SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

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.
Key Takeaways: Social Constructionism

 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.

ORIGINS

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.
HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT
Berger and Luckmann

Constructionism became prominent in the U.S. with Peter L. Berger and Thomas
Luckmann's 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. 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 has its roots
in phenomenology. It links to Heidegger and Edmund Husserl through the teaching
of Alfred Schutz, 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 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.
Postmodernism

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.

APPLICATIONS
Personal construct psychology

Since its appearance in the 1950s, personal construct psychology (PCP) has mainly
developed as a constructivist theory of personality and a system of transforming
individual meaning-making processes, largely in therapeutic contexts
Educational psychology

Like social constructionism, social constructivism 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.
Systemic therapy

Systemic therapy is a form of psychotherapy which seeks to address people as people in

relationship, dealing with the interactions of groups and their interactional patterns and
dynamics.
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.

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM DEFINITION

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:

Knowledge Is Socially Constructed

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 Is Central to Social Construction

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.

Knowledge Construction Is Politically-Driven

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 vs. Other Theories

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.

CRITIQUES

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.

CONCLUSION

Social constructionism accepts that there is an objective reality. It is concerned with how
knowledge is constructed and understood. It has therefore an epistemological not an
ontological perspective. Criticisms and misunderstanding arise when this central fact is
misinterpreted. This is most evident in debates and criticisms surrounding realism and
relativism. The words of Kirk and Miller (1986) are relevant when they suggest that the
search for a final, absolute truth be left to philosophers and theologians. Social
constructionism places great emphasis on everyday interactions between people and
how they use language to construct their reality. It regards the social practices people
engage in as the focus of enquiry. This is very similar to the focus of grounded theory
but without the emphasis on language. Social constructionism that views society as
existing both as objective and subjective reality is fully compatible with classical
grounded theory, unlike constructionist grounded theory which takes a relativist
position. Relativism is not compatible with classical grounded theory. Social
constructionism as influence by Berger and Luckman makes no ontological claims.
Therefore choosing constructionist grounded theory based on the ontological
assumptions of the researcher seems incompatible with the idea of social
constructionism. How this stance has influenced and remodelled grounded theory into
socalled constructionist grounded theory will be the subject of another article.