Social constructionism

Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge in sociology and communication theory. It holds that characteristics typically thought to be immutable are in fact "socially constructed," that is, produced within a social context and shaped by cultural and historical contexts (Subramaniam 2010). The theory is typically applied to categories such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality, many of which are generally seen by science to be determined by biology. Social constructionism holds that they are products of human definition and interpretation.

Sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann introduced the term social construction into the social sciences in their 1966 book about the sociology of knowledge, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Their central concept is that people and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized. In the process, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people's conceptions (and beliefs) of what reality is become embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Reality is therefore said to be socially constructed.

Definition

Social constuctionism is a theory of knowledge that examines the development of jointly-constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared assumptions about reality. The theory asserts that meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately within each individual. Social constructionism claims that "taken-for-granted realities" are cultivated from "interactions between and among social agents." Reality is not some objective truth "waiting to be uncovered through positivist scientific inquiry." Rather, there can be "multiple realities that compete for truth and legitimacy."

A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the construction of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are developed, institutionalized, known, and made into tradition by humans.

Social constructs can be different based on the society and the events surrounding the time period in which they exist. An example of a social construct is money or the concept of currency, as people in society have agreed to give it importance/value. Another example of a social construction is the concept of self/self-identity. Charles Cooley stated based on his looking-glass self theory: "I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am." This demonstrates how people in society construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without the existence of people or language to validate those concepts.

There are weak and strong social constructs. Weak social constructs rely on brute facts (which are fundamental facts that are difficult to explain or understand, such as quarks) or institutional facts (which are formed from social conventions). Strong social constructs rely on the human perspective and knowledge that does not just exist, but is rather constructed by society.

Origins

File:Diagram of constructed reality.svg

Each person creates their own "constructed reality" that drives their behaviors.

The notion of the social construction of reality has roots in the problematization of the concept of truth that goes back as far as Friedrich Nietzsche. "No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations." In his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann said, "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance" between people and their environment. Each person constructs a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. People "live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones." Lippman's concepts are one of the pre-cursors of modern sociology's idea of social constructionism.

Andy Lock and Tomj Strong trace some of the fundamental tenets of social constructionism back to the work of the 18th-century Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist Giambattista Vico.

Berger and Luckmann give credit to Max Scheler as a large influence as he created the idea of Sociology of knowledge which influenced social construction theory.

According to Lock and Strong, other influential thinkers whose work has affected the development of social constructionism are: Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Jürgen Habermas, Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, Valentin Volosinov, Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gregory Bateson, Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Ken Gergen, Mary Gergen, Rom Harre, and John Shotter.

History and Development

Sociology of Knowledge

The specific term "sociology of knowledge" has been in widespread use since the 1920s, when a number of German-speaking sociologists, most notably Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, wrote extensively on sociological aspects of knowledge.

Sociology of knowledge was an important precursor to social constructionism. Its roots go back to founding sociologist Émile Durkheim at the beginning of the 20th century. His work deals directly with how conceptual thought, language, and logic can be influenced by the societal milieu from which they arise. In an early work co-written with Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, Durkheim and Mauss study "primitive" group mythology, arguing that classification systems are collectively based and that the divisions within these systems derive from social categories. Later, Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life would elaborate his theory of knowledge, examining how language and the concepts and categories (such as space and time) used in logical thought have a sociological origin. While neither Durkheim, nor Mauss, specifically coined nor used the term "sociology of knowledge," their work is an important first contribution to the field.

With the dominance of functionalism through the middle years of the 20th century, the sociology of knowledge tended to remain on the periphery of mainstream sociological thought. It was largely reinvented and applied in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and is still central for methods dealing with qualitative understanding of human society.

Berger and Luckmann

Social constructionism became prominent in the U.S. after the publication of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's 1966 book. Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. When people interact, they do so with the understanding that their respective perceptions of reality are related, and as they act upon this understanding their common knowledge of reality becomes reinforced. Since this common sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human typifications, significations and institutions come to be presented as part of an objective reality, particularly for future generations who were not involved in the original process of negotiation. For example, as parents negotiate rules for their children to follow, those rules confront the children as externally produced "givens" that they cannot change. Berger and Luckmann's social constructionism was influenced by the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schütz. Schütz attempted to apply the insights of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to sociology.

Development of the theory

More than four decades later, much theory and research pledged itself to the basic tenet that people "make their social and cultural worlds at the same time these worlds make them."

Social constructionism focuses on meaning and power. Meaning is not a property of the objects and events themselves, but aconstruction. Meaning is the product of the prevailing cultural frame of social, linguistic, discursive and symbolic practices (Cojocaru, & Bragaru, 2012). Persons and groups interacting together in a social system form, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other’s actions. These concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. The roles are made available to other member of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized (Cojocaru, 2010). In this process of this institutionalization meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people’s conception (and belief) of what reality is become embedded in the institutional fabric of society (Berger and Luckman, 1996 pp. 75-77).

Narrative turn

Like the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, it questions that there is a natural or immediate connection between concept and reality, and instead focuses on the relationship between knowers, positing that it is the consensus that develops between and among knowers. What we call reality is mediated socially. A social construct or construction concerns the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by the inhabitants of that society.

During the 1970s and 1980s, social constructionist theory underwent a transformation as constructionist sociologists engaged with the work of Michel Foucault and others as a narrative turn in the social sciences was worked out in practice. This particularly affected the emergent sociology of science and the growing field of science and technology studies. In particular, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Steve Woolgar, and others used social constructionism to relate what science has typically characterized as objective facts to the processes of social construction, with the goal of showing that human subjectivity imposes itself on those facts we take to be objective, not solely the other way around. A particularly provocative title in this line of thought is Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics. At the same time, Social Constructionism shaped studies of technology – the Sofield, especially on the Social construction of technology, or SCOT, and authors as Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Maarten van Wesel, etc. Despite its common perception as objective, mathematics is not immune to social constructionist accounts. Sociologists such as Sal Restivo and Randall Collins, mathematicians including Reuben Hersh and Philip J. Davis, and philosophers including Paul Ernest have published social constructionist treatments of mathematics.^{[citation needed]}

Postmodernism

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that "The assumption that there is no common denominator in 'nature' or 'truth' ... that guarantees the possibility of neutral or objective thought" is a key assumption of postmodernism. The National Research Council has characterized the belief that "social science research can never generate objective or trustworthy knowledge" as an example of a postmodernist belief.

Social constructionism can be seen as a source of the postmodern movement, and has been influential in the field of cultural studies. Some have gone so far as to attribute the rise of cultural studies (the cultural turn) to social constructionism. Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the ongoing mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at a time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallized by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions, given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and philosophy, maintained by therapies and socialization, and subjectively internalized by upbringing and education to become part of the identity of social citizens.

In the book The Reality of Social Construction, the British sociologist Dave Elder-Vass places the development of social constructionism as one outcome of the legacy of postmodernism. He writes "Perhaps the most widespread and influential product of this process [coming to terms with the legacy of postmodernism] is social constructionism, which has been booming [within the domain of social theory] since the 1980s."

Foucault

The 'genealogical' and 'archaeological' studies of Michel Foucault are of considerable contemporary influence.

In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Foucault concentrates on the correlation between knowledge and power. According to him, knowledge is a form of power and can conversely be used against individuals as a form of power. As a result, knowledge is socially constructed. He argues that knowledge forms discourses and discourses form the dominant ideological ways of thinking which govern our lives. For him, social control is maintained in 'the disciplinary society', through codes of control over sexuality and the ideas/knowledge perpetuated through social institutions. In other words, discourses and ideologies subject us to authority and turn people into 'subjected beings', who are in turn afraid of being punished if they sway from social norms. Foucault believes that institutions overtly regulate and control our lives. Institutions such as schools reinforce the dominant ideological forms of thinking onto the populace and force us into becoming obedient and docile beings. Hence, the dominant ideology that serves the interests of the ruling class, all the while appearing as 'neutral', needs to be questioned and must not go unchallenged.

Applications

Crime

Potter and Kappeler (1996), in their introduction to Constructing Crime: Perspective on Making News And Social Problems wrote, "Public opinion and crime facts demonstrate no congruence. The reality of crime in the United States has been subverted to a constructed reality as ephemeral as swamp gas."

Communication studies

A bibliographic review of social constructionism as used within communication studies was published in 2016. It features a good overview of resources from that disciplinary perspective The collection of essays published in Galanes and Leeds-Hurwitz (2009) should also be useful to anyone interested in how social construction actually works during communication. This collection was the result of a conference held in 2006, sponsored by the National Communication Association as a Summer institute, entitled "Catching ourselves in the Act: A Collaboration to Enrich our Discipline Through Social Constructionist Approaches." Briefly, the basic assumption of the group was that "individuals jointly construct (create) their understandings of the world and the meanings they give to encounters with others, or various products others create. At the heart of the matter is the assumption that such meanings are constructed jointly, that is, in coordination with others, rather than individually. Thus the term of choice most often is social construction." At that event, John Stewart in his keynote presentation, suggested it was time to choose a single term among the set then common (social constructionist, social constructivism, social constructivist), and proposed using the simper form: social construction. Those present at the conference agreed to that use, and so that is the term most often used in this book, and by communication scholars since then. During discussion at the conference, participants developed a common list of principles:

• 1. Communication is the process through which we construct and reconstruct social worlds.
• 2. Communication is constitutive; communication makes things.
• 3. Every action is consequential.
• 4. We make things together. We construct the social worlds we share with others as relational beings.
• 5. We perceive many social worlds existing simultaneously, and we continue to shape them. Other people's social worlds may be different from ours. What we inherit is not our identity.
• 6. No behavior conveys meaning in and of itself. Contexts afford and constrain meanings.
• 7. Ethical implications and consequences derive from Principles 1-6.

A survey of publications in communication relating to social construction in 2009 found that the major topics covered were: identity, language, narratives, organizations, conflict, and media.

Criticisms

Critics have argued that social constructionism generally ignores the contribution made by physical and biological sciences. It equally denies or downplays to a significant extent the role that meaning and language have for each individual, seeking to configure language as an overall structure rather than an historical instrument used by individuals to communicate their personal experiences of the world. This is particularly the case with cultural studies, where personal and pre-linguistic experiences are disregarded as irrelevant or seen as completely situated and constructed by the socio-economical superstructure. As a theory, social constructionism particularly denies the influences of biology on behavior and culture, or suggests that they are unimportant to achieve an understanding of human behavior. The scientific consensus is that behavior is a complex outcome of both biological and cultural influences.

In 1996, to illustrate what he believed to be the intellectual weaknesses of social constructionism and postmodernism, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted an article to the academic journal Social Text deliberately written to be incomprehensible but including phrases and jargon typical of the articles published by the journal. The submission, which was published, was an experiment to see if the journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." In 1999, Sokal, with coauthor Jean Bricmont published the book Fashionable Nonsense, which criticized postmodernism and social constructionism.

Philosopher Paul Boghossian has also written against social constructionism. He follows Ian Hacking's argument that many adopt social constructionism because of its potentially liberating stance: if things are the way that they are only because of our social conventions, as opposed to being so naturally, then it should be possible to change them into how we would rather have them be. He then states that social constructionists argue that we should refrain from making absolute judgments about what is true and instead state that something is true in the light of this or that theory. Countering this, he states:

But it is hard to see how we might coherently follow this advice. Given that the propositions which make up epistemic systems are just very general propositions about what absolutely justifies what, it makes no sense to insist that we abandon making absolute particular judgements about what justifies what while allowing us to accept absolute general judgements about what justifies what. But in effect this is what the epistemic relativist is recommending.

Woolgar and Pawluch argue that constructionists tend to 'ontologically gerrymander' social conditions in and out of their analysis.

Social constructionism has been criticized for having an overly narrow focus on society and culture as a causal factor in human behavior, excluding the influence of innate biological tendencies, by psychologists such as Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate as well as by Asian Studies scholar Edward Slingerland in What Science Offers the Humanities. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides used the term "standard social science model" to refer to social-science philosophies that they argue fail to take into account the evolved properties of the brain.

See also

Social constructionism Portal

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• Consensus reality
• Construct (philosophy)
• Constructivism (international relations)
• Constructivist epistemology
• Critical theory
• Epochalism
• Nominalism
• Parametric determinism
• Phenomenology (psychology)
• Social construction of technology
• Social epistemology
• Talcott Parsons

Further reading

Books

• Boghossian, P. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Oxford University Press, 2006. Online review: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25184/?id=8364
• Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T., The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Anchor, 1967; Template:ISBN).
• Best, J. Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems, New York: Gruyter, 1989
• Burr, V. Social Constructionism, 2nd ed. Routledge 2003.
• Ellul, J. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1965. New York: Random House/ Vintage 1973
• Ernst, P., (1998), Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics; Albany, New York: State University of New York Press
• Galanes, G. J., & Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (Eds.). Socially constructing communication. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009.
• Gergen, K., An Invitation to Social Construction. Los Angeles: Sage, 2015 (3d edition, first 1999).
• Glasersfeld, E. von, Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 1995.* Hacking, I., The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999; Template:ISBN
• Hibberd, F. J., Unfolding Social Constructionism. New York: Springer, 2005. Template:ISBN
• Kukla, A., Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science, London: Routledge, 2000. Template:ISBN, Template:ISBN
• Lowenthal, P., & Muth, R. Constructivism. In E. F. Provenzo, Jr. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the social and cultural foundations of education (pp. 177–179). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008.
• McNamee, S. and Gergen, K. (Eds.). Therapy as Social Construction. London: Sage, 1992 Template:ISBN.
• McNamee, S. and Gergen, K. Relational Responsibility: Resources for Sustainable Dialogue. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2005. Template:ISBN.
• Penman, R. Reconstructing communicating. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000.
• Poerksen, B. The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism. Exeter: Imprint-Academic, 2004.
• Restivo, S. and Croissant, J., "Social Constructionism in Science and Technology Studies" (Handbook of Constructionist Research, ed. J.A. Holstein & J.F. Gubrium) Guilford, NY 2008, 213–229; Template:ISBN
• Schmidt, S. J., Histories and Discourses: Rewriting Constructivism. Exeter: Imprint-Academic, 2007.
• Searle, J., The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995; Template:ISBN.
• Shotter, J. Conversational realities: Constructing life through language. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1993.
• Stewart, J., Zediker, K. E., & Witteborn, S. Together: Communicating interpersonally – A social construction approach (6th ed). Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury, 2005.
• Weinberg, D. Contemporary Social Constructionism: Key Themes. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014.
• Willard, C. A., Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Template:ISBN.
• Wilson, D. S. (2005), "Evolutionary Social Constructivism". In J. Gottshcall and D. S. Wilson, (Eds.), The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press; Template:ISBN. Full text

Articles

• Drost, Alexander. "Borders. A Narrative Turn – Reflections on Concepts, Practices and their Communication", in: Olivier Mentz and Tracey McKay (eds.), Unity in Diversity. European Perspectives on Borders and Memories, Berlin 2017, pp. 14–33.
• (April 1973) Toward a Sociology of Social Problems: Social Conditions, Value-Judgments, and Social Problems. Social Problems 20 (4): 407–419.
• Mallon, R, "Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
• (2015) Constructions of Environmental Issues in Scientific and Public Discourse.
• Shotter, J., & Gergen, K. J., Social construction: Knowledge, self, others, and continuing the conversation. In S. A. Deetz (Ed.), Communication Yearbook, 17 (pp. 3- 33). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994.

External links

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