I started using the word "constitution" in the early 2000s. My take on the word is rooted in ethnomethodological usage, but is intended to go beyond this usage (depending on how it is taken). For me, “to constitute” is a stronger verb than the verbs “make” or “construct” that have become popular in educational research.
The paradigm of "constitution" emphasizes the political aspect of joint human productivity. It hints at the complex processes through which institutionalizing acts that are the products of conversations–a take on Searle’s theory of the “speech act” (1969)–then become the points of reference for all further conversations about these acts within the constituted polity. The “Constitution” of the United States is thus not just a document, nor a historical moment–though it is also those. It remains the product of complex conversations with major consequences over hundreds of millions of human beings. This line of argument, including the justification for the capitalization of the word “School” in certain contexts, was started in Varenne and McDermott’s Successful Failure (1998).
There are other versions of the same intuition. For example, Hannah Arendt noted that "political deeds, for instance, institute ways of living together." ( Lorenzo Simpson, Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity, p. 57).