In 1992 Jim Kemeny made an influential plea for housing studies to be more theoretically aware through the application of theories from the mainstream social disciplines. In his own work, Kemeny drew on social constructionism as his theoretical framework and applied it to the study of housing tenures and to international comparative research (Kemeny and Lowe, 1998). The framework became popular in housing studies and an edited collection in 2004 (Jacobs et al, 2004) showed the scope of the research that had been undertaken under its rubric. However, there has been an increasing dissatisfaction with the constraints and lacunae in the underlying tenets of social constructionism and it has been challenged by a number of important developments and trends in social theory and research such as materialism and practice theory.

It may appear strange to start a chapter on new materialism with a discussion of social constructionism, but the latter’s popularity in housing studies and the links between the two approaches make this way of proceeding useful. In part, new materialism was adopted as a reaction to the social constructionist approach in the social sciences. In addition, the following chapter will outline the practice approach that is adopted in this book and it is useful to see this in relation to both social constructionism and new materialism as there are some features that are related to both approaches. It is argued that the practice approach provides a more holistic framework by integrating the strengths of the other two and overcomes some of their drawbacks.

Therefore, this chapter begins with a brief description of social constructionism and its impact on academic housing research and policy and practice. The strengths and weaknesses of the approach are outlined and the increasingly popular alternative of new materialism that builds on the weaknesses is considered. New materialism overcomes the relative neglect of material elements in social constructionism, which was dominated by the study of language and discourse.

The chapter covers just two of the many possible approaches that have been applied to housing given its multidisciplinarity.