Social constructionism

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. The social construction of target populations refers to the cultural characterizations or popular images of the persons or groups whose behavior and well-being are affected by public policy. Social constructionism posits that the meanings of 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. 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 ==

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 "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" and "phenomenology". With Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality 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." The majority of social constructionists abide by the belief that "language does not mirror reality; rather, it constitutes [creates] it." 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. == 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. 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. Systemic therapy Some of the systemic models that use social constructionism include narrative therapy and solution-focused therapy. Poverty Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner (2013), in Framing the Poor: Media Coverage and U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960-2008, examine how media has framed the poor in the U.S. and how negative framing has caused a shift in government spending. Since 1960, the government has decreasingly spent money on social services such as welfare. Evidence shows the media framing the poor more negatively since 1960, with more usage of words such as lazy and fraud. 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, there is 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. She goes on to say that gender is linked with experiences that shape someone's life, such as harmful experiences that women endure. Society dictates how a man and woman should act and the norms associated with them. In this article, they talked about the role of being a manager in a business or firm, and how there are stereotypes of men's and women's roles in the workplace. This has trickled into the advertising industry, as different companies advertise and show off what they think masculinity is. According to a study done by Kreicbergs and Sceulovs, consumers appreciate it when business advertisements display a version of masculinity that fits their own personal beliefs and values. They studied how early childhood relationships lead them to internalize cultural norms and values, the meanings of emotions, and the norms associated with each emotion. Being in the same spaces repeatedly can cause individuals to develop emotions and memories of that place. He views childhood as a form of social construction. She says that when parents restrict the use of technology, it takes away from the self-direction that children would have. We interpret different meanings of technology and what we read online, and that changes the way people live. Devices that are the main sources of technology and media influence individuals to develop and assign social meanings to AI when they interact with it. Using websites to view ideas from peers can help improve people's own ideas as they build a better understanding of various topics. Scientists come up with claims that they claim are facts, and they try to prove them to their colleagues and the public. Social constructionism affects how scientists create claims because they are influenced by many factors, such as government groups, schools, and the competition of other scientists. These factors pressure them to come up with claims quickly, so they can please others and say that they have an answer. In the article, Yuichiro Amekawa says that scientific claims are "social artifacts" that are created through the influence of groups. People in the Maldives can't gain good life skills if they are constantly around violence and have no access to a good education or a job. Nasheeda, Krauss, Abdullah, and Ahmad stated that individuals gain life skills from interactions and imitations of others. The younger generation's perceptions of soft skills are developed from their experiences in family engagements and educational activities. Silence is seen as a "code" in Senegal, and it is expected to be followed so that social peace is maintained. It basically dictates an individual's place in a cultural society, and it is a way to maintain social hierarchy. During the evaluations of corporate conflicts and moral repair, it is discussed how much dignity or moral value each victim has or is worthy of. This mostly included giving money to the school scholarship fund, so that future students can get financial aid and feel the same way that the donor did at one point in time. They said that an individual's social values would become clearer to them, and it would influence how they would act towards others. Students would interpret the financial aid as a sign that, as a society, everyone should help each other out and give to others when they can. It would feel like a social obligation to serve the community and help others so that they could develop good, socially constructed norms and values. This would make the individuals feel as if they are an important part of society, and that would help them believe that they have the power to influence others. == 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. 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 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. Their goal was to show that human subjectivity imposes itself on the facts taken as 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 technologythe 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 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. These worldviews are 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. Together, these 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." In the article, Navigating Social Worlds: A Theoretical Exploration of Phenomenological Sociology and the Construction of Social Realities, Javad and Zafar came up with the idea that individuals actively construct meaning by interpreting and illustrating their experiences, rather than observing what is going on around them. They create a reality through the experiences they have been through and create their own meaning. Social realities are not only created through intangible ideas, but are also woven, in a detailed way, into people's physical and sensory interactions with their surroundings. When people see things or experience things, they don't just see them; they feel deeply. According to Berger and Luckmann, people internalize cultural norms and values and create a "manufactured world" that only makes sense to those who are involved in that reality. They enhance their knowledge, create a new shared meaning, and better understand the topic and how to act in different contexts. Homophily can also be seen as contributing new knowledge with those who share common interests. == Criticisms ==

Critics argue that social constructionism rejects the influences of biology on behaviour and culture, or suggests that they are unimportant to achieve an understanding of human behaviour. Scientific estimates of nature versus nurture and gene–environment interactions have shown almost always substantial influences of both genetics and social experiences, often in an inseparable manner. Claims that genetics does not affect humans are seen as outdated by most contemporary scholars of human development. Social constructionism has also 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. This criticism has been explored 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 theories that they believe fail to take into account the evolved properties of the brain. 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." Alan Sokal also criticizes 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. Social constructionism is a diverse field with varying stances on these matters. Some social constructionists do acknowledge the existence of an objective reality but argue that human understanding and interpretation of that reality are socially constructed. Others might contend that while the term average may not exist in all languages, equivalent or analogous concepts might still be applied within those cultures, thereby not completely invalidating the principle of cultural relativity in measuring phenomena. == See also ==