From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A social construction or social construct is an institutionalized entity or artifact in a social system "invented" or "constructed" by participants in a particular culture or society that exists because people agree to behave as if it exists, or agree to follow certain conventional rules, or behave as if such agreement or rules existed.
Social constructionism is a school of thought which deals detecting and analyzing social constructions. Recent developments in science have shed light on how many cultural practices and conceptions, once thought to be purely social in their construction, have a strong genetic component.
[edit] Definition
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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 central concept of Berger and Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality was that actors interacting together in a social system form, over time, typifications or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these typifications eventually become habitualised into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these reciprocal roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the typified reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalised. In the process of this institutionalisation, meaning is embedded and institutionalised 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.
[edit] Hot-button issues
[edit] Gender
[edit] Politics
[edit] Violence
[edit] Children
[edit] The Arts
[edit] Social constructs and language
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." 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.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann: The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Doubleday, 1966.
- John Searle (1995) The Construction of Social Reality
- Ian Hacking (1999). The Social Construction of What?. Harvard University Press: 2001.
- Ian Hacking (1997). John Searle's building blocks. History of the Human Sciences.
- Steven Pinker (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human nature. Viking Penguin.
