs. This paper focuses on two approaches that appear in relevant studies: 1) a narrative approach that urges practitioners to pay attention to the voices and stories of clients who have been oppressed by the dominant stories and urges clients to create alternative narratives, and 2) a critical approach that analyzes the construction and reconstruction of social work. Take the child protection system as an example: while recent developments in social work feature a shift to risk technology, it has been argued that combining social work with risk technology nullifies the narratives of clients and authorship of their own stories. Compared to the relatively well developed social constructionism in social work studies written in English, studies in Japan are largely limited to a narrative approach that encourages social workers to be more reflective than critical. This limitation in practical social work in Japan results from various factors, including the fact that social work requires a national qualification via a professional training curriculum accredited by the Japanese government. This paper highlights recent discussion of how social workers victimize clients and how social workers are themselves victimized by neo-liberal social welfare regimes in which risk is the controlling technology, and social workers become managers and deskilled workers. Attention is drawn to the self-justification of social workers and the fact that emphasizing victims requires social workers to resist risk-driven regimes that constrain both the behavior of clients and social workers.

This paper examines the significance of the social constructionist approach in the sociology of deviance and discusses the possibility of discourse analysis being applicable in that field. There are two subordinate and practical questions for this consideration. One concerns the actuality of the sociology of deviance today. As discussed elsewhere, the sociology of deviance has declined since the 1980s and criminology has taken its place. We discuss the reasons for such a shift in terms of the changes in schemes of crime control in late modernity, and the emergence of new criminological insights and practices.We also discuss how some considerations like the new penology indicate the field where sociological insights and the research practices of deviance could successfully survive to demonstrate their abilities. Another subordinate question concerns the actualities of the social constructionist approach, especially in discourse analysis. This approach is sometimes criticized in Japan because it does not work well with the life history method, and has associated issues. However, to analyze the accomplishment of some identity in talk it is often helpful for us to understand what is going on in the situation and the significance of the story. I analyze an old confession of a drug user in Japan and identify the identity that was accomplished by the speaker. To identify the interpretative repertoire used, it also would be helpful for us to understand the mediated ideology that we might find in interactional situations. I analyze the discourse of druginduced sufferings and identify four interpretative repertoires to show that these repertoires would be helpful in understanding the features of drug-induced suffering in Japan. These analyses show that discourse analysis is still be an effective method for describing deviance as a part of society.

As a theory of the self in the era of late modernity or post-modernity, stories of the self or narrative identities are a current issue. Holstein and Gubrium's “The Self We Live by” is a typical account of a case of social constructionism.

Social constructionism is one of the successors to labeling theory and the other descendants of the Chicago School, Symbolic Interactionism, and Erving Goffman. Although they evaluate their contribution to theories of the self in appearance, we cannot find any concept or idea of the preceding arguments in their theories of the self. However, if we examine their arguments, we can quickly understand their significance.

They have missed important points. In particular, they have no idea of the differences between the self (social identity) and (personal) identity. However, in the case of self-narratives, the personal identity that matters is the object of evaluations. Goffman has already identified this different function in the concept of “self” (roles) from “person,” which eventually relates to “life history” or “career” as an element of personal identity.

In contrast, on these points, M. H. Goodwin develops arguments and sophisticated descriptions that are strongly influenced by Goffman's work, namely, the concepts of “evaluation” and “participation.” Thus we will reorganize a theory of narrative identity to take into account not only these preceding studies of the self but also Goodwin's findings.

In story-telling, at least, we need two persons. One is the teller who tells a self-story, the other is the hearer who hears it. If so, the distribution of each turns tends to be asymmetrical in their talk. Yet self-narrative is not like a one-way road from the teller to the hearer (s). The tellers have to try to employ multiple devices to obtain good “evaluations” and good “participation,” which give them chances to change themselves.

The aim of this paper is to develop a historical sociology of social problems based on a constructionist approach. This paper clarifies several points.

First, this paper takes up a study, the “Historical Sociology of Discourses on Mental Disorders,” written by Masahiro Sato in 2013; it is an excellent project which combines a constructionist “history of ideas” with comparative historical sociology developed by Theda Skocpol.

Second, this paper introduces Hiroyuki Hoshiro's three viewpoints on causal relationships: (a) a theory which explains why an event occurs; (b) a theory which integrates several theories; and (c) a theory which describes what an event or a state is. Constructionism concerning social problems is an approach that accounts for the emergence, nature, and maintenance of claim-making activities and discourse and is regarded as based on (c) or “thick descriptions.” This study, however, confirms that it does not fully reject causal relationships in a number of constructionist historical studies.

Third, based on a process-creating method proposed by Hoshiro, this paper attempts a comparative historical sociology on low birthrate measures in Japan since the 1990s. As a result, it shows that measures for employment and secure income are sufficient conditions for establishing the outcome that a measure is effective for increasing the birthrate.

Fourth, this paper investigates the advantages and disadvantages of causal explanations suggested by the process-creating method and asserts that the natural history model of social problems, which focuses on the chains and changes of claim-making activities and discourse, is an effective process-tracing method when a such a method cannot fully specify the causal mechanisms of events.

In this article, I reinterpret the social constructionist approach to the study of social problems from the perspective of conceptual analysis in sociology. The literature on social constructionism has argued that it already overcame the problem of ontological gerrymandering and all we must do is engage in empirical research. On the contrary, I argue that far too little attention has been paid to the methodological implications of the research on “claim-making activities.”

First, I point out that the main topic of the debate over social constructionism has not been the status of knowledge we acquire from the research on claim-making activities, but the selection of philosophical standpoints. Second, I reaffirm that social constructionism originally had a serious interest in the method of researching a particular problem, such as crime or child abuse, as a social problem, and society members' moral judgments on the condition of society. Subsequently, I explicate the idea of the conceptual analysis of sociology, which can afford a well-defined methodology to research social problems involving the original concern of social constructionism.

The aim of conceptual analysis is to elucidate concepts we use to understand who we are and what we do with detailed descriptions of the organization of practices. From this viewpoint, the social constructionist approach could be interpreted as a conceptual inquiry into members' methodologies that make claim-making activities intelligible as the very activity of claiming social problems.