social construction
A
social construction or
social construct is any phenomenon "invented" or "constructed" by participants in a particular
culture or
society, existing because people agree to behave as if it exists or follow certain
conventional rules. One example of a social construct is
social status. Another example of social construction is the use of
fiat money, which is worth more than the paper it is printed on only because society has agreed to treat it as valuable.
Social constructionism is a school of thought which deals with detecting and analyzing social constructions.
Definition
Emile Durkheim first theorized about social construction in his anthropological work on
collective behavior, but did not coin the term. The first book with "social construction" in its title was
Peter L. Berger and
Thomas Luckmann's
The Social Construction of Reality, first published in 1966. Since then, the term found its way into the mainstream of the
social sciences. The idea of Berger and Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality was that actors interacting together form, over time,
typifications or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these typifications eventually become
habitualized into reciprocal
roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these reciprocal roles become routinized, the typified reciprocal interactions are said to be
institutionalized. In the process of this institutionalization,
meaning is embedded and institutionalized into individuals and society - knowledge and people's conception of (and therefore belief regarding) what reality 'is' becomes embedded into the institutional fabric and structure of society, and social reality is therefore said to be socially constructed. For further discussion of key concepts related to social construction, see
social constructionism and
deconstruction.
Social constructs and language
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Pinker (2002, p. 202) writes that "some categories really are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist". He goes on to say, however: "But, that does not mean that
all conceptual categories are socially constructed" (italics his). Both Hacking 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". Hacking (1997) argues that it should not.
Social constructs and gender
One of the main theses of
gender theory is that genders and gender roles are mere social constructs, and that there is nothing
natural about being a man or a woman, a heterosexual or a homosexual, or even a transsexual, since genders are mere social appearances and built-in ideas, not unalike men's clothes or women's clothes.
See also
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External links
Constructo socialהבניה חברתיתConstructo socialСоциальный конструктSocial konstruktion
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