A social construction, social construct or social concept is an institutionalised entity or artifact in a social system 'invented' or 'constructed' by participants in a particular culture or society that exists solely because people agree to behave as if it exists, or agree to follow certain conventional rules.
Obvious social constructs include such things as games, language, money, school grades, titles, governments, universities, corporations and other institutions. Less obvious, and more debatable, social constructs include class, race, gender, religion, sexuality, morality, memory and reality.
Social constructionism is a school of thought that attempts, to varying degrees, to analyze seemingly natural and given phenomena in terms of social constructs. Connotations of such analysis may seem to include made-up, accidental, arbitrary, and unreal, though this is rarely what social constructionists who use the term have in mind, for, according to most social constructionists, social constructions are very much real - they are a part of, or sometimes the entirety of, lived reality. Indeed, they have an ontological status in society as substantial as the ontological status of brute facts.
Social constructions must be seen in an institutional context, as arising from the institutionalisation of patterns of interaction and meaning in society leading to a construction of social institutions and institutionalised perspectives and understandings.
The term "social construction"
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 is 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.
In articulating the term 'social construction' it is also relevant to note the distinction made between institutional facts and brute facts. Institutional facts, such as 'this piece of paper issued by the government is a ten dollar bill' are 'facts' only in the context of specific social institutions (in the above case, the institution of money). Institutional facts are socially constructed, while 'brute' facts are not ontologically dependent on social institutions.
Philosopher and historian of science Ian Hacking (1999, pp. 24-25) argued that there are few, if any, "universal constructionists". That is, few people would say for example that the sun or DNA are in and of themselves socially constructed and exist only by virtue of that social construction. Rather, our mental representations of objects in the physical world are socially constructed, and our social relationships to and interactions with those objects are socially constructed. The social sphere, however, is different, as important social realities (for example money) may exist by virtue of their social construction by people over time.
Another key point raised by Hacking (1999, p. 18) is that the term 'social construction' is also used where its usage isn't meaningful. As an example, he relates that Rom Harré's publisher insisted that Harré change the title of one of his works from The Social Production of Emotions to The Social Construction of the Emotions since more copies would sell under the new title. "Social construction" may also sometimes be used primarily to make friends or enemies; as Hacking (1999, p. vii) says, "The phrase has become code. If you use it favorably, you deem yourself rather radical. If you trash the phrase, you declare that you are rational, reasonable, and respectable".
Games
There is little argument as to whether or not games are social constructs. They exist entirely because of a set of rules or social conventions which the players, and the spectators, agree to work within. To take one example, each piece in chess may move only in certain patterns - the bishop may move only diagonally, the knight only in an 'L' shape, etc. There is, of course, no physical property the pieces possess that prevents them from moving otherwise, nor is it impossible for any other reason to move, say, a pawn two spaces backward instead of the usual one space forward. It is only a set of social conventions—the rules of chess—and our agreement to abide by those rules which prevents us from doing so.
In a similar vein, Stanley Fish (Fish 1996) has suggested that the baseball's "balls and strikes" are social constructions (Hacking 1999, pp. 29-31).
Gender, sex, and feminism
Especially with the advent of second-wave feminism, it has become fairly common to separate biological sex from gender, claiming along the way that there is no inherent connection between the two. Indeed, in more recent years, social constructionists have asserted that gender is entirely a social construct. The rules by which, for example, biological women navigate the world are products of a given society and, indeed, they vary between societies. There is no fact in nature that compels women to wear dresses, have long hair, be nurturing toward children, cook, clean, etc. These are roles that women have been socialised into fulfilling, and they could be, and are often, otherwise. Moreover, like the chess example above, these are conventions - the rules exist because we create them and they can be changed.
Biological sex, too, has been subjected to the critical eye of social constructionists, especially when viewed in terms of an exclusive either/or, male/female dichotomy. Queer theorists note that transsexual and intersexed people seem to defy this mode of categorization, and note attempts by medical doctors throughout the 20th century to force such people into the male/female construct. Intersexed babies, especially, have been forcibly subjected to a series of sex assignment surgeries in order to make them fit into our historically specific worldview, often following the crass guideline "its easier to make a hole than a pole". The point, social constructionists argue, is that the very necessity of forcing these people into our scheme of sex categorization shows that this scheme cannot be a matter of biological fact, but must instead be a social construction.
Anatomy of a social construct
Linguist Steven 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.
Contemporary developments
Berger and Luckmann's work on social construction has been extended by major sociological theorists of the late twentieth century, for example in Pierre Bourdieu's genetic structuralism, Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration and Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and Tony Lawson's Critical Realist Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA). See structure and agency for a discussion of further developments in contemporary social science theory consistent with the concept of social construction.
A further contemporary perspective on social construction worth examining is philosopher John Searle's book The Construction of Social Reality - the title constituting a deliberate reference to Berger and Luckmann's landmark 1966 work.
Meanwhile, the notion of social construction has continued to feature prominently in the social sciences and in the 'culture wars'.
See also
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.