Construction of Social Reality
"Construction of Social Reality" is a concept introduced by philosopher John Searle, which explores how social institutions and systems are created and maintained through collective intentionality. Searle argues that these social realities, such as money, marriage, and government, exist as a result of shared beliefs and practices within a community. This concept highlights the role of human intentionality in shaping the social world.
8 Key excerpts on "Construction of Social Reality"
eBook - ePub- Paul Atkinson(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...2 Defining Social Reality Introduction Social realities, social life-worlds, are what ethnographers study. They are not ‘given’ and they require detailed studies that reflect and respect their complexity. The notion that social realities are socially constructed is something of a commonplace. But it deserves careful attention. Constructionism (or constructivism) in general is a very important aspect of an ethnographic understanding. Unfortunately, it is readily misunderstood and poorly applied. In particular, it is too easy to assume that a constructionist analytic perspective implies that phenomena are ‘only’ constructed, or that they therefore lack any material substance. But there is nothing trivial about constructions, and they have real embodiments and practical accomplishment. Likewise, it is not the goal of constructionist analysis simply to conclude that things are socially constructed, but to document how they are, with what resources, and with what consequences. In other words, we ought to study how social realities are produced. Moreover, we need to remind ourselves that notions of construction always imply the social. We are not dealing here with private worlds or fantasies. Assumptions and activities in and about the world are generated through socially shared beliefs, knowledge and conventions. Consequently, there is a direct and necessary analytic parallel between our studies of social worlds and their production and the detailed study of practical knowledge. Just as realities are socially defined, so situations have their construction. The idea of the definition of the situation is fundamental to our close analysis of social activities and events. But if we subscribe to the view that situations are real insofar as they are defined as real, then that does not mean that any or all such defining is arbitrary. Far from it: such defining is based on shared or contested stocks of knowledge...
- Sergio Sismondo(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Realists disagree, though, over what science realistically represents, and over what it means to realistically represent something. They disagree about whether the issue is fundamentally one about knowledge or about things. And there is no good account of the nature of reality, the conditions that make real things real - for this reason, realism is probably less often a positive position than a negative one, articulated in opposition to one or another form of anti-realism. 1 The social Construction of Social Reality Ideas of social construction have many origins in classic sociology and philosophy, from analyses by Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, among others. STS imported the phrase “social construction” from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966), an essay on the sociology of knowledge. That work provides a succinct argument for why the sociology of knowledge studies the social construction of reality: Insofar as all human “knowledge” is developed, transmitted and maintained in social situations, the sociology of knowledge must seek to understand the processes by which this is done in such a way that a taken-for-granted “reality” congeals for the man in the street. In other words, we contend that the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality. (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 3) The subject that most interests Berger and Luckmann, though, is social reality, the institutions and structures that come to exist because of people’s actions and attitudes. These features of the social world exist because significant numbers of people act as if they do. Rules of polite behavior, for example, have real effects because people act on them and act with respect to them...
eBook - ePubThe Foundations of Social Research
Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process
- Michael Crotty(Author)
- 1998(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...484). An even more explicit account is offered by Greenwood: Physical and social phenomena. . . differ in one essential respect. Chairs may exist independently of our knowing that they do; our knowledge of the existence of chairs is not constitutive of their existence. In contrast, social phenomena do not exist independently of our knowledge of them. . . Social realities, therefore, are constructed and sustained by the observation of the social rules which obtain in any social situation by all the social interactors involved. . . Social reality is, therefore, a function of shared meanings; it is constructed, sustained and reproduced through social life. (1994, p. 85) That social realities are socially constructed is something of a truism. The most ardent positivist would find that hard to contradict. What distinguishes constructionism, setting it over against the objectivism inherent in the positivist stance, is its understanding that all meaningful reality, precisely as meaningful reality, is socially constructed. The chair may exist as a phenomenal object regardless of whether any consciousness is aware of its existence. It exists as a chair, however, only if conscious beings construe it as a chair. As a chair, it too ‘is constructed, sustained and reproduced through social life’. The ‘social’ in social constructionism is about the mode of meaning generation and not about the kind of object that has meaning. The object involved in the social constructionist understanding of meaning formation need not involve persons at all (and therefore need not be ‘social’ in that sense). The interaction may be, say, with the natural world—the sunset, the mountains, a tree. Natural these objects may be, but it is our culture (shorthand in most cases today for a very complex mix of many cultures and sub-cultures) that teaches us how to see them—and in some cases whether to see them. ‘A way of seeing is a way of not seeing’, feminist author Ann Oakley sagely advises (1974, p. 27)...
eBook - ePub- James T. Tedeschi, James T. Tedeschi(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...II The Construction of Social Reality Jack M. McLeod and Steven R. Chaffee Why Social Reality? Each of us likes to think of himself as being rational and autonomous. Our ideas seem to be peculiarly our own. It is hard for us to realize how little of our information comes from direct experience with the physical environment, and how much of it comes only indirectly, from other people and the mass media. Our complex communication systems enable us to overcome the time and space limitations that confined our ancestors, but they leave us with a greater dependence on others for shaping our ideas about how things are in the world. While becoming aware of places and events far from the direct experience of our daily lives, we have given up much of our capacity to confirm what we think we know. This dependence on communication would have little impact on the study of social influence processes were it not for certain other aspects of the way we typically construct our view of the world. First, it appears that much of the information obtained from others is given the status of reality, as if it were no less valid than if it had been a direct observation of physical reality. The personal and tentative nature of our information may be forgotten as the material becomes absorbed into our cognitive structure. This tendency to treat information as reality is reinforced by the fact that a large proportion of unverified information is shared by others around us. That is, they seem to have the same information and ideas we do, and we may find ourselves agreeing that everyone “ought to” see things the way we do. This normative sharing of “oughtness” is often referred to by the term social reality. It is widely held that the influence process is greatly affected by the beliefs, attitudes, and values brought to an influence situation by its participants...
eBook - ePub- Craig E. Carroll(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Vidhi A. Chaudhri Vidhi A. Chaudhri Chaudhri, Vidhi A. Jiska Engelbert Jiska Engelbert Engelbert, Jiska Social Construction of Reality Social construction of reality 763 766 Social Construction of Reality Social constructionism is a theory of reality and knowledge. Centered on two fundamental questions—(1) What is real? and (2) How is one to know?—social constructionism proposes that what people recognize as real and what they know—with some degree of certainty—in or about that reality is an effect of social interactions. Moreover, people’s understanding of what constitutes the social world is historically contingent and socially relative. Reality, in other words, is not an objective or fixed “given.” Rather, it is a construct that is bound by the specifics of cultural and social location, by the outcomes of historical negotiations over meanings and understandings of the social world, and thus by power relations. This entry focuses on the significance of discourse in the construction of social realities. It first provides some crucial background on the origins and tenets of social constructionism, before elaborating on both the limitations and the possibilities of deploying social constructionism as a theoretical premise in corporate reputation–related matters. The Academic History of Social Constructionism The seminal text on social construction is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966). Problematizing the positivist and materialist approaches to reality, while acknowledging the limitations of addressing questions of reality on philosophical turf only, Berger and Luckmann’s work is to be read as a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. This branch of sociology, developed from the late 19th century onward, calls for a theoretical and analytical reflection on what constitutes knowledge about the aspects of the social world...
eBook - ePub- Hubert Knoblauch(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...II From social to communicative construction The aim of this chapter is to outline how the theory of the communicative construction of reality came about. As central as the concept of communicative action may be, so too is its entrenchment in phenomenologically oriented sociology crucial. 1 The history of the problem it addresses provides the starting point for the considerations that bestow order to this introduction. Three movements should be mentioned in particular, which have led to the communicative construction of reality: the phenomenological, the empirical, and the social-constructivist movements. All three are closely connected, in terms of both individuals and institutions. At the same time, however, they refer to different scientific discussions and discourses. 1 Other designations are “social phenomenology”, “hermeneutic sociology of knowledge” or “sociological hermeneutics”. This introduction does not attempt to explicate the theory of the communicative construction of reality; rather it is about its imbedding and contextualization within a particular scientific discourse from which the communicative construction of reality is primarily derived. Even if this theory draws on many other discourses in social and sociological theory later on in this book, it must always be understood with respect to the specific problems that we outline here. These problems are by no means marginal. Rather they address the very subject matter of all social sciences, the question: what is social? The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann (1966) forms the best-known starting point of our theory, and is also acknowledged in the title of this book. Here, we discuss this theory and consider critically its relevance for social theory. This discussion forms one of the ways that lead to the communicative construction of reality. Social constructivism is connected to a range of methodical innovations...
eBook - ePubThe Learning Self
Understanding the Potential for Transformation
- Mark Tennant(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Jossey-Bass(Publisher)
...It implies the internalization of society as such and of the objective reality established therein, and, at the same time, the subjective establishment of a coherent and continuous identity. Society, identity and reality are subjectively crystallized in the same process of internalization” (p.153). For Berger and Luckmann (1967), the overriding idea is that we are “predestined to construct and inhabit a world with others” (p. 204). They argue that the socially constructed reality that we experience becomes reified for us as an objective reality—as if it were “natural.” This is the result of the process of “legitimation,” whereby social reality as a whole “makes sense” and is “self-evident” and wherein the course of an individual’s life is subjectively endowed with meaning within this social reality. Language itself is a form of legitimation; so too are informal everyday expressions, maxims, and stories that circulate in the culture. Explicit theories relating to the conduct of human affairs and the symbolic universe that we inhabit constitute further levels and types of legitimation, all of which contribute to the acceptance of society and its activities and prescriptions for conduct as objectively real and subjectively meaningful. For Berger and Luckmann, humans, unlike animals, are “world-open”—that is, they are open to being socialized in many different ways, largely because their development proceeds over a long period of interaction with the external world. The Social Organization of the Life Span Casual observation of how the lifecourse is framed by institutional practices and values seems to support the arguments of Berger and Luckmann (1967) in that it is abundantly clear that age-related norms, statuses, and roles are features of social organization. In different cultures and historical periods there are different conceptions of the stages of life—their boundaries, dimensions, and divisions...
eBook - ePub- David Bakhurst(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Far from it. What is at issue here is how helpful the metaphor of social construction is for addressing them, especially those that bear on our understanding of mind. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY Hacking suggests that no one really holds that reality as such is socially constructed (1999, pp. 24–5). But, for once, Hacking is wrong. Although Bruner himself merely flirts with such ‘global’ constructionism, 5 recoiling from its more radical implications, a bold statement of the position can be found in the work of American psychologist Kenneth Gergen (1999; 2001). For Gergen, social constructionism fills the void that remains once we abandon the broadly Cartesian conception of mind and world that emerged in the early-modern period, dominated the Enlightenment and cast its shadow over the subsequent development of philosophy and psychology to the present day. The Cartesian conception has three principal components: 1 The individual human mind represents a self-contained subjective world of experiences, thoughts and other mental phenomena. Each thinking subject, or ‘self’, is directly aware only of the goings-on in its own mental world, and only it has direct awareness of these goings-on. Our awareness of the world independent of our minds is indirect, via the mediation of mental representations. Our awareness of other minds is doubly indirect: we infer what is going on in the minds of others from observations of their bodily behaviour. 2 Mental and linguistic representations—thoughts and utterances—are able accurately to represent the world beyond the mind. When representations accurately depict—or ‘correspond to’—objects and states of affair, they are true. The mind is a mirror to reality. 3 The individual mind is transparent to itself...
