Why performances of accountability and normative heterosexual masculinity do not constitute ‘maturity’: A commentary on Korobov and Bamberg

When we were invited to comment on an empirical discourse analytic article that had been accepted for publication by the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, our initial reaction was one of astonishment. We found it hard to believe that any social constructionist researchers in developmental psychology would be sufficiently courageous (or perhaps foolhardy) to submit their work to a journal that has no track record of publishing social constructionist work. Nor could we believe that the journal had been sufficiently courageous to publish the article and begin what may prove to be a process of broadening its scope in a significant and challenging way. Hence, before we offer any reflections on the content of the article, we must commend both Korobov and Bamberg and the journal. The article appears at a very appropriate time, when social constructionist work has moved beyond the social psychological realm in which it first appeared in British psychology and has begun to feature regularly in British Psychological Society journals devoted to other domains such as health psychology and psychotherapeutic and counselling psychology. The appearance of Korobov and Bamberg's article in the journal that lies at the heart of British developmental psychology is a significant and welcome move as it may introduce the radical potential of social constructionist work to a new audience of psychologists (although, of course, 2 some developmentalists have already used social constructionist approaches in creative ways to shed new light on developmental psychology as a discipline – see Burman, 1994 – and, more specifically, on masculinities in youth, for example – see the work of Frosh et al., 2002, 2003, and the resistance it engendered from Archer, 2004). For those who are not familiar with social constructionism and its outworking in discursive research, Korobov and Bamberg provide a helpful synopsis in the early part of their article. However, it is important to point out that they tell only part of the story of social constructionist research in British psychology. The social constructionist approach that they focus on in their article is very much a discursive psychology approach with its characteristic micro-level attention to text (Edwards & Potter, 1992). However, there is another strand which is sometimes termed 'Foucauldian discourse analysis'. This is concerned with the availability of discursive resources within a culture (and the implications for those living within that culture), the role of discourse in wider social processes of legitimation and …