ABSTRACT
Answering these questions required an approach that was explicitly concerned with political continuity and change within institutional settings. This is provided through the constructivist institutionalist methodology outlined below. Yet the term ‘constructivist institutionalist’ is highly problematic at one level, as there are a multitude of constructivist positions. Many authors have documented the plethora of positions that fall under the constructivist umbrella, and added many adjectives as a result. For John Gerard Ruggie (1998a: 35-6) there is ‘neoclassical’, ‘postmodernist’ and ‘naturalistic’. For Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner (1998: 675-8) there is ‘conventional’, ‘critical’ and ‘postmodern’. For Christian ReusSmit (2005) constructivism has evolved into ‘systemic’, ‘unit-level’ and ‘holistic’ variants. Moreover, Emanuel Adler (1997: 335-6) originally settled on cleavages between ‘modernist’, ‘rule-based’, ‘narrative knowing’ and ‘postmodernist’, but then altered the boundaries to ‘modernist’, ‘modernist linguistic’, ‘Critical’ and ‘Radical’ (Adler 2005: 95-8). Still some authors simply choose to distinguish between the constructivism espoused by various scholars, thus distinguishing ‘Wendt-ian’, ‘Kratochwil-ian’ and ‘Onuf-ian’ constructivism (Zehfuss 2002). The list of possible adjectives that could be applied to constructivist approaches does appear to be dizzyingly endless along a spectrum of ‘thick’ to ‘thin’.
