Social constructionism is the theory that people develop knowledge of the world in a social context, and that much of what we perceive as reality depends on shared assumptions. From a social constructionist perspective, many things we take for granted and believe are objective reality are actually socially constructed, and thus, can change as society changes.
- The theory of social constructionism states that meaning and knowledge are socially created.
- Social constructionists believe that things that are generally viewed as natural or normal in society, such as understandings of gender, race, class, and disability, are socially constructed, and consequently aren’t an accurate reflection of reality.
- Social constructs are often created within specific institutions and cultures and come to prominence in certain historical periods. Social constructs’ dependence of historical, political, and economic conditions can lead them to evolve and change.
The theory of social constructionism was introduced in the 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality, by sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman. Berger and Luckman’s ideas were inspired by a number of thinkers, including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and George Herbert Mead. In particular, Mead's theory symbolic interactionism, which suggests that social interaction is responsible for the construction of identity, was highly influential.
In the late 1960s, three separate intellectual movements came together to form the foundation of social constructionism. The first was an ideological movement that questioned social realities and put a spotlight on the political agenda behind such realities. The second was a literary/rhetorical drive to deconstruct language and the way it impacts our knowledge of reality. And the third was a critique of scientific practice, led by Thomas Kuhn, who argued that scientific findings are influenced by, and thus representative of, the specific communities where they're produced—rather than objective reality.
The theory of social constructionism asserts that all meaning is socially created. Social constructs might be so ingrained that they feel natural, but they are not. Instead, they are an invention of a given society and thus do not accurately reflect reality. Social constructionists typically agree on three key points:
Social constructionists believe that knowledge arises out of human relationships. Thus, what we take to be true and objective is the result of social processes that take place in historical and cultural contexts. In the realm of the sciences, this means that although truth can be achieved within the confines of a given discipline, there is no over-arching truth that is more legitimate than any other.
Language abides by specific rules, and these rules of language shape how we understand the world. As a result, language isn’t neutral. It emphasizes certain things while ignoring others. Thus, language constrains what we can express as well as our perceptions of what we experience and what we know.
The knowledge created in a community has social, cultural, and political consequences. People in a community accept and sustain the community’s understanding of particular truths, values, and realities. When new members of a community accept such knowledge, it extends even further. When a community’s accepted knowledge becomes policy, ideas about power and privilege in the community become codified. These socially constructed ideas then create social reality, and—if they aren’t examined—begin to seem fixed and unchangeable. This can lead to antagonistic relationships between communities that don’t share the same understanding of social reality.
Social constructionism is often placed in contrast with biological determinism. Biological determinism suggests that an individual's traits and behavior are determined exclusively by biological factors. Social constructionism, on the other hand, emphasizes the influence of environmental factors on human behavior and suggests that relationships among people create reality.
In addition, social constructionism should not be confused with constructivism. Social constructivism is the idea that an individual's interactions with her environment create the cognitive structures that enable her to understand the world. This idea is often traced back to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. While the two terms spring from different scholarly traditions, they are increasingly used interchangeably.
Some scholars believe that, by asserting that knowledge is socially constructed and not the result of observations of reality, social constructionism is anti-realist.
Social constructionism is also criticized on grounds of relativism. By arguing that no objective truth exists and that all social constructions of the same phenomena are equally legitimate, no construct can be more legitimate than another. This is especially problematic in the context of scientific research. If an unscientific account about a phenomenon is considered as legitimate as empirical research about that phenomenon, there is no clear path forward for research to make a meaningful impact on society.
- Andrews, Tom. “What is Social Constructionism?” Grounded Theory Review: An International Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, 2012. //groundedtheoryreview.com/2012/06/01/what-is-social-constructionism/
- Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckman. The Social Construction of Reality. Doubleday/Anchor, 1966.
- Chu, Hyejin Iris. “Social Constructionism.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Encyclopedia.com. 2008. //www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/sociology-and-social-reform/sociology-general-terms-and-concepts/social-constructionism
- Galbin, Alexandra. “An Introduction to Social Constructionism.” Social Research Reports, vol. 26, 2014, pp. 82-92. //www.researchreports.ro/an-introduction-to-social-constructionism
- Gergen, Kenneth J. “The Self as Social Construction.” Psychological Studies, vol. 56, no. 1, 2011, pp. 108-116. //dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12646-011-0066-1
- Hare, Rachel T. and Jeanne Marecek. “Abnormal and Clinical Psychology: The Politics of Madness.” Critical Psychology: An Introduction, edited by Dennis Fox and Isaac Prilleltensky, Sage Publications, 1999, pp. 104-120.
- Kang, Miliann, Donovan Lessard, Laura Heston, and Sonny Nordmarken. Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, 2017. //press.rebus.community/introwgss/front-matter/287-2/ 401 401
- “Social Constructionism.” Oxford Reference. //www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100515181
Culture is a social construct, and it is generally considered highly subjective. Etymologically, the word derives from the Latin root-term “colere”, which means to inhabit, to cultivate or to honour; the root-term generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give commonly-agreed meanings to such activity.
In its broader sense, the term “culture” refers to the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people who develop a common series of cultivated behaviours, which correspond to the totality of a person’s learned, accumulated experience.
Culture is socially transmitted, in the sense that behaviours pass between generations through social learning. During this inter-generational transmission, culture might acquire new behaviours, confirm or modify the previous ones, as it refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.
Culture includes shared communicative symbols, some of which represent a group’s skills, knowledge, attitudes, values and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its formal and informal institutions.
Socially, culture consists of explicit and implicit patterns and behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, and on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.
Social groups constantly create and recreate the behavioural patterns that define a culture. At the same time, the term culture is used in a variety of very different contexts in our society. Today, the term is not only used to describe fine arts, but also to describe social groupings and their behavioural patterns.
Culture is a collective common-ground that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.
With such a broad usage, culture may be misused in order to label people, to justify lack of understanding, and to claim that attempts at understanding must always be futile because of presumed insurmountable differences between cultural groups. Sentences such as “we are from different cultures”, implicitly excluding others from one’s own group, may easily invite this kind of thinking. “Culture” may also be used to explain a variety of misunderstandings or differences which in fact would be more accurately explained by differences in age, socialisation, language, gender and/or status, and which moreover could have been prevented with better communicative skills and bigger efforts to understand each other.
For the reasons stated above, in this module, we will promote definitions of culture that emphasise its highly nuanced, multi-dimensional, and dynamic nature.
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