14 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
tacit knowledge, creating a sense of “how we do things here.” This works well until a third person
arrives. New to the situation, Person C does not know the rules, and this requires A and B to make
them explicit as they socialize C to the situation they have created and modify that situation and
the rules to accommodate C’s strengths, talents, and limitations.
Through such interactive processes, members of a group come to use the same or similar
cognitive mechanisms, engage in the same or similar acts, and use the same or similar language to
talk about thought and action.^20 The shared meanings are public, not private or personal (although
the latter may be of interest in psychological studies and other fields less focused on collective
action): Each group “has its own sounds, noises, and silences which arouse the attention of its
members and have agreed upon significance” (Warner 1959, 455). This is also the process through
which institutions are objectified and practices, reified.
Taking off from Berger and Luckmann’s book, the notion of “social construction” achieved
currency in the human sciences. The creation of intersubjective understanding that they describe
there—that which is developed between two (or more) “subjectivities”—was a central concern of
their teacher, the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz, in his effort to understand how an individual
makes sense of another’s acts. This is what is “social” about ontological constructivism: that it
has a shared character, developed in the course of living in common, interacting through the
medium of political, cultural, and other artifacts in which the meanings embedded in these arti-
facts come to be known, tacitly, even when such communication is nonverbal.^21
Were it not for the awkwardness of language, we should rather speak of social constructing,
rather than social constructions (much like Weick’s [1969] distinction between organizing and
organization). The gerund captures the dynamism of the process and reserves agency to actors,
whereas the noun form excessively reifies process outcomes: “social constructions” have been
treated by some, in a most non-phenomenological fashion, as if they were agentless entities,
disembodied from their action contexts.^22 This is not to deny the institutionalization and reification
that typically occur—the habits of thought and practice that result as constructive acts become
mundane, so well described in that section of Berger and Luckmann’s work. A phenomenologi-
cal ontology would remind us, however, and ask us to remind ourselves in the midst of our
research and writing of the “as if” character of these institutions; it insists on human agency and,
thereby, the possibility of change.
The concept of intersubjectivity, operative in an ontological sense, enables a conceptualization
of collective action that is, or may be, otherwise problematic. A student of political, organiza-
tional, and social life often wants to make statements not only about individual actors but also
about collectivities: states, communities, neighborhoods, departments. The intersubjective char-
acter of social “realities”—describing as it does the habits of thinking, the ways of seeing, and the
shared meanings submerged therein that knit together members of a group who have been inter-
acting over time—accomplishes what from a more atomistic perspective appears to be an anthro-
pomorphizing sleight of mind. The classic challenge put to analytic philosophy (thinking here of
Bertrand Russell or the early Wittgenstein)—what meaning is there in the statement “England
declared war”?—provides an example. Such declaration is an act of a single individual; what
sense does it make to render it in the collective? Does it mean that “Parliament declared war” or
that “Prime Minister Winston Churchill, acting as representative of The Crown, itself standing in
for the English people as a whole, declared war”? The phenomenological observation that ongo-
ing interaction leads to communities of interpretation and of practice, while not denying indi-
vidual differences, enables such statements as “the United States has an immigration policy” or
“the department knows how to get its students jobs.”^23 The phenomenological concept of
intersubjectivity that enables such a conceptualization of collective social reality stands in direct