SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

'Social constructionism' or 'social constructivism' is a sociological theory of knowledge that considers how social phenomena develop in particular social contexts. Within constructionist thought, a social construction (social construct) is a concept or practice which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society. Social constructs are generally understood to be the by-products (often unintended or unconscious) of countless human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature. This is not usually taken to imply a radical anti-determinism, however. Social constructionism is usually opposed to essentialism, which defines specific phenomena instead in terms of transhistorical essences independent of conscious beings that determine the categorical structure of reality.
A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived social reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by humans. Socially constructed reality is seen as an ongoing, dynamic process; reality is reproduced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it.
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. It is in this sense that it can be said that reality is socially constructed. The specific mechanisms underlying Berger and Luckmann's notion of social construction are discussed further in social construction.

Precursors

Marvin Carlson believes that within our lives they “are structured according to repeated socially sanctioned modes of behaviour” and this “raises the possibility that all human activity could potentially be considered as performance.”(Marin Carlson, “What is Performance?”) This includes the idea of social construction, this is the unnatural way in which people act in public society to conform.
In the tradition of sociology of knowledge, what seems real to members of a social class arises from the situation of the class, such as the capitalist or working classes, especially with respect to the economic fundamentals which affect the class. According to the theories advanced by Karl Mannheim, who formulated the classic theories of sociology of knowledge, intellectuals occupy a special position which is to some extent free of the intellectual blinders imposed by the social position of other classes.
Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony both prefigures and enriches current social constructionist discourse. As a Marxist, Gramsci was interested in the way inequities between classes are maintained, and the role of knowledge in this process. Marx himself recognized the important role of knowledge in the maintenance of class structure, observing that the prevailing ideology in society tends to be the ideology of the ruling class, and proposing that the proletariat are suppressed by a social structure which gave a ‘false consciousness’. Whilst previous Marxist thinkers saw hegemony in terms of political and ideological leadership, Gramsci took the idea of hegemony as ideological dominance and expanded it to the common sense knowledge of the everyday. In Gramsci’s view, the interests of the ruling class are not only reflected in politics and ideologies, but also in the taken-for-granted, assumed-as-natural knowledge that appears as common sense. By accepting a version of common sense that protects the interests of the bourgeoisie as natural and inevitable, the proletariat ‘consent’ to domination: revolution is prevented and the social order is maintained. ^[1] Michel Foucault's influential idea of "discourse" (and "discursive formation") can also be seen to contribute to and connect with social contructionist thought.
Sociologist Talcott Parsons used the concept of gloss to discuss the idea that 'reality' is constructed, that we are all actors on a stage.

The background and development of social constructivism

From traditional education to cognitive constructivism

The constructivist movement has grown essentially from dissatisfaction with educational methods where rote memorisation, regurgitation of facts and the division of knowledge into different subjects, led to a situation where learners were not necessarily able to apply what they have learned in real life (Dixon-Kraus 1996). As early as 1929, Alfred North Whitehead argued that the way students learn many things in school produces inert knowledge - knowledge that can be used to answer items on a school test but which is not available to the student when he or she is trying to solve a problem that requires that knowledge (Flavell and Piaget 1963).
Furthermore, in traditional rationalist and behaviourist approaches, instruction is focused on covering an extensive subject area, reducing the amount of time for problem-solving and thinking beyond the facts, thus minimising independent and autonomous learning. It also encourages didactic lecture formats rather than active student learning (Holt and Willard-Holt 2000). This fundamental problem led to the viewpoint that instructors should only provide appropriate learning situations that will allow students to develop their own knowledge, meaning and truth that will be useful in later life. Providing a problem-solving context for actively engaging students in the thoughtful application of knowledge is an important variable in increasing learning (McMahon 1997).
This educational viewpoint is called cognitive constructivism and was derived from the work of Piaget (Flavell and Piaget 1963). It defines learning as an internal process of accommodation, assimilation, and equilibration (Flavell and Piaget 1963). Piaget thus saw learning as a process where an individual constructs his or her own meaning through cognitive processes. The main underlying assumption of constructivism is that individuals are actively involved right from birth in constructing personal meaning that is their own personal understanding from their experiences (Flavell and Piaget 1963). This action-based theory is thus more concerned with the process of learning than with what is learned (McMahon 1997). Constructivism thus goes beyond the study of how the brain stores and retrieves information to examine the ways in which learners make meaning from experience (Savery 1994). Rather than the transmission of knowledge, learning is an internal process of interpretation: learners do not transfer knowledge from the external world into their memories, rather, they create interpretations of the world based upon their past experiences and their interactions in the world. How someone construes the world, their existing metaphors, is at least as powerful a factor influencing what is learned as any characteristic of that world (McMahon 1997).
Most cognitive theories, and the constructivist approaches that have grown out of these, argue that learning should be durable, transferable and self-regulated (Di Vesta 1987). Mechanisms need to be in place to promote the deeper internal processing required for such learning to occur.

From cognitive constructivism to social constructivism

See Social Constructivism (Learning Theory)
These thoughts on learning, which we now call cognitive constructivism, paved the way for the emergence of the educational theory called social constructivism (McMahon 1997). Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896 – 1934), a Belarusian psychologist who lived and worked in a Marxist environment, became famous for his view on mediation as an integral part of human psychology: “the central fact about our psychology is the fact of mediation” (Vygotsky 1978:166). Although his work only became known during the 1960s, his critique on his contemporary Piaget’s cognitive constructivism, led to the understanding of the importance of culture, language and context in the process of constructing knowledge. Whilst Piaget in his ''Moral judgment of the Child'' (Piaget, 1932) and ''Sociological Studies'' (1977]1995) argued for the importance of co-operation and mutual respect in social interaction as a necessary condition for cognitive development, Vygotsky added the importance of discussing with others, in order to, through the process of mediation, get to a higher order of truth that has also been socially tested (Derry 1999). Vygotsky's “zone of proximal development” is probably his best-known concept. It argues that students can, with help from adults or peers who are more advanced, master concepts and ideas that they cannot understand on their own. Again the emphasis falls on learners actively constructing knowledge and meaning through participating in activities and challenges, with the added emphasis on the interaction between learners and facilitators in order to arrive at a higher level of truth (Sternberg and Williams 1998).

A practical definition of social constructivism

Social constructivism argues that the most optimal learning environment is one where a dynamic interaction between instructors, learners and tasks provides an opportunity for learners to create their own truth due to the interaction with others. Social constructivism thus emphasizes the importance of culture and context in understanding what is happening in society and constructing knowledge based on this understanding (Derry 1999; McMahon 1997).
Paul Ernest (1991) summarises the main foundations of social constructivism as follows:
Knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject.
“The function of cognition is adaptive and serves the organisation of the experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality" (Von Glasersfeld 1989:182).
The personal theories which result from the organization of the experiential world must fit the constraints imposed by physical and social reality.
This is achieved by a cycle of theory-prediction-test-failure-accommodation-new theory.
This gives rise to socially agreed theories of the world and social patterns and rules of language use.
In what follows, social constructivism is examined in more detail with specific reference to the way social constructivism views the nature of the learner, the role of the instructor, the learning process and the selection, scope and sequencing of the subject matter. The constructivesm is the reflextion of those who are in place to teach other and how they teach and the information that ues to show other

Social constructionism in sociology and cultural studies

Berger and Luckman's work has been influential in the sociology of knowledge, including the sociology of science, where Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Steve Woolgar and others use the ideas of 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''.
Social Constructionism has also left its mark on the Social Shaping of Technology field, especially on the Social construction of technology, or SCOT, and authors as Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Maarten van Wesel etc. ^[2] ^[3]
Despite its common perception as objective, mathematics is not immune to social constructivist accounts. Sociologists such as Sal Restivo, mathematicians including Reuben Hersh and Philip J. Davis, and philosophers including Paul Ernest have published social constructivist treatments of mathematics.
An illustrative example of social constructionist thought at work is, following the work of Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim, religion. Freud argued that the basis for religion is rooted in our psyche, in a need to see some purpose in life. A given religion, then, does not show us some hidden aspect of objective reality, but has rather been constructed according to social and historical processes according to human needs. Peter L. Berger wrote an entire book exploring the social construction of religion, ''The Sacred Canopy''.

Social constructionism and 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 on-going mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at any time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallised by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions, given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and philosophy, maintained by therapies and socialisation, and subjectively internalised by upbringing and education to become part of the identity of social citizens.

Degrees of social construction

Though social constructionism contains a diverse array of theories and beliefs, it can generally be divided into two camps: Weak social constructionism and strong social constructionism. The two differ mainly in degree, where weak social constructionists tend to see some underlying objective factual elements to reality, and strong social constructionists see everything as, in some way, a social construction. This is not to say that strong social constructionists see the world as ontologically unreal. Rather, they propose that the notions of "real" and "unreal" are themselves social constructs, so that the question of whether anything is "real" is just a matter of social convention.

Weak social constructionism

Linguist Steven Pinker^[4] writes that "some categories really are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist. Examples include money, tenure, citizenship, decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States."
In a similar vein, Stanley Fish^[5] has suggested that baseball's "balls and strikes" are social constructions.^[6]
Both Fish and Pinker agree that the sorts of objects indicated here can be described as part of what John Searle calls "social reality". In particular, they are, in Searle's terms, ontologically subjective but epistemologically objective. Informally, they require human practices to sustain their existence, but they have an effect that is (basically) universally agreed upon. The disagreement lies in whether this category should be called "socially constructed". Ian Hacking ^[7] argues that it should not. Furthermore, it is not clear that authors who write "social construction" analyses ever mean "social construction" in Pinker's sense. If they never do, then Pinker (probably among others) has misunderstood the point of a social constructionist argument.

Strong social constructionism

"Science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought forth by one particular culture (our own) in the circumstances of one particular historical period; thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a body of knowledge and testable conjecture concerning the real world. It is a discourse, devised by and for one specialized interpretive community, under terms created by the complex net of social circumstance, political opinion, economic incentive and ideological climate that constitutes the ineluctable human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science is but one discursive community among the many that now exist and that have existed historically. Consequently its truth claims are irreducibly self-referential, in that they can be upheld only by appeal to the standards that define the scientific community and distinguish it from other social formations."^[8]

The anatomy of a social constructionist analysis

"Social construction" may mean many things to many people. Ian Hacking, having examined a wide range of books and articles with titles of the form "The social construction of X" or "Constructing X", argues that when something is said to be "socially constructed", this is shorthand for at least the following two claims:
: (0) In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable.^[9]
: (1) X need ''not'' have existed, or need ''not'' be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is ''not'' determined by the nature of things; it is ''not'' inevitable. ^[10]
Hacking adds that the following claims are also often, though not always, implied by the use of the phrase "social construction":
: (2) X is quite bad as it is.
: (3) We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least radically transformed. ^[11]
Thus a claim that gender is socially constructed probably means that gender, as currently understood, is not an inevitable result of biology, but highly contingent on social and historical processes. In addition, depending on who is making the claim, it may mean that our current understanding of gender is harmful, and should be modified or eliminated, to the extent possible.
According to Hacking, "social construction" claims are not always clear about exactly what isn't "inevitable", or exactly what "should be done away with." Consider a hypothetical claim that quarks are "socially constructed". On one reading, this means that quarks themselves are not "inevitable" or "determined by the nature of things." On another reading, this means that our ''idea'' (or conceptualization, or understanding) of quarks is not "inevitable" or "determined by the nature of things".^[12]
Hacking is much more sympathetic to the second reading than the first.^[13] Furthermore, he argues that, if the second reading is taken, there need not always be a conflict between saying that quarks are "socially constructed" and saying that they are "real".^[14] In our gender example, this means that while a legitimate biological basis for gender may exist, ''some'' of society's perceptions of gender may be socially constructed.
The stronger first position, however, is more-or-less an inevitable correlary of Willard Van Orman Quine's concept of ontological relativity, and particularly of the Duhem-Quine thesis. That is, according to Quine and like-minded thinkers (who are not usually characterized as social contructionists) there is no single privileged explanatory framework that is closest to "the things themselves"—every theory has merit only in proportion to its explanatory power.
As we step from the phrase to the world of human beings, "social construction" analyses can become more complex. Hacking briefly examines Helène Moussa’s analysis of the social construction of "women refugees".^[15] According to him, Moussa's argument has several pieces, some of which may be implicit:
# Canadian citizens' idea of "the woman refugee" is not inevitable, but historically contingent. (Thus the idea or category "the woman refugee" can be said to be "socially constructed".)
# Women coming to Canada to seek asylum are profoundly affected by the category of "the woman refugee". Among other things, if a woman does not "count" as a "woman refugee" according to the law, she may be deported, and forced to return to very difficult conditions in her homeland.
# Such women may modify their behavior, and perhaps even their attitudes towards themselves, in order to gain the benefits of being classified as a "woman refugee".
Hacking suggests that this third part of the analysis, the "interaction" between a socially constructed category and the individuals that are actually or potentially included in that category, is present in many "social construction" analyses involving types of human beings.

References

1. Hall, S., Lumley, B. & McLennan, G. (1978). “Politics and Ideology: Gramsci” in ''On Ideology''. University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
2. Pinch, T. J. (1996). The Social Construction of Technology: a Review. In R. Fox (Ed.), Technological Change; Methods and Themes in the History of Technology (pp. 17 - 35). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
3. Wesel, M. v. (2006). Why we do not always get what we want; The power imbalance in the Social Shaping of Technology (final draft 29th of june 2006). Unpublished Master Thesis, Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht (Look for the latest version here).
4. Pinker, Steven. ''The Blank Slate : The Modern Denial of Human Nature''. Penguin Boos, 2002, p. 202)
5. Fish 1996
6. Hacking, Ian. ''The Social Construction of What? ''. Harvard University Press, 1999; ISBN 0-674-00412-4, pp. 29-31
7. Hacking, Ian. 1997
8. Gross, Paul R. and Levitt, Norman. ''Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science''. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998.
9. Hacking, Ian. ''The Social Construction of What? ''. Harvard University Press, 1999; ISBN 0-674-00412-4, p. 12. Numbering begins with 0 for consistency with Hacking's usage.
10. Hacking, Ian. ''The Social Construction of What? ''. Harvard University Press, 1999; ISBN 0-674-00412-4, p. 6. Emphasis added.
11. Hacking, Ian. ''The Social Construction of What? ''. Harvard University Press, 1999; ISBN 0-674-00412-4, p. 6.
12. The distinction between "quarks themselves" and "our idea (or conceptualization, or understanding) of quarks" will undoubtedly trouble some with a philosophical bent. Hacking's distinction is based on an intuitive metaphysics, with a split between things out in the world, on one hand, and ideas thereof in our minds, on the other. Hacking is less advocating a serious, particular metaphysics than suggesting a useful way to analyze claims about "social construction". (Hacking, Ian. ''The Social Construction of What? ''. Harvard University Press, 1999; ISBN 0-674-00412-4, p. 21-24)
13. Hacking, Ian. ''The Social Construction of What? ''. Harvard University Press, 1999; ISBN 0-674-00412-4, pp. 68-70
14. Hacking, Ian. ''The Social Construction of What? ''. Harvard University Press, 1999; ISBN 0-674-00412-4, pp. 29-30
15. Hacking, Ian. ''The Social Construction of What? ''. Harvard University Press, 1999; ISBN 0-674-00412-4, pp. 9-10

External links

★ A critical essay by Peter Slezak

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