Social Constructionism

Before heading to the bookstore for some appreciative inquiry texts, though, it’s fair to ask how AI is more than a savvy gloss on "accentuating the positive," to survey AI’s principles and practice, and to briefly consider how religious communities can use this gift.

Appreciative inquiry is an expression of postmodern social constructionism. As such it is preoccupied with language, learning, relationship, and generativity in living systems—and spends little time with "objective reality" or "absolutes," including ultimate truth or the "right" way to do something. As Cooperrider and Whitney state in Appreciative Inquiry, "Constructionism replaces the individual with the relationship as the locus of knowledge by valuing the power of language to create our sense of reality."⁷

Social constructionists pay attention to how people create meaning through dialogue. They believe that history and culture shape every expression of meaning; thus they hold that reality is never objective. Human beings are shaped and conditioned by the idiosyncrasies of history and culture. At the same time, social constructionism does not see humankind as "determined" by its past or forever subject to the vagaries of war and human failure. Rather, it references science’s most recent frontiers to offer philosophic grounding for the notion that human beings have the freedom to socially construct preferred futures for ourselves. Rather than trying to prove their case, they are hard at work embodying it, and case studies are proliferating.

Social constructionists recommend nurturing a radical agnosticism about our assumptions, about whatever "meaning worlds" we live in. They suggest cultivating an ability to distinguish between what is true and our own perceptions and conclusions.⁸ Recommending humility about what we "know" and the limits of our understanding is accompanied with a respect for inclusiveness and diversity, values guarding against the elitism so tempting to institutions, meaning systems, and the ego.

Both physical and social sciences have played a role in creating and understanding AI. When Cooperrider’s doctoral research identified the unexpected power of focusing on positive outcomes, he and his committee chair, Professor Suresh Srivastva, asked themselves why. A multidisciplinary team including researchers in anthropology, behavioral science, medicine, psychology, and sports came on board. The team’s research included examining how images help athletes compete and studying the Pygmalion phenomenon and the placebo effect. Ultimately its inquiry focused on what Cooperrider now describes as "the relationship between our images and our behavior; between what we believe to be true and what we create as truth."⁹

The principles and practice of AI grew from this research, and Cooperrider’s dissertation, completed in 1986, was titled "Appreciative Inquiry: Toward a Methodology for Understanding and Enhancing Organizational Innovation." In 1987 Srivastva and Cooperrider published "Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life," a professional, academic paper where the term "appreciative inquiry" was used in print for the first time.¹⁰

7. David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, Appreciative Inquiry (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2000), 26–27.
8. Kenneth Gergen’s work, in particular his Toward Transformation in Social Knowledge, 2nd Edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), has had a strong influence on AI.
9. Watkins and Mohr, 29. Cooperrider’s seminal essay on the role of image, published in 1990, is titled "Positive Image; Positive Action: The Affirmative Basis of Organizing."
10. This essay and the one mentioned in the previous note are both reprinted in Appreciative Inquiry: Rethinking Human Organization toward a Positive Theory of Change (Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing, 2000).