‘Social’ constructionism

If seeing interpretation as a making of meaning does not condemn us to subjectivism, it does not condemn us to individualism either. We have to reckon with the social origin of meaning and the social character with which it is inevitably stamped.

Fish emphasises that ‘all objects are made and not found’ but adds at once that ‘the means by which they are made are social and conventional’. These means are institutions which ‘precede us’ and in which ‘we are already embedded’ and ‘it is only by inhabiting them, or being inhabited by them, that we have access to the public and conventional senses they make’. Functioning as ‘a publicly available system of intelligibility’, these institutions are the source of the interpretative strategies whereby we constmct meaning (Fish 1990, p. 186).

Where Fish invokes ‘a publicly available system of intelligibility’, anthropologist Clifford Geertz speaks of ‘a system of significant symbols’. Geertz is talking, of course, about culture and he presents the meaningful symbols that constitute culture as an indispensable guide to

human behaviour. What, in Geertz’s view, would we be without them? Certainly we would not be ‘clever savages’, as in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Nor would we be the ‘nature’s noblemen’ who in Enlightenment thought lurk beneath the trappings of culture. Nor, again, would we be ‘intrinsically talented apes who had somehow failed to find themselves’, as classical anthropological theory seems to imply. We would be none of these, Geertz insists. Rather, we would be ‘unworkable monstrosities’ (Geertz 1973, p. 49).

Unworkable? Yes, unworkable. Without culture we could not function. Culture has to do with functioning. As a direct consequence of the way in which we humans have evolved, we depend on culture to direct our behaviour and organise our experience. In the past, Geertz points out, we have tended to see culture as ‘complexes of concrete behaviour patterns—customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters’. To view culture primarily in this light is to consider it the outcome of human thought and action. We need to reverse this way of viewing culture. Culture is best seen as the source rather than the result of human thought and behaviour. It is ‘a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”)—for the governing of behavior’ (Geertz 1973, p. 44).

In this view of the role of culture, human thought emerges as ‘basically both social and public’.

Thinking consists not of ‘happenings in the head’ (though happenings there and elsewhere are necessary for it to occur) but of a traffic in what have been called, by G.H. Mead and others, significant symbols—words for the most part but also gestures, drawings, musical sounds, mechanical devices like clocks, or natural objects like jewels—anything, in fact, that is disengaged from its mere actuality and used to impose meaning upon experience. (Geertz 1973, p. 45)

Fish has told us that the institutions constituting our publicly available system of intelligibility precede us. We come to inhabit this pre-existing system and to be inhabited by it. Similarly, in describing culture as a system of significant symbols, Geertz emphasises that, from the point of view of any particular individual, ‘such symbols are largely given’. They are already current in the community when the individual is bom and they remain in circulation—with some changes, to be sure— after the individual dies (Geertz 1973, p. 45).

Thus, while humans may be described, in constmctionist spirit, as engaging with their world and making sense of it, such a description is misleading if it is not set in a genuinely historical and social perspective. It is clearly not the case that individuals encounter phenomena in the world and make sense of them one by one. Instead, we are all bom into a world of meaning. We enter a social milieu in which a ‘system of intelligibility’ prevails. We inherit a ‘system of significant symbols’. For each of us, when we first see the world in meaningful fashion, we are inevitably viewing it through lenses bestowed upon us by our culture. Our culture brings things into view for us and endows them with meaning and, by the same token, leads us to ignore other things.

The social constmctionism we are talking about here is all- encompassing and we need to be careful not to restrict its ambit. For one thing, it is not to be taken here in an ideational sense only. It is not just our thoughts that are constmcted for us. We have to reckon also with the social constmction of emotions (Harre 1986). Moreover, constmctionism embraces the whole gamut of meaningful reality. All reality, as meaningful reality, is socially constmcted.⁷ There is no exception.

Not everyone agrees. There are some who take social constmctionism to mean that social realities, and only social realities, have a social genesis. Natural or physical realities do not. In other words, they understand social constmctionism as denoting ‘the constmction of social reality’ rather than ‘the social constmction of reality’. The wording used by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology to describe social constmctionism suggests this standpoint. Social constructionists, we are told, ‘emphasize the idea that society is actively and creatively produced by human beings’, social worlds being ‘interpretive nets woven by individuals and groups’ (Marshall 1994, p. 484). An even more explicit account is offered by Greenwood:

Physical and social phenomena . . . differ in one essential respect. Chairs may exist independendy 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 constmcted is something of a tmism. 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). Accordingly, whether we would describe the object of the interaction as natural or social, the basic generation of meaning is always social, for the meanings with which we are endowed arise in and out of interactive human community.

Accordingly, not only the social scientist but equally the natural scientist has to deal with realities that, as meaningful realities, are socially constructed. They are on an equal footing in this respect. British sociologist Anthony Giddens appears to disagree. He makes the following distinction between the natural world and the social world:

The difference between the social and natural world is that the latter does not constitute itself as ‘meaningful’; the meanings it has are produced by men in the course of their practical life, and as a consequence of their endeavours to understand or explain it for themselves. Social life—of which these endeavours are a part—on the other hand, is produced by its component actors precisely in terms of their active constitution and reconstitution of frames of meaning whereby they organize their experiences. (Giddens 1976, P. 79)

What is Giddens postulating here? He is asserting that, while humans do not create the natural world but have to make sense of a ‘world always already there’ (Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, not Giddens’s), the very existence of social phenomena stems from human action. Consequendy, the process of bringing these social realities into being is one with the process of interpreting and reinterpreting them. Unlike the natural world, then, social realities are meaningful by virtue of the very act that brings them into existence. Natural realities are not.

Giddens’s purpose in making this distinction is to offer a basis for his concept of the ‘double hermeneutic’ in which social scientists have to engage. Social scientists have the task, first of all, of ‘entering and grasping the frames of meaning involved in the production of social life by lay actors’ as well as the subsequent task of ‘reconstituting these within the new frames of meaning involved in technical conceptual schemes’ (Giddens 1976, p. 79). Natural scientists, he believes, do not have the same task to face. They merely construct a ‘theoretical metalanguage, a network in which the meaning of scientific concepts is tied-in to the meaning of other terms’. That is all they have to worry about. They are faced with a ‘single level of hermeneutic problems’. Social scientists are not so lucky. They have two interpretative levels to face. They must contend with a double hermeneutic. ‘There is a two-way connection between the language of social science and ordinary language’, writes Giddens (1979, p. 12). ‘The former cannot ignore the categories used by laymen in the practical organization of social life.’

Natural science, as Giddens sees it, can do what social science cannot do. It is able to ignore the categories used by people in everyday life and avoid or minimise ordinary language, using its own scientific metalanguage instead. The natural scientist comes to the task of studying nature with something of a tabula rasa.

Blaikie (1993, p. 36) warmly espouses these views of Giddens. He says that the natural scientist studies nature ‘as it were, from the outside’. The scientist then has ‘to invent concepts and theories to describe and explain’. Contrasting with this, in Blaikie’s view, is the study of social phenomena. Here we are talking about ‘a social world which people have constructed and which they reproduce through their continuing activities’ and which they are ‘constandy involved in interpreting’. ‘They develop meanings for their activities together’, concludes Blaikie. ‘In short, the social world is already interpreted before the social scientist arrives.’

How sustainable is this understanding of things?

Our discussion to this point suggests that our knowledge of the natural world is as socially constructed as our knowledge of the social world. The world of meaning into which we are bom is a world of trees as much as it is a world of kinship, law, finance or nationalism. Understanding of trees is not something we come to individually ‘in the course of our practical life’. As we have already considered, we are taught about trees. We learn that trees are trees and we learn what trees should mean to us. In infancy and childhood we learn the meaning of trees from the culture in which we are reared. Trees are given a name for us and, along with the name, all kinds of understandings and associations. They are a source of livelihood if the setting for our childhood is a logging town. They constitute a focal point of lively aesthetic pleasure if we grow up within an artists’ colony. They are the subject of deep reverence, fear perhaps, if we come to adulthood within an animist community. They may have very litde meaning at all if we come from a slum neighbourhood in which there are no trees.

So the natural scientist does not come to the study of trees with a clean slate. To be sure, scientists have to lay aside much of the baggage they bring with them so as to study trees in a ‘scientific’ manner. They come to view trees, or whatever other natural phenomena they happen to be studying, within a particular horizon. But their starting point, inevitably, is the everyday understanding abroad in their culture. Blaikie talks of scientists inventing concepts and theories to understand and explain natural phenomena. In fact, they bring many of the concepts and much of the theory with them to the task. The so-called theoretical metalanguage is not a language existing in itself, distinct from the language spoken in the streets. It is ordinary language adapted to serve a specific purpose. What Blaikie says of the social world is true of the natural world too: people develop meanings together and it is already interpreted before the scientist arrives.

The social world and the natural world are not to be seen, then, as distinct worlds existing side by side. They are one human world. We are bom, each of us, into an already interpreted world and it is at once natural and social.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.