Social constructionism is a theory in
sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...
,
social ontology Social ontology is a domain-specific branch of ontology (philosophy) which studies the nature and properties of the social world. Social ontology deals with examining the various entities in the world arising from social interaction.
Notable conte ...
, and
communication theory
Communication theory is a proposed description of communication phenomena, the relationships among them, a storyline describing these relationships, and an argument for these three elements. Communication theory provides a way of talking about a ...
which proposes that certain ideas about
physical reality arise from collaborative consensus, instead of pure observation of said reality. The theory centers on the notion that meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately by each individual. It has often been characterised as neo-
Marxian or also as a neo-
Kantian
Kantianism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The term ''Kantianism'' or ''Kantian'' is sometimes also used to describe contemporary positions in philosophy of mind, ...
theory, in that social constructionism replaces the transcendental subject with a concept of society that is at the same time descriptive and
normative
Normative generally means relating to an evaluative standard. Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good, desirable, or permissible, and others as bad, undesirable, or impermissible. A norm in ...
.
While some social constructs are obvious, for instance money or the concept of
currency
A currency, "in circulation", from la, currens, -entis, literally meaning "running" or "traversing" is a standardization of money in any form, in use or circulation as a medium of exchange, for example banknotes and coins.
A more general def ...
, in that people have agreed to give it importance/value,
others are controversial and hotly debated, such as the
concept of self
In the psychology of self, one's self-concept (also called self-construction, self-identity, self-perspective or self-structure) is a collection of beliefs about oneself. Generally, self-concept embodies the answer to the question ''"Who am I? ...
/self-identity. This articulates the view that people in society construct ideas or concepts that may not exist without the existence of people or language to validate those concepts.
There is weak and strong social constructionism.
Weak social constructionism relies on
brute factsfacts that are not socially constructed, such as, arguably, facts about physical particlesor institutional facts (which are formed from
social conventions
A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms, or criteria, often taking the form of a custom.
In a social context, a convention may retain the character of an "unwritten law" of custom (for e ...
).
It has been objected that strong social constructionism undermines the foundation of science as the pursuit of objectivity, and as a theory defies any attempt at falsifying it.
Overview
A social construct or construction is the meaning, notion, or connotation placed on an object or event by a society, and adopted by that society with respect to how they view or deal with the object or event.
Social constructionism posits that phenomena do not have an independent foundation outside the mental and linguistic representation that people develop about them throughout their history, and which becomes their shared
reality
Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence. In physical terms, r ...
. From a linguistic viewpoint, social constructionism centres meaning as an internal reference within language (words refer to words, definitions to other definitions) rather than to an external reality.
Origins
![Diagram of constructed reality](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Diagram_of_constructed_reality.svg)
In the 16th century,
Michel de Montaigne
Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne ( ; ; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), also known as the Lord of Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a liter ...
wrote that, "We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things." In 1886 or 1887,
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...
put it similarly:
"Facts do not exist, only interpretations." In his 1922 book
''Public Opinion'',
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann (September 23, 1889 – December 14, 1974) was an American writer, reporter and political commentator. With a career spanning 60 years, he is famous for being among the first to introduce the concept of Cold War, coining the te ...
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 "environment" might be called "reality", and his "pseudo-environment" seems equivalent to what today is called "constructed reality".
Social constructionism has more recently been rooted in "
symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interactionism is a sociological theory that develops from practical considerations and alludes to particular effects of communication and interaction in people to make images and normal implications, for deduction and correspondence w ...
" and "phenomenology".
With Berger and Luckmann's ''
The Social Construction of Reality
''The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge'' (1966), by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, proposes that social groups and individual persons who interact with each other, within in a system of social classes, ...
'' published in 1966, this concept found its hold. 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."
It is a viewpoint that uproots social processes "simultaneously playful and serious, by which reality is both revealed and concealed, created and destroyed by our activities."
It provides a substitute to the "Western intellectual tradition" where the researcher "earnestly seeks certainty in a representation of reality by means of propositions."
In social constructionist terms, "taken-for-granted realities" are cultivated from "interactions between and among social agents"; furthermore, 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."
Social constructionism understands the "fundamental role of language and communication" and this understanding has "contributed to the
linguistic turn
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relations between language, langua ...
" and more recently the "turn to
discourse
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ...
theory".
The majority of social constructionists abide by the belief that "language does not mirror reality; rather, it constitutes
reatesit."
A broad definition of social constructionism has its supporters and critics in the organizational sciences.
A constructionist approach to various organizational and managerial phenomena appear to be more commonplace and on the rise.
Andy Lock and Tom 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
Giambattista Vico (born Giovan Battista Vico ; ; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment. He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationali ...
.
Berger and Luckmann give credit to
Max Scheler
Max Ferdinand Scheler (; 22 August 1874 – 19 May 1928) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. Considered in his lifetime one of the most prominent German philosophers,Davis, Zachar ...
as a large influence as he created the idea of
sociology of knowledge
The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and the effects that prevailing ideas have on societies. It is not a specialized area of sociology. Instead, it dea ...
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
, thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations)
, thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view
, thesis1_year = 1883
, thesis2_title ...
,
Alfred Schutz
Alfred may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
*''Alfred J. Kwak'', Dutch-German-Japanese anime television series
* ''Alfred'' (Arne opera), a 1740 masque by Thomas Arne
* ''Alfred'' (Dvořák), an 1870 opera by Antonín Dvořák
*"Alfred (Interlu ...
,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest an ...
,
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...
,
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer (; ; February 11, 1900 – March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 ''magnum opus'', '' Truth and Method'' (''Wahrheit und Methode''), on hermeneutics.
Life
Family an ...
,
Paul Ricoeur
Paul may refer to:
*Paul (given name), a given name (includes a list of people with that name)
*Paul (surname), a list of people
People
Christianity
*Paul the Apostle (AD c.5–c.64/65), also known as Saul of Tarsus or Saint Paul, early Chris ...
,
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas (, ; ; born 18 June 1929) is a German social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.
Associated with the Frankfurt School, Habermas's wor ...
,
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas (; ; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to me ...
,
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin ( ; rus, Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н, , mʲɪxɐˈil mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪdʑ bɐxˈtʲin; – 7 March 1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked on literary theor ...
,
Valentin Volosinov
Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (russian: Валенти́н Никола́евич Воло́шинов; June 18, 1895, St. Petersburg – June 13, 1936, Leningrad) was a Russian Soviet linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of l ...
,
Lev Vygotsky
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; be, Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on ps ...
,
George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, Sociology, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatism, pragmati ...
,
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considere ...
,
Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include '' Steps to an ...
,
Harold Garfinkel
Harold Garfinkel (October 29, 1917 – April 21, 2011) was an American sociologist and ethnomethodologist, who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Having developed and established ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociolo ...
,
Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman (11 June 1922 – 19 November 1982) was a Canadian-born sociology, sociologist, Social psychology (sociology), social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth ...
,
Anthony Giddens
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens (born 18 January 1938) is an English sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and is t ...
,
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how ...
,
Ken Gergen
Kenneth J. Gergen (born 1935) is an American social psychologist and emeritus professor at Swarthmore College. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University (1957) and his Doctor of Philosophy, PhD from Duke University (1962).
Biography ...
,
Mary Gergen
Mary McCanney Gergen (December 12, 1938; September 22, 2020) was an American social psychologist specializing in feminist studies women's studies and social constructionism. She is known for her contributions to the field of feminist studies, orga ...
,
Rom Harre
Rom, or ROM may refer to:
Biomechanics and medicine
* Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient
* Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac
* R ...
, and John Shotter.
Applications
Personal construct psychology
Since its appearance in the 1950s,
personal construct psychology
Within personality psychology, personal construct theory (PCT) or personal construct psychology (PCP) is a theory of personality and cognition developed by the American psychologist George Kelly in the 1950s.For example: (first published 1955 ...
(PCP) has mainly developed as a constructivist theory of personality and a system of transforming individual
meaning-making
In psychology, meaning-making is the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self.
The term is widely used in constructivist approaches to counseling psychology and psychotherapy, especia ...
processes, largely in therapeutic contexts. It was based around the notion of persons as scientists who form and test theories about their worlds. Therefore, it represented one of the first attempts to appreciate the constructive nature of experience and the meaning persons give to their experience. Social constructionism (SC), on the other hand, mainly developed as a form of a critique, aimed to transform the oppressing effects of the social meaning-making processes. Over the years, it has grown into a cluster of different approaches, with no single SC position. However, different approaches under the generic term of SC are loosely linked by some shared assumptions about language, knowledge, and reality.
A usual way of thinking about the relationship between PCP and SC is treating them as two separate entities that are similar in some aspects, but also very different in others. This way of conceptualizing this relationship is a logical result of the circumstantial differences of their emergence. In subsequent analyses these differences between PCP and SC were framed around several points of tension, formulated as binary oppositions: personal/social; individualist/relational; agency/structure; constructivist/constructionist. Although some of the most important issues in contemporary psychology are elaborated in these contributions, the polarized positioning also sustained the idea of a separation between PCP and SC, paving the way for only limited opportunities for dialogue between them.
Reframing the relationship between PCP and SC may be of use in both the PCP and the SC communities. On one hand, it extends and enriches SC theory and points to benefits of applying the PCP "toolkit" in constructionist therapy and research. On the other hand, the reframing contributes to PCP theory and points to new ways of addressing social construction in therapeutic conversations.
Educational psychology
Like social constructionism,
social constructivism
Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge according to which human development is socially situated and knowledge is constructed through interaction with others.
Like social constructionism, social constructivism states th ...
states that people work together to construct
artifacts. While social constructionism focuses on the artifacts that are created through the social interactions of a group, social constructivism focuses on an individual's learning that takes place because of his or her interactions in a group.
Social constructivism has been studied by many educational psychologists, who are concerned with its implications for teaching and learning. For more on the psychological dimensions of social constructivism, see the work of
Lev Vygotsky
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; be, Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on ps ...
,
Ernst von Glasersfeld
Ernst von Glasersfeld (March 8, 1917, Munich – November 12, 2010, Leverett, Franklin County, Massachusetts) was a philosopher, and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, research associate at the Scientific Reasoni ...
and A. Sullivan Palincsar.
Systemic therapy
Some of the systemic models that use social constructionism include
Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy (or Narrative Practice) is a form of psychotherapy that seeks to help patients identify their values and the skills associated with them. It provides the patient with knowledge of their ability to live these values so they can ...
and
Solution Focused Therapy
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."
Criminology has long focussed on why and how society defines criminal behavior and crime in general. While looking at crime through a social constructionism lens, we see evidence to support that criminal acts are a social construct where abnormal or deviant acts become a crime based on the views of society.
Another explanation of crime as it relates to social constructionism are individual identity constructs that result in deviant behavior.
If someone has constructed the identity of a "madman" or "criminal" for themselves based on a society's definition, it may force them to follow that
label
A label (as distinct from signage) is a piece of paper, plastic film, cloth, metal, or other material affixed to a container or product, on which is written or printed information or symbols about the product or item. Information printed dir ...
, resulting in criminal behavior.
Communication studies
A bibliographic review of social constructionism as used within
communication studies
Communication studies or communication science is an academic discipline that deals with processes of human communication and behavior, patterns of communication in interpersonal relationships, social interactions and communication in differen ...
was published in 2016. It features an 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
The National Communication Association (NCA) is a not-for-profit association of academics in the field of communication.
Organization
NCA is governed by the Legislative Assembly, which meets during the NCA Annual Convention. Between annual me ...
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 simpler form: ''social construction''. Those present at the conference agreed to that use, and so that is the term most often used in this article, 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.
History and development
Berger and Luckmann
Constructionism became prominent in the U.S. with
Peter L. Berger
Peter Ludwig Berger (17 March 1929 – 27 June 2017) was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian. Berger became known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and theor ...
and
Thomas Luckmann
Thomas Luckmann (; October 14, 1927 – May 10, 2016) was an American-Austrian sociologist of German and Slovene origin who taught mainly in Germany. Born in Jesenice, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Luckmann studied philosophy and linguistics at the Uni ...
's 1966 book, ''
The Social Construction of Reality
''The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge'' (1966), by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, proposes that social groups and individual persons who interact with each other, within in a system of social classes, ...
''. Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted
common sense
''Common Sense'' is a 47-page pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–1776 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine collected various moral and political argu ...
knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by
social interactions
A social relation or also described as a social interaction or social experience is the fundamental unit of analysis within the social sciences, and describes any voluntary or involuntary interpersonal relationship between two or more individuals ...
. In their model, people interact on the understanding that their perceptions of everyday life are shared with others, and this common knowledge of reality is in turn reinforced by these interactions. Since this common sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human
typification
Typification is a process of creating standard (''typical'') social construction based on standard assumptions. Discrimination based on typification is called typism.
See also
* Ideal type
* Normal type
*Typology
Typology is the study of types o ...
s,
sign
A sign is an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or me ...
ifications and
institution
Institutions are humanly devised structures of rules and norms that shape and constrain individual behavior. All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions a ...
s 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 has its roots in
phenomenology
Phenomenology may refer to:
Art
* Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties
Philosophy
* Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...
. It links to
Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...
and
Edmund Husserl
, thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations)
, thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view
, thesis1_year = 1883
, thesis2_title ...
through the teaching of
Alfred Schutz
Alfred may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
*''Alfred J. Kwak'', Dutch-German-Japanese anime television series
* ''Alfred'' (Arne opera), a 1740 masque by Thomas Arne
* ''Alfred'' (Dvořák), an 1870 opera by Antonín Dvořák
*"Alfred (Interlu ...
, who was also Berger's PhD adviser.
Narrative turn
During the 1970s and 1980s, social constructionist theory underwent a transformation as constructionist sociologists engaged with the work of
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how ...
and others as a narrative turn in the social sciences was worked out in practice. This particularly affected the emergent
sociology of science
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing with "the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity." The sociolog ...
and the growing field of
science and technology studies
Science and technology studies (STS) is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts.
History
Like most interdisciplinary fie ...
. In particular,
Karin Knorr-Cetina
Karin Knorr Cetina (also Karin Knorr-Cetina) (born 19 July 1944 in Graz, Austria) is an Austrian sociologist well known for her work on epistemology and social constructionism, summarized in the books ''The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay o ...
,
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour (; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.Wheeler, Will. ''Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations'' Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Libraries ...
,
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
Subjectivity in a philosophical context has to do with a lack of objective reality. Subjectivity has been given various and ambiguous definitions by differing sources as it is not often the focal point of philosophical discourse.Bykova, Marina F ...
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
Andrew Pickering (born 1948) is a British sociologist, philosopher and history of science, historian of science at the University of Exeter. He was a professor of sociology and a director of science and technology studies at the University of Il ...
's ''Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics''. At the same time, social constructionism shaped studies of technologythe Sofield, especially on the
social construction of technology
Social construction of technology (SCOT) is a theory within the field of science and technology studies. Advocates of SCOT—that is, social constructivists—argue that technology does not determine human action, but that rather, human action ...
, or SCOT, and authors as
Wiebe Bijker
Wiebe E. Bijker (born 19 March 1951, Delft) is a Dutch professor Emeritus, former chair of the Department of Social Science and Technology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
Early life
Bijker's father was an engineer involved in imp ...
,
Trevor Pinch
Trevor J. Pinch (1 January 1952 – 16 December 2021) was a British sociologist, part-time musician and chair of the Science and Technology Studies department at Cornell University. In 2018, he won the J.D. Bernal Prize from the Society for ...
, Maarten van Wesel, etc. Despite its common perception as objective, mathematics is not immune to social constructionist accounts. Sociologists such as
Sal Restivo
Sal Restivo (born 1940) is a sociologist/anthropologist.
Work
Restivo is a leading contributor to science studies and in particular to the sociology of mathematics. His current work focuses on the sociology of mind and brain, and the sociology o ...
and
Randall Collins
Randall Collins (born July 29, 1941) is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing. He has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various langu ...
, mathematicians including
Reuben Hersh
Reuben Hersh (December 9, 1927 – January 3, 2020) was an American mathematician and academic, best known for his writings on the nature, practice, and social impact of mathematics. Although he was generally known as Reuben Hersh, late in life h ...
and
Philip J. Davis
Philip J. Davis (January 2, 1923 – March 14, 2018) was an American academic applied mathematician.
Davis was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was known for his work in numerical analysis and approximation theory, as well as his investigati ...
, and philosophers including
Paul Ernest
Paul Ernest is a contributor to the social constructivist philosophy of mathematics.
Life
Paul Ernest is currently emeritus professor of the philosophy of mathematics education at Exeter University, UK. He is best known for his work on philos ...
have published social constructionist treatments of mathematics.
Postmodernism
Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the ongoing mass-building of
worldview
A worldview or world-view or ''Weltanschauung'' is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge, culture, and point of view. A worldview can include natural p ...
s by
individual
An individual is that which exists as a distinct entity. Individuality (or self-hood) is the state or quality of being an individual; particularly (in the case of humans) of being a person unique from other people and possessing one's own Maslow ...
s in
dialectic
Dialectic ( grc-gre, διαλεκτική, ''dialektikḗ''; related to dialogue; german: Dialektik), also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing ...
al interaction with society at a time. The numerous
realities
Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence. In physical terms, rea ...
so formed comprise, according to this view, the
imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallized by
habit
A habit (or wont as a humorous and formal term) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. into institutions propped up by
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
conventions, given ongoing legitimacy by
mythology
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narrat ...
, religion and philosophy, maintained by therapies and
socialization
In sociology, socialization or socialisation (see spelling differences) is the process of internalizing the norms and ideologies of society. Socialization encompasses both learning and teaching and is thus "the means by which social and cultur ...
, and subjectively
internalized
Internalization ( or internalisation) is the process of making something internal, with more specific meanings in various fields. It is the opposite of externalization.
Psychology and sociology
In psychology, internalization is the outcome of ...
by upbringing and education to become part of the
identity
Identity may refer to:
* Identity document
* Identity (philosophy)
* Identity (social science)
* Identity (mathematics)
Arts and entertainment Film and television
* ''Identity'' (1987 film), an Iranian film
* ''Identity'' (2003 film), ...
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
oming to terms with the legacy of postmodernismis social constructionism, which has been booming
ithin the domain of social theorysince the 1980s."
[Dave Elder-Vass. 2012.''The Reality of Social Construction''. Cambridge University Press, 4]
Criticisms
One criticism that has been leveled at social constructionism is that it generally ignores the contribution made by
natural sciences
Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeatab ...
or misuses them in social sciences.
Most notably, social constructionists have been accused of using the term "society" in both a descriptive way and a normative way, thereby failing to provide adequate explanation as to what they mean by society, whether it be an ideological concept or a description of any historically located community.
As a theory, social constructionism rejects the influences of biology on behaviour and culture, or suggests that they are unimportant to achieve an understanding of human behaviour,
while the scientific consensus is that behaviour is a complex outcome of both biological and cultural influences. 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
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
P ...
in ''
The Blank Slate
''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature'' is a best-selling 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is s ...
'' as well as by Asian Studies scholar Edward Slingerland in ''What Science Offers the Humanities''.
John Tooby
John Tooby (born 1952) is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology.
Biography
Tooby received his PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University i ...
and
Leda Cosmides
Leda Cosmides (born May 1957) is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology.
Biography
Cosmides originally studied biology at Radcliffe College/Harvard Univ ...
used the term "
standard social science model" to refer to
social theories
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena.Seidman, S., 2016. Contested knowledge: Social theory today. John Wiley & Sons. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relat ...
that they believe fail to take into account the evolved properties of the brain.
Social constructionism 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 a 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.
In 1996, to illustrate what he believed to be the intellectual weaknesses of social constructionism and postmodernism, physics professor
Alan Sokal
Alan David Sokal (; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmo ...
submitted an article to the academic journal ''
Social Text
''Social Text'' is an academic journal published by Duke University Press. Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, ''Social Text'' has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gende ...
'' 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
''Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science'' (1998; UK: ''Intellectual Impostures''), first published in French in 1997 as french: Impostures intellectuelles, label=none, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont ...
'', which criticized
postmodernism
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticis ...
and social constructionism.
Philosopher
Paul Boghossian
Paul Artin Boghossian (; born 1957) is an American philosopher. He is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, where he is chair of the department (having also held the position from 1994 to 2004). His research interests include epi ...
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 judgements about what is true and instead state that something is true in the light of this or that theory. Countering this, he states:
Woolgar and Pawluch argue that constructionists tend to "ontologically gerrymander" social conditions in and out of their analysis.
Alan Sokal also criticize social constructionism for contradicting itself on the knowability of the existence of societies. The argument is that if there was no knowable objective reality, there would be no way of knowing whether or not societies exist and if so, what their rules and other characteristics are. One example of the contradiction is that the claim that "phenomena must be measured by what is considered average in their respective cultures, not by an objective standard" since there are languages that have no word for average and therefore the whole application of the concept of "average" to such cultures contradict social constructionism's own claim that cultures can only be measured by their own standards.
[Sokal, Alan D. (March 2008) "Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture"]
See also
References
Further reading
Books
*
Boghossian, P. ''Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism''. Oxford University Press, 2006. Online review
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism*
Berger, P. L. and
Luckmann, T., ''
The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge'' (Anchor, 1967; ).
* 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;
* Hibberd, F. J., Unfolding Social Constructionism. New York: Springer, 2005.
* Kukla, A., ''Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science'', London: Routledge, 2000.
* 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 .
*
McNamee, S. and
Gergen, K. ''Relational Responsibility: Resources for Sustainable Dialogue''. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2005. .
* 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;
* Schmidt, S. J., ''Histories and Discourses: Rewriting Constructivism''. Exeter: Imprint-Academic, 2007.
*
Searle, J., ''The Construction of Social Reality.'' New York: Free Press, 1995; .
* 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; .
*
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;
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.
*
* Mallon, R
"Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction" The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
*
* 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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{{DEFAULTSORT:Social Constructionism
Communication theory
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Human behavior
Human communication
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Sociology of knowledge
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