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For more than half of the 20* century, psychologists sought to locate the causes of behaviour in individuals and tended to neglect the possibility of locating the psy­ chological in the social. In the late 1960s, a reaction to that neglect brought about a "crisis" in social psychology. This "crisis" did not affect all social psychologists; some remained seemingly oblivious to its presence; others dismissed its signifi­ cance and continued much as before. But, in certain quarters, the psychological was re-conceptualised as the social, and the social was taken to be sui generis. Moreover, the possibility of developing general laws and theories to describe and explain social interaction was rejected on the grounds that, as social beings, our actions vary from occasion to occasion, and are, for many reasons, unrepeatable. There is, so it was thought, an inherent instability in the phenomena of interest. The nomothetic ideal was said to rest on individualistic cause-effect positivism of the kind which (arguably) characterised the natural sciences, but social psychology (so it was said) is an historical inquiry, and its conclusions are necessarily historically relative (Gergen, 1973). Events outside psychology converged to give impetus to the "crisis" within.

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CHOICE Review

This timely and important book makes a major contribution to the ongoing debate about whether social constructionism is an appropriate metatheory for psychology and related disciplines. A psychologist who thinks like a philosopher, Hibberd (Univ. of Sydney) draws on an impressively diverse literature in psychology and philosophy to present a trenchant critique of Kenneth Gergen's social constructionist metatheory of psychology (as articulated in Social Construction in Context, 2001). Social constructionism has come under close philosophical scrutiny before (e.g., in Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What?, CH, Mar'00, 37-3851), but the present volume is unique for its almost exclusive focus on Gergen's work. Hibberd outlines Gergen's ideas and the related views of John Shotter and Jonathan Potter, and he concludes that those who accuse constructionism of relativism are mistaken. He concentrates on a detailed and quite persuasive analysis of the similarities between social constructionism and its supposed archenemy, positivism (in its various forms), and on the ways in which the two have come to occupy the same metatheoretical niche. Devotees of social constructionism will be inclined to dismiss Hibberd's (and all such philosophical) arguments as beside the point, but such views are nonetheless compelling and deserve a wide audience. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. R. R. Cornelius Vassar College