Social Constructionisms

Approaches to the Study of the Human World

Titus Hjelm

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781403940001
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350314467
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Social constructionism is one of the key ideas in the social sciences, offering different frameworks for understanding the human world. But what does it mean when we say that something is 'socially constructed'? What exactly do we construct in our social interaction? And what actually 'does' the constructing?

This dynamic text invites critical reflection on these questions and more, outlining the various ways that social constructionist theory has been utilised in the social sciences. Hjelm introduces the basic assumptions of social constructionism - before examining the differences between various constructionist traditions and perspectives - from Berger and Luckmann's sociology of knowledge, to constructionist approaches in social psychology and discourse analysis.

Through a diverse range of case studies on religion, crime, gender and the media, the chapters demonstrate how to apply constructionist ideas in empirical social research. Social Constructionisms is thus an invaluable source for students and scholars across the social sciences.

1

The World We Make: The Idea of Social Construction

My alarm clock goes off at seven on a normal weekday morning. I get up – more often than not sleepy and grumpy – and go to the kitchen to put on a kettle for tea. I make breakfast for my daughter and myself, drink my tea, and check the morning headlines in the news, or read a book. After that I take a shower, shave, brush my teeth, comb my hair, put on my clothes, dress my daughter, and take her to the nursery. Arriving at work, I greet the receptionist in the lobby and answer ‘Fine thank you, and you?’ to a ‘How are you?’ question asked by a colleague in the school lift. I drop my bag at the office and pop into the men’s toilet before the first lecture starts. Entering the classroom, I say ‘Good morning, everyone. Today we are going to discuss social constructionism.’

I won’t bore you with the rest of the day, but that is a quite accurate description of an average morning in my life. Now, I would like you to write down your average morning routine. After that, let’s take a look at an alternative version of my morning.

I wake up to sounds coming from my daughter’s room. The sun is shining. I make breakfast for my daughter and myself and complain about the coming day to an uninterested toddler. I put on yesterday’s slightly smelly clothes. On the other hand, without showering and brushing my teeth I’ll smell anyway. My chin is stubbly and my hair tangled, but who cares? I take my daughter to the nursery, and complain about the coming day to the staff. Arriving at work I let out an audible ‘hmph’ to the greetings of the receptionist. A colleague in the lift greets me with a ‘How are you?’; I respond by telling him that I think I have cancer. After dropping my bag I pop into the women’s toilet, to the horror of another colleague. Entering the classroom, I say ‘Alright folks, another day at the grind – except today we’re going to sit in class naked.’ Many of the students smile in confusion at first, but are soon packing their things when I start to take off my trousers.¹

If, while reading the above, you thought that the reactions of my colleagues and students were justified, I don’t blame you. So do I. My imagined actions would be considered as impolite, potentially as harassment, and most likely the actions of a mentally disturbed person. If you look at your own morning routine it probably resembles my first example more than the second. I am not surprised. It is common sense to act as I did in the first example.

Yet, if we look at the individual actions in the examples more closely, there is nothing ‘natural’ or inevitable about them. Why should we get up for work or school at times when it’s pitch dark outside and we could easily sleep a couple of more hours? Why are we expected to take care of our personal hygiene? Sure, we’ll have more cavities without dental care, but why should we shave or spend time fixing our hair? And if you’re asked ‘How are you?’, shouldn’t you reply with whatever your current assessment of your physical and mental state is? Toilets have the same function, no matter what the symbol on the door. Finally, providing the heating works, why shouldn’t people sit in class naked?

Just asking these questions feels absurd, because all these things are so ingrained in our modern way of life. Some more so than others: It takes time for some people from non-Anglo-American cultures to understand that more often than not ‘How are you?’ is just a different version of ‘hello’ rather than a serious enquiry into one’s wellbeing. Yet, perhaps with the exception of some tribal people unaffected by Western norms of covering the body, most people would shrink back from nudity in the workplace. The point here is that doing the above things ‘right’ is a matter of convention, where the correct way of acting in a situation is imposed or agreed upon at some point and has become so commonplace that it has become taken for granted. These conventions that become habits make social life as we know it possible, so they’re never ‘just’ conventions. But the important point is that a convention created by people can also be changed by people. Social constructionism argues that the human world is not as simple and obvious as it seems and that people, you and I, take actively part in producing and reproducing – constructing – it.²

The challenge of social constructionism: rethinking the human world

The idea that the world as we know it is a ‘social construction’, a product of human interaction, has become a central metaphor in social science (Restivo and Croissant, 2008: 220; Elder-Vass, 2012: i) – a key framework for examining society and culture. Although I keep referring to the more familiar terms ‘society’ and ‘culture’, the term ‘human world’ nicely captures what I think of as the subject matter of this book: it is ‘the aspect of the world, that bears the imprint of human activity, that would not exist at all but for the actions of human beings’ (Bauman, 1990: 3, quoted in Jenkins, 2002: 3). In this human world, what we take for granted, as ‘common sense’, is not as simple as we have thought. What seem to be unquestioned ways of doing things turn out to be conventions, habits, and agreements. What we have forgotten during history is that there would be no social life without people, and that people came up with the conventions, habits and agreements in the first place. Social constructionism draws attention to this and the idea that if and when the social reality we experience every day is a human construction, it can also be changed by human action. Our destiny is affected, but not defined, by biological or psychological characteristics, nor by the way society is structured.

This book aims to chart the different ways the idea of social construction has been employed in the social sciences. It focuses on the sociological contributions to constructionist discussions, but also tackles ideas in constructionist social psychology. The argument running through the text is simple: there is no one ‘constructionism’ (or ‘constructivism’, see below) we can point to, but rather many constructionisms – as the title of the book implies. These different constructionist traditions or perspectives sensitize us to different aspects of social and cultural life and come with particular assumptions about how we can know about the human world and how best to study it social-scientifically. Although the diversity of traditions and the consequences of this diversity are the gist of the book, it makes sense to begin with some general characteristics that traditions claiming to be ‘constructionist’ almost always share.

In the first place, understanding social constructionism requires what could be described as an inverse suspension of disbelief. ‘Suspension of disbelief’ is a literary term that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary refers to the ‘voluntary withholding of scepticism on the part of the reader with regard to incredible characters and events’. In other words, it doesn’t matter that we know that Frodo, Gandalf, and Sauron are fictional characters, because there are important thoughts, ideas and human interests conveyed in an ‘unrealistic’ fantasy story like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Social constructionism invites us to do the same to our everyday lives, by showing that what we consider as unproblematically ‘real’ is actually contingent on what we think and do. Unicorns will not exist just because we would like them to, but by thinking about and communicating about a different way of understanding the role of women in the world, for example, we can change things. Contingency, therefore, is a key term in understanding social constructionism. Things and ideas in the human world – the world that would not exist without the humans in it – are not inevitable, but products of human action.

This revelation, if you will, has had the consequence that much of constructionist research has played a liberating role in at least two senses. First, it has showed how ideas about motherhood, for example, are products of historical and social processes:

Mothers who accept current canons of emotion and behavior may learn that the ways they are supposed to feel are not ordained by human nature or the biology of reproduction. They need not feel quite as guilty as they are supposed to, if they do not obey either the old rules of family or whatever is the official psycho-pediatric rule of the day (Hacking, 1999: 2).

Although constructionist analyses of various topics have showed their liberating potential, Hacking (1999: 2) goes on to say that sometimes talk of ‘construction’ can be of little help to those whose problems are being constructed, like in the case of anorexia. Second, constructionism has been considered liberating in the sense that ‘social constructionist movements have tended to emerge as self-consciously critical of the institutional mainstream of the various academic disciplines within which they are found’ (Weinberg, 2008: 15). The following chapters show that this has been more or less the case for all of the traditions discussed in this book. Constructionism has emerged from the questioning of the paradigmatic ways of thinking about the central questions and methods of a discipline. Different constructionisms combine the two senses of liberation and critique in different portions, but it is safe to say that one or the other is present in all types.

As a result of the focus on contingency and liberation, constructionists pay careful attention to the social processes in which the human world is constructed (Burr, 1995: 4; Hacking, 1999: 49). I will return to the issue of what kind of questions constructionist research is best fit to answer in Chapter 7, but suffice it to say here that the idea of process assumes that the construction of ideas, for example, takes place in stages in history. Hence, constructionist enquiry is always sensitive to issues of historicity, which in this context means more than ‘it actually happened’ – rather that ideas do not pop up from nowhere, but are products of people’s thinking and communicating in a sequence of time.

If contingency, process and liberation could be called the shared ‘characteristics’ of constructionism, there are also four ‘functions’ that follow from these characteristics: (1) constructionism offers a view of what the human world is like, what it consists of (the ontological function); (2) it offers a view of how knowledge of the human world is produced (the epistemological function); and (3) it argues that (1) and (2) make it possible for people to change the human world by thinking and communicating differently about it (the critical function). The chapters that follow demonstrate how these functions are combined, if at all, in different constructionist traditions. In addition, there is a fourth function, which examines the best way to study the processes of construction (the methodological function). The key term here is discourse, which warrants a more in-depth discussion because it also illuminates the abovementioned core aspects of constructionism.

Table 1.1 The characteristics and functions of constructionisms

Characteristics
1. Contingency	The human world is a human product
2. Liberation	Categories and definitions can be changed
3. Process	Construction is an interactive and historical achievement
Functions
1. Ontological	What the human world consists of
2. Epistemological	How knowledge of the human world is produced
3. Critical	How to change the human world by thinking and communicating differently
4. Methodological	How to study the processes of construction

Text and talk as doing: the centrality of discourse

Constructionists are divided over what it is exactly that is doing the construction. Knowledge, culture, language and discourse have all been offered as choices (for a comprehensive discussion, see Elder-Vass, 2012). While there are good grounds to favour any of the above, I have opted for discourse, which – I think – best captures what is going on when something is said to be socially constructed.

The concept of ‘discourse’ entered the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s and gained increasing popularity with the advent of poststructuralism and postmodernism in the 1980s, so much so that is justified to speak of a ‘discursive turn’. Crucial to this development was the work of Michel Foucault (especially 1978; 1995), who argued that discourse was the defining aspect of social relations and, consequently, saw the study of discourse as central to the study of how individuals (‘subjects’) and society are constituted discursively, that is, in practical language use by people who interact with other people.³ Discourse theory and analysis has diversified since, and there are few definitions of ‘discourse’ that catch a meaning that is shared by all who use the concept. What is shared by all of the approaches is a commitment to at least some of the principles of social constructionism outlined above.

Although ‘discourse’ often pops up in discussions of ‘discourse analysis’, this has ‘the unfortunate consequence that it is sometimes treated as a method only, a technique something on a par with an experiment or a questionnaire’ (Edwards and Potter, 1992: 11), whereas actually ‘there is more than a methodological shift at work; there is some fairly radical theoretical rethinking’ (Edwards and Potter, 1992: 11; see also Mills, 2004: 117; Bloor and Wood, 2006: 54). The first aspect of this theoretical rethinking is that discourse is considered constitutive, because it does not simply reflect or represent things ‘out there’ in the world (or in an individual’s mind) but ‘constitutes’ – constructs – them (Fairclough, 1992: 3). Our descriptions of the world are by definition incomplete: while we might be telling the truth and nothing but the truth, we can never tell the whole truth about the world (see Barker, 2011: 200). Our discourse is therefore always partial – both in the sense of incomplete and biased – and constructs the world from a particular point of view. When a divorced couple battles over the custody of children in a court, they are both describing the same family, but very likely in quite different ways.

The constitutive aspect is closely linked to the second aspect of discourse, its ‘action orientation’, that is, how things are done with discourse (Edwards and Potter, 1992: 2–3; see Potter and Wetherell, 1987: 32–3; Potter, 1996: 105). For example, the sentence ‘it is going to drive me mad doing all those statistics by hand tonight’ can be read as a simple announcement. However, if uttered in the presence of a friend in possession of a calculator, its potential meaning changes into a veiled question (Potter and Wetherell, 1987: 33). Because of the action orientation of discourse, analysing processes of social construction is never about analysing text and talk as such. Although I don’t want to anticipate the methodological discussion in Chapter 7 too much at this point, it is good to mention here that what is said is the first, descriptive, step in constructionist analyses. Discourse should, however, be understood as a social practice, which in turn means that the second step is to examine what is done with discourse. Texts and talk conceptualized as doing goes to the very heart of social constructionist thinking.

Constructionism or constructivism?

If you have come across the idea of social construction before, there is a good chance that you have been reading or hearing about ‘social constructionism’, ‘social constructivism’, or perhaps just ‘constructionism’ and ‘constructivism’. On some levels the difference is unproblematic – certainly the terms are often used interchangeably. But there are several reasons why I prefer ‘social constructionism’. First, the ‘social’ in constructionism is sometimes thought of as redundant, because the way ‘construction’ is used always refers to processes of social interaction. The ‘social’ remains, however, a useful reminder that even when we are constructing ideas about the world, say, by watching television, there is always a human producer to the programme, and that makes the idea of construction broader than an analysis of individual ‘readings’ of, say, television programmes. However, I will for the sake of brevity often refer to just ‘constructionism’ on the following pages, assuming that the title of the book will remind the reader of the ‘social’ aspects of construction processes. Second, although perhaps more often than not ‘(social) constructivism’ is used to refer to the very same thing as ‘(social) constructionis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figure
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. The World We Make: The Idea of Social Construction
• 2. The Construction of Everyday Life: The Sociology of Knowledge
• 3. The Making of the Dark Side of Society: Social Problems as Social Constructions
• 4. Constructing the Self: Social Psychology, Discourse and Postmodernism
• 5. The Power of Construction: Critical Discourse Analysis
• 6. Constructionisms and Critique
• 7. Social Constructionisms and the Study of the Human World
• Notes
• References
• Index