What Is Social Constructionism?: ST ND

What is Social Constructionism?
Social constructionism is the construction of reality is a theory of knowledge of sociology and

communication that examines the development jointly constructed understanding of the world. It is
closely related to the sense of that people are working together to construct artifact. Social
constructionism may be defined as a perspective which believes that a great deal of human life exists as it
does due to social and interpersonal influences. Although genetically inherited factors and social factors
are at work at the same time, social constructionism does not deny the influence of genetic inheritance,
but decides to concentrate on investigating the social influences on communal and individual life. The
subjects that social constructionism is interested in are those to do with what anthropologists call culture,
and sociologists call society: the shared social aspects of all that is psychological.
There are several versions of social constructionism with different writers making different emphases.
Two distinguishing marks of social constructionism include the rejection of assumptions about the nature
of mind and theories of causality, and placing an emphasis on the complexity and interrelatedness of the
many facets of individuals within their communities. The constructionism is a semiotic paradigm which
begins from the interpretative axiom according to the map through the reality is read, is nothing but a
continuous negotiation.
An integration of the existing literature on social constructionism shows as there are several features of
social constructionism. 1st, social constructionists reject the traditional positivistic approaches to
knowledge that are basically no reflexive in nature. 2 nd, social constructionists take a critical stance in
relation to taken-for-granted assumptions about the social world, which are seen as reinforcing the
interests of dominant social groups. 3 rd, social constructionists uphold the belief that the way we
understand the world is a product of a historical process of interaction and negotiation between groups of
people. 4th, social constructionists maintain that the goal of research and scholarship is not to produce
knowledge that is fixed and universally valid, but to open up an appreciation of what is possible. Finally,
social constructionism represents a movement toward redefining psychological constructs such as the
“mind,” “self,” and “emotion” as social constructed processes that are not intrinsic to the individual but
produced by social discourse.
Social constructionism regards individuals as integral with cultural, political and historical evolution, in
specific times and places, and so resituates psychological processes cross-culturally, in social and
temporal contexts. Apart from the inherited and developmental aspects of humanity, social
constructionism hypothesizes that all other aspects of humanity are created, maintained and destroyed in
our interactions with others through time. To say of something that it is socially constructed is to
emphasize its dependence on contingent aspects of our social selves. It is to say: This thing could not
have existed had we not built it; and we need not have built it at all, at least not in its present form. Had
we been a different kind of society, had we had different needs, values, or interests, we might well have
built a different kind of thing, or built this one differently. The inevitable contrast is with a naturally
existing object, something that exists independently of us and which we did not have a hand in shaping.
Varieties of Constructionism
There is no single social constructionist position is now more obvious than ever, and that positions that
have never labeled or identified themselves as social constructionism are sometimes labeled in this way
simply adds to the confusion. Like the term ‘postmodernism’, social constructionism is not a single target
(for its critics) or a single movement (for its enthusiasts). The frequent conflation of postmodernism with
social constructionism adds to the confusion, since the former is even more ambiguous a label, not to
mention that in many respects social constructionism is thoroughly and respectably modernist in intent
and practice. Of course, having said all this, it is not out of the question that a list could be drawn up with
appropriate similarities and some key set of defining features found that many could agree do function as
central to the enterprise called ‘social constructionism’. But this is beside the point. What counts as
constructionism is often dependent on the author’s or critic’s aims. For what seems important to many of
our authors is to critique a particular version.
History and development
Social constructionism has many roots - some are in existential-phenomenological psychology, social
history, hermeneutics and social psychology. The disciplines of the history of ideas and the sociology of
knowledge also have much in common with social constructionism. Social constructionism as it is now
infiltrating British and North American psychology and social psychology cannot be traced to a single
source. It has emerged from the combined influences of a number of North American, British and
continental writers dating back more than thirty years.
Human beings together create and sustain all social phenomena through social practices. They see three
fundamental processes as responsible for this: externalization, objectivation and internalization. People
externalize when they act on their world, creating some artifact or practice, and externalize it by telling a
story or writing a book. Other people re-tell the story or read the book, and once in this social realm the
story or books begin to take on a life of its own. The idea is expresses has become an object of
consciousness for people in that society (objectivation) and has developed a kind of factual existence of
truth; it seems to be out there, an objective feature of the world which appears as natural, issuing from the
nature of the world itself rather than dependent upon the constructive work and interactions of human
beings. Finally, because future generations are born into a world where this idea already exists, they
internalize is as part of their consciousness, as part of their understanding of the nature of the world.
A Postmodern Approach to Knowledge
Social constructionism can be seen as a source of the postmodern movement, and has been influential in
the field of cultural studies. Some have gone so far as to attribute the rise of cultural studies (the cultural
turn) to social constructionism. Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of
socially constructed reality stresses the ongoing mass-building of world views by individuals in
dialectical interaction with society at a time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this
view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallized by habit into
institutions propped up by language conventions, given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and
philosophy, maintained by therapies and socialization, and subjectively internalized by upbringing and
education to become part of the identity of social citizens. The constructionist theory is very sensitive to
changes generating new forms of practices and behaviors. In times of rapid transformation in the world,
social constructionism can be a useful approach to address and embrace changes in context, pointing to
new possibilities of doing research and intervention.

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What is Social Constructionism?

Social constructionism is the construction of reality is a theory of knowledge of sociology and

History and development

A Postmodern Approach to Knowledge

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