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An Introduction to Social Constructionism
Introduction to Social Constructionism is a readable and critical account of social constructionism for students new to the field. Focusing on the challenge to psychology that social constructionism poses, Viven Burr examines the notion of 'personality' to illustrate the rejection of essentialism by social constructionists. This questions psychology's traditional understanding of the person. She then shows how the study of language can be used as a focus for our understanding of human behaviour and experience. This is continued by examining 'discourses' and their role in constructing social phenomena, and the relationship between discourse and power. However, the problems associated with these analyses are also clearly outlined.Many people believe that one of the aims of social science should be to bring about social change. Viven Burr analyses what possibilities there might be for change in social constructionist accounts. She also addresses what social constructionism means in practice to research in the social sciences, and includes some guidelines on undertaking discourse analysis.Introduction to Social Constructionism is an invaluable and clear guide for all perplexed students who want to begin to understand this difficult area.
208 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 11, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 27, 2023
"The concept of the interpretative repertoire is similar in some ways to that of the Foucauldian notion of discourse. It points to how our ways of speaking about the world are inseparable from our ways of understanding it. As we become adept as speakers in our native language, we inevitably become enculturated into our society’s ways of seeing."
"Berger and Luckmann saw the relationship between individual and society as operating in both directions: human beings continually construct the social world, which then becomes a reality to which they must respond. So that although human beings construct the social world they cannot construct it in any way they choose. At birth they enter a world already constructed by their predecessors and this world assumes the status of an objective reality for them and for later generations."
"If our knowledge of the world, our common ways of understanding it, is not derived from the nature of the world as it really is, where does it come from? The social constructionist answer is that people construct it between them. It is through the daily interactions between people in the course of social life that our versions of knowledge become fabricated. Therefore social interaction of all kinds, especially language, is of great interest to social constructionists. The goings-on between people in the course of their everyday lives are seen as the practices during which our shared versions of knowledge are constructed. For example, what we understand as dyslexia is a phenomenon that has come into being through the exchanges between those who have difficulties with reading and writing, their families and friends, and others who may teach them or offer them diagnostic tests. Therefore what we regard as truth, which of course varies historically and cross-culturally, may be thought of as our current accepted ways of understanding the world. These are a product not of objective observation of the world, but of the social processes and interactions in which people are constantly engaged with each other."
"Social constructionism therefore opposes the essentialism of mainstream psychology. Essentialism is seen as trapping people inside personalities and identities that are restrictive and pathological, rendering psychology an even more oppressive practice. For example, if someone is described as a manic depressive and this is seen as an abiding feature of their personality, they not only face a future in which change appears unlikely but may also become subject to invasive psychiatric procedures. Essentialism also creates a tendency for psychologists to seek dispositional explanations for human behaviour, and to look for causes of behaviour in psychological states and structures rather than in social processes."
"If all forms of knowledge are historically and culturally specific, this must include the knowledge generated by the social sciences. The theories and explanations of psychology thus become time- and culture-bound and cannot be taken as final descriptions of human nature. There are numerous emotional states recognised and experienced by people in non-western cultures that just do not translate into western labels (Stearns, 1995). For example, for the Japanese, "amae" refers to a feeling of ‘sweet dependence’ on another person. The disciplines of psychology and social psychology can therefore no longer be about discovering the true nature of people and social life.
They must instead turn their attention to a historical study of the emergence of current forms of psychological and social life, and to the social practices by which they are created."
"Social constructionism argues that our ways of understanding the world do not come from objective reality but from other people, both past and present. We are born into a world where the conceptual frameworks and categories used by the people in our culture already exist. We do not each conveniently happen to find existing categories of thought appropriate for the expression of our experiences. For example, if I say that I prefer to wear clothes that are fashionable rather than out-dated, it is the concept of fashion that provides the basis for my experienced preference. Concepts and categories are acquired by each person as they develop the use of language and are thus reproduced every day by everyone who shares a culture and a language. This means that the way a person thinks, the very categories and concepts that provide a framework of meaning for them, are provided by the language that they use. Language therefore is a necessary pre-condition for thought."
"In sociology, the search for rules and structure was exemplified by Marx, who explained social phenomena in terms of society’s underlying economic structure, and psychologists such as Freud and Piaget each postulated the existence of underlying psychic structures to account for psychological phenomena. In each case the hidden structure or rule is seen as the deeper reality underlying the surface features of the world, so that the truth about the world could be revealed by analysing these underlying structures. Theories in the social sciences and humanities that postulate such structures are known as ‘structuralist’, and the later rejection of the notion of rules and structures underlying forms in the real world is thus known as ‘poststructuralism’, the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststructuralism’ being sometimes used interchangeably. The common feature of all these theories is that they constitute what are often called ‘metanarratives’ or grand theories. They offered a way of understanding the entire social world in terms of one all-embracing
principle (for Marx it was class relations). Recommendations for social change were therefore based upon this principle – in the case of Marxism, revolution by the working class."
"Fundamental to symbolic interactionism is the view that people construct their own and others’ identities through their everyday encounters with each other in social interaction."
"Berger and Luckmann’s account of social life argues that human beings together create and then sustain all social phenomena through social practices. Berger and Luckmann show how the world can be socially constructed by the social practices of people but at the same time experienced by them as if the nature of their world is pre-given and fixed."
"...narrative psychology argues that we tell each other and ourselves stories that powerfully shape our possibilities."
"Just as we take for granted the idea that our personality is stable, so do we also tend not to question the notion that each person has a unified, coherent personality, a self which is made up of elements that are consistent with each other. Psychologists themselves have found it necessary to come up with hypothetical structures and processes precisely because our experience of ourselves and of each other is just the opposite of coherent. We talk of being ‘in conflict’: we say that our thoughts lead us in one direction and our feelings in another, we say that our heart rules our head, or that we have acted out of character."
"Second, we can question the idea that our personality is inside us. Think of some of the personality-type words that are used to describe people, for example: friendly, caring, shy, self-conscious, charming, bad-tempered, thoughtless. Most ‘personality’ words would completely lose their meaning if the person described were living alone on a desert island. Without the presence of other people, i.e. a social environment, can a person be said to be friendly, shy or caring? The point is that we use these words as if they referred to entities existing within the person they describe, but once the person is removed from their relations with others the words become meaningless. They refer to our behaviour towards other people. The friendliness, shyness or caring exists not inside people, but in the relations between them. Of course you could reply that, even on the desert island, a person can still carry with them the predisposition to be friendly, shy, etc. We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of personality traits, and similarly we cannot demonstrate the truth of a social constructionist view simply by an appeal to the evidence. In the end our task may be to decide which view offers us the best way of understanding ourselves and others and thus of guiding our research and action."
"The social constructionist view of personality is that it is a concept that we use in our everyday lives in order to try to make sense of the things that other people and ourselves do. Personality can be seen as a theory for explaining human behaviour and for trying to anticipate our part in social interactions with others that is held very widely in our society. We could say that in our daily lives we act as if there were such a thing as personality, and most of the time we get by reasonably well by doing so. But it is a big leap from this to saying that personality really exists in the sense of traits inhabiting our mental structures, or being written into our genetic material."
“…meaning-making is something that is characteristically human. Our ability to invest our actions with meaning is what marks us out from other animals.”
"As with personality and illness, there is considerable diversity across people and across time in sexual desire and sexual practice. In the face of this we must distrust essentialist accounts of sexuality. The role of meaning in our sexual lives is paramount, and meaning is made by human beings together; it is social. Meaning, unlike biological material, is fluid, volatile and always open to change through this medium of social interaction. Furthermore, sexuality is an area of our lives in which the meanings we have created are often imbued with value and come with prescriptions for action. They are moral meanings; they tell us how we ought to feel and behave. And finally, these moral meanings are not accidental. They make sense within the social and economic structure of the society we live in. To the extent that this society is one divided by numerous power inequalities, the meanings that are widely endorsed play a role in maintaining these power relations."
"Our common sense view of the relationship between language and the person sees the one as a means of expressing the other. When I talk about ‘myself’, my personality or some aspect of my experience like heath or sexuality, it is assumed that this self, personality or experience pre-dates and exists independently of the words used to describe it. We think of language as a bag of labels which we can choose from in trying to describe our internal states such as thoughts and feelings. The nature of the person and their internal states seem to us to come first, and the job of language is to find a way of expressing these things to other people. In this way of thinking, people and the language they use are certainly closely bound up with each other; people use language to give expression to things that already exist in themselves or in the world, but the two are essentially independent things."
"He is also saying that the concepts themselves are arbitrary divisions and categorisations of our experience. We have divided up our world into things we have called ‘dogs’, ‘pigs’, ‘marriage’, ‘intelligence’ and so on, and these divisions are arbitrary. It is quite possible that in some cultures separate concepts for ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ do not exist. In English-speaking cultures we have the words ‘sheep’ and ‘mutton’, and they refer to different concepts, but in French there is only one word,
‘mouton’. Whatever differences we see between the concepts ‘sheep’ and ‘mutton’ as English-speakers, they simply do not exist for the French. So when Saussure talks of the arbitrary linking of signifiers to signifieds, he is saying that, with the aid of language, we have divided up our world into arbitrary categories."
"...language provides the basis for all our thought. It provides us with a system of categories for dividing up our experience and giving it meaning, so that our very selves become the products of language. Language produces and constructs our experience of each other and ourselves. Structuralist writers have shown the arbitrariness of the way human experience is carved up by language, that it could always have been different. There is nothing about the nature of the world or human beings that leads necessarily to the conceptual categories present in any language."
"From this perspective, the nineteenth-century burgeoning of the sexology literature is seen not so much as an increase in knowledge about sexuality as a proliferation of classifications and divisions with which the population could be categorised and controlled. And it wasn’t only in the area of sexuality that such a move towards surveillance and normalisation was taking place. Psychiatry developed the category of sane/insane, later extending this to innumerable varieties of abnormality (psychosis, neurosis, manic depression, schizophrenia, etc.)."
"Looked at against this background, the position of psychology itself becomes highly dubious. In this light, the practice of psychology becomes seen not as a liberatory project in which knowledge discovered about human beings is used to improve their lives, but one more cog in the machine of social control. In fact the term ‘psy-complex’ (e.g. Ingleby, 1985; Parker, 2011; Rose, 1985) has been coined to refer to all the practices and professions with a ‘psy’ prefix, such as psychology,
psychotherapy and psychiatry, which play a central role in the surveillance and regulation of people in contemporary society. The practice of surveillance requires information about people. This
information can then be used to establish norms for healthy or morally acceptable behaviour, against which any person can be assessed or assess themselves. The history of psychology is littered with such products: intelligence tests, personality inventories, tests of masculinity, femininity and androgyny, child development tests, measurements of attitudes and beliefs and so on. All this information about ourselves constitutes, from a Foucauldian perspective, the production of knowledges which can be used to control people while making it appear as though it is in their own interests, and with the stamp of ‘science’ to give such knowledges authority. Rose (1990) undertook a Foucauldian analysis of the rise of psychology as a social science, demonstrating the way that psychology is implicated in modern forms of disciplinary power, and Parker (Parker, 1998b; Parker et al., 1995) developed a critical deconstruction of psychotherapy and psycho - pathology."
"Liebrucks (2001) adopts a position that maintains a transcendent reality while allowing for different perspectives on that reality. He argues that, in order for there to be discrepancies in the accounts of an object or phenomenon offered by different people occupying different cultural and historical positions, we must presuppose that these people are in fact looking at the same thing: ‘after all, their descriptions could not seem discrepant were they not supposed to be descriptions
of the same matter’. Liebrucks thus argues that the world is not socially constituted at a different place depending upon time and place, but that each of us sees different aspects of the same world; we each look at it from a different perspective."
"There seems no reason in principle why the categories of ‘gold’ and ‘other metals’ should be beyond such human construction, and therefore no reason why we should not also include human ��natural kinds’ such as sex within the realm of human constructions. This does not deny the
materiality of the world, but it is to deny that there are no conditions under which it could (or should) be carved up differently."
‘individuals are constrained by available discourses because discursive positions preexist the individual whose sense of ‘self’ (subjectivity) and range of experience are circumscribed by available discourses’
"Positions in discourse are seen as providing us with the content of our subjectivity. Once we take up a position within a discourse (and some of these positions can entail a long-term occupation by the person, like gender or fatherhood) we then inevitably come to experience the world and ourselves from the vantage point of that perspective."
"Social constructionism paints a picture of the person as multiple, fragmented and incoherent. We have a multiplicity of different selves, each called forth or conjured by our immersion in discourse and in the processes of social interaction. But our subjective experience is often the opposite; we still feel that there is coherence to the person we are, both historically and across the different areas of our lives, that gives us this sense of self. This needs some explanation. One possibility is
that our feelings of consistency and continuity in time are provided by our memory. Memory allows us to look back on our behaviours and experiences, to select those that seem to ‘hang together’ in some narrative framework, literally the story of your life, and to look for patterns, repetitions and so on that provide us with the impression of continuity and coherence. The application of the concept of narrative in understanding the self has attracted much attention from psychologists and others in recent decades, and has been attractive to some social constructionists because of the opportunity it offers to sketch a theory of the self that is not essentialist and that locates this self in the social domain. Indeed, narrative psychology itself has been influenced by social constructionist thinking."
"One of the classic contributions has been that of Sarbin (1986). Sarbin argues that human beings impose a structure on their experience, and that this structure is present both in our accounts of ourselves and our experience that we share with others, and in how we represent those things to ourselves. This structure is a narrative structure; we organise our experience in terms of stories. Just as Harré sees the structuring of our experience and our self-understandings to be given by the internal logic or grammar of our language, Sarbin suggests that this structuring takes a particular form, the narrative form, and that this is ubiquitous throughout human cultures. He sees it as fundamental to what it means to be human."
"Berger and Luckmann saw the relationship between individual and society as operating in both directions: human beings continually construct the social world, which then becomes a reality to which they must respond. So that although human beings construct the social world they cannot construct it in any way they choose. At birth they enter a world already constructed by their predecessors and this world assumes the status of an objective reality for them and for later generations."
"If our knowledge of the world, our common ways of understanding it, is not derived from the nature of the world as it really is, where does it come from? The social constructionist answer is that people construct it between them. It is through the daily interactions between people in the course of social life that our versions of knowledge become fabricated. Therefore social interaction of all kinds, especially language, is of great interest to social constructionists. The goings-on between people in the course of their everyday lives are seen as the practices during which our shared versions of knowledge are constructed. For example, what we understand as dyslexia is a phenomenon that has come into being through the exchanges between those who have difficulties with reading and writing, their families and friends, and others who may teach them or offer them diagnostic tests. Therefore what we regard as truth, which of course varies historically and cross-culturally, may be thought of as our current accepted ways of understanding the world. These are a product not of objective observation of the world, but of the social processes and interactions in which people are constantly engaged with each other."
"Social constructionism therefore opposes the essentialism of mainstream psychology. Essentialism is seen as trapping people inside personalities and identities that are restrictive and pathological, rendering psychology an even more oppressive practice. For example, if someone is described as a manic depressive and this is seen as an abiding feature of their personality, they not only face a future in which change appears unlikely but may also become subject to invasive psychiatric procedures. Essentialism also creates a tendency for psychologists to seek dispositional explanations for human behaviour, and to look for causes of behaviour in psychological states and structures rather than in social processes."
"If all forms of knowledge are historically and culturally specific, this must include the knowledge generated by the social sciences. The theories and explanations of psychology thus become time- and culture-bound and cannot be taken as final descriptions of human nature. There are numerous emotional states recognised and experienced by people in non-western cultures that just do not translate into western labels (Stearns, 1995). For example, for the Japanese, "amae" refers to a feeling of ‘sweet dependence’ on another person. The disciplines of psychology and social psychology can therefore no longer be about discovering the true nature of people and social life.
They must instead turn their attention to a historical study of the emergence of current forms of psychological and social life, and to the social practices by which they are created."
"Social constructionism argues that our ways of understanding the world do not come from objective reality but from other people, both past and present. We are born into a world where the conceptual frameworks and categories used by the people in our culture already exist. We do not each conveniently happen to find existing categories of thought appropriate for the expression of our experiences. For example, if I say that I prefer to wear clothes that are fashionable rather than out-dated, it is the concept of fashion that provides the basis for my experienced preference. Concepts and categories are acquired by each person as they develop the use of language and are thus reproduced every day by everyone who shares a culture and a language. This means that the way a person thinks, the very categories and concepts that provide a framework of meaning for them, are provided by the language that they use. Language therefore is a necessary pre-condition for thought."
"In sociology, the search for rules and structure was exemplified by Marx, who explained social phenomena in terms of society’s underlying economic structure, and psychologists such as Freud and Piaget each postulated the existence of underlying psychic structures to account for psychological phenomena. In each case the hidden structure or rule is seen as the deeper reality underlying the surface features of the world, so that the truth about the world could be revealed by analysing these underlying structures. Theories in the social sciences and humanities that postulate such structures are known as ‘structuralist’, and the later rejection of the notion of rules and structures underlying forms in the real world is thus known as ‘poststructuralism’, the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘poststructuralism’ being sometimes used interchangeably. The common feature of all these theories is that they constitute what are often called ‘metanarratives’ or grand theories. They offered a way of understanding the entire social world in terms of one all-embracing
principle (for Marx it was class relations). Recommendations for social change were therefore based upon this principle – in the case of Marxism, revolution by the working class."
"Fundamental to symbolic interactionism is the view that people construct their own and others’ identities through their everyday encounters with each other in social interaction."
"Berger and Luckmann’s account of social life argues that human beings together create and then sustain all social phenomena through social practices. Berger and Luckmann show how the world can be socially constructed by the social practices of people but at the same time experienced by them as if the nature of their world is pre-given and fixed."
"...narrative psychology argues that we tell each other and ourselves stories that powerfully shape our possibilities."
"Just as we take for granted the idea that our personality is stable, so do we also tend not to question the notion that each person has a unified, coherent personality, a self which is made up of elements that are consistent with each other. Psychologists themselves have found it necessary to come up with hypothetical structures and processes precisely because our experience of ourselves and of each other is just the opposite of coherent. We talk of being ‘in conflict’: we say that our thoughts lead us in one direction and our feelings in another, we say that our heart rules our head, or that we have acted out of character."
"Second, we can question the idea that our personality is inside us. Think of some of the personality-type words that are used to describe people, for example: friendly, caring, shy, self-conscious, charming, bad-tempered, thoughtless. Most ‘personality’ words would completely lose their meaning if the person described were living alone on a desert island. Without the presence of other people, i.e. a social environment, can a person be said to be friendly, shy or caring? The point is that we use these words as if they referred to entities existing within the person they describe, but once the person is removed from their relations with others the words become meaningless. They refer to our behaviour towards other people. The friendliness, shyness or caring exists not inside people, but in the relations between them. Of course you could reply that, even on the desert island, a person can still carry with them the predisposition to be friendly, shy, etc. We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of personality traits, and similarly we cannot demonstrate the truth of a social constructionist view simply by an appeal to the evidence. In the end our task may be to decide which view offers us the best way of understanding ourselves and others and thus of guiding our research and action."
"The social constructionist view of personality is that it is a concept that we use in our everyday lives in order to try to make sense of the things that other people and ourselves do. Personality can be seen as a theory for explaining human behaviour and for trying to anticipate our part in social interactions with others that is held very widely in our society. We could say that in our daily lives we act as if there were such a thing as personality, and most of the time we get by reasonably well by doing so. But it is a big leap from this to saying that personality really exists in the sense of traits inhabiting our mental structures, or being written into our genetic material."
“…meaning-making is something that is characteristically human. Our ability to invest our actions with meaning is what marks us out from other animals.”
"As with personality and illness, there is considerable diversity across people and across time in sexual desire and sexual practice. In the face of this we must distrust essentialist accounts of sexuality. The role of meaning in our sexual lives is paramount, and meaning is made by human beings together; it is social. Meaning, unlike biological material, is fluid, volatile and always open to change through this medium of social interaction. Furthermore, sexuality is an area of our lives in which the meanings we have created are often imbued with value and come with prescriptions for action. They are moral meanings; they tell us how we ought to feel and behave. And finally, these moral meanings are not accidental. They make sense within the social and economic structure of the society we live in. To the extent that this society is one divided by numerous power inequalities, the meanings that are widely endorsed play a role in maintaining these power relations."
"Our common sense view of the relationship between language and the person sees the one as a means of expressing the other. When I talk about ‘myself’, my personality or some aspect of my experience like heath or sexuality, it is assumed that this self, personality or experience pre-dates and exists independently of the words used to describe it. We think of language as a bag of labels which we can choose from in trying to describe our internal states such as thoughts and feelings. The nature of the person and their internal states seem to us to come first, and the job of language is to find a way of expressing these things to other people. In this way of thinking, people and the language they use are certainly closely bound up with each other; people use language to give expression to things that already exist in themselves or in the world, but the two are essentially independent things."
"He is also saying that the concepts themselves are arbitrary divisions and categorisations of our experience. We have divided up our world into things we have called ‘dogs’, ‘pigs’, ‘marriage’, ‘intelligence’ and so on, and these divisions are arbitrary. It is quite possible that in some cultures separate concepts for ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ do not exist. In English-speaking cultures we have the words ‘sheep’ and ‘mutton’, and they refer to different concepts, but in French there is only one word,
‘mouton’. Whatever differences we see between the concepts ‘sheep’ and ‘mutton’ as English-speakers, they simply do not exist for the French. So when Saussure talks of the arbitrary linking of signifiers to signifieds, he is saying that, with the aid of language, we have divided up our world into arbitrary categories."
"...language provides the basis for all our thought. It provides us with a system of categories for dividing up our experience and giving it meaning, so that our very selves become the products of language. Language produces and constructs our experience of each other and ourselves. Structuralist writers have shown the arbitrariness of the way human experience is carved up by language, that it could always have been different. There is nothing about the nature of the world or human beings that leads necessarily to the conceptual categories present in any language."
"From this perspective, the nineteenth-century burgeoning of the sexology literature is seen not so much as an increase in knowledge about sexuality as a proliferation of classifications and divisions with which the population could be categorised and controlled. And it wasn’t only in the area of sexuality that such a move towards surveillance and normalisation was taking place. Psychiatry developed the category of sane/insane, later extending this to innumerable varieties of abnormality (psychosis, neurosis, manic depression, schizophrenia, etc.)."
"Looked at against this background, the position of psychology itself becomes highly dubious. In this light, the practice of psychology becomes seen not as a liberatory project in which knowledge discovered about human beings is used to improve their lives, but one more cog in the machine of social control. In fact the term ‘psy-complex’ (e.g. Ingleby, 1985; Parker, 2011; Rose, 1985) has been coined to refer to all the practices and professions with a ‘psy’ prefix, such as psychology,
psychotherapy and psychiatry, which play a central role in the surveillance and regulation of people in contemporary society. The practice of surveillance requires information about people. This
information can then be used to establish norms for healthy or morally acceptable behaviour, against which any person can be assessed or assess themselves. The history of psychology is littered with such products: intelligence tests, personality inventories, tests of masculinity, femininity and androgyny, child development tests, measurements of attitudes and beliefs and so on. All this information about ourselves constitutes, from a Foucauldian perspective, the production of knowledges which can be used to control people while making it appear as though it is in their own interests, and with the stamp of ‘science’ to give such knowledges authority. Rose (1990) undertook a Foucauldian analysis of the rise of psychology as a social science, demonstrating the way that psychology is implicated in modern forms of disciplinary power, and Parker (Parker, 1998b; Parker et al., 1995) developed a critical deconstruction of psychotherapy and psycho - pathology."
"Liebrucks (2001) adopts a position that maintains a transcendent reality while allowing for different perspectives on that reality. He argues that, in order for there to be discrepancies in the accounts of an object or phenomenon offered by different people occupying different cultural and historical positions, we must presuppose that these people are in fact looking at the same thing: ‘after all, their descriptions could not seem discrepant were they not supposed to be descriptions
of the same matter’. Liebrucks thus argues that the world is not socially constituted at a different place depending upon time and place, but that each of us sees different aspects of the same world; we each look at it from a different perspective."
"There seems no reason in principle why the categories of ‘gold’ and ‘other metals’ should be beyond such human construction, and therefore no reason why we should not also include human ��natural kinds’ such as sex within the realm of human constructions. This does not deny the
materiality of the world, but it is to deny that there are no conditions under which it could (or should) be carved up differently."
‘individuals are constrained by available discourses because discursive positions preexist the individual whose sense of ‘self’ (subjectivity) and range of experience are circumscribed by available discourses’
"Positions in discourse are seen as providing us with the content of our subjectivity. Once we take up a position within a discourse (and some of these positions can entail a long-term occupation by the person, like gender or fatherhood) we then inevitably come to experience the world and ourselves from the vantage point of that perspective."
"Social constructionism paints a picture of the person as multiple, fragmented and incoherent. We have a multiplicity of different selves, each called forth or conjured by our immersion in discourse and in the processes of social interaction. But our subjective experience is often the opposite; we still feel that there is coherence to the person we are, both historically and across the different areas of our lives, that gives us this sense of self. This needs some explanation. One possibility is
that our feelings of consistency and continuity in time are provided by our memory. Memory allows us to look back on our behaviours and experiences, to select those that seem to ‘hang together’ in some narrative framework, literally the story of your life, and to look for patterns, repetitions and so on that provide us with the impression of continuity and coherence. The application of the concept of narrative in understanding the self has attracted much attention from psychologists and others in recent decades, and has been attractive to some social constructionists because of the opportunity it offers to sketch a theory of the self that is not essentialist and that locates this self in the social domain. Indeed, narrative psychology itself has been influenced by social constructionist thinking."
"One of the classic contributions has been that of Sarbin (1986). Sarbin argues that human beings impose a structure on their experience, and that this structure is present both in our accounts of ourselves and our experience that we share with others, and in how we represent those things to ourselves. This structure is a narrative structure; we organise our experience in terms of stories. Just as Harré sees the structuring of our experience and our self-understandings to be given by the internal logic or grammar of our language, Sarbin suggests that this structuring takes a particular form, the narrative form, and that this is ubiquitous throughout human cultures. He sees it as fundamental to what it means to be human."
November 1, 2018
This was a little textbook-wonky at times but the subject is fascinating; I’ve if the main tenants is that we (individuals, societies) create our reality through the language we use. This feels especially relevant right now.
Read
June 17, 2019Good mental exercise for the uninitiated.
July 12, 2016
I hope this doesn't sound too grandiose, but this book really changed how I think/hope to pursue eventual research. It is the perfect introduction to social construction--which before reading this book felt like a huge, ambiguous and unsurmountable topic. It's the perfect introduction for someone who wants to broaden their understanding of critical theory, with a focus on discourse and discourse analysis. Burr does a very good job of explaining how elements like essentialism and realism have come to form their supposed claims and truths, and how a social-constructionist would counter such claims. There is a great deal of (at times dense) material, but overall it offers a clear and accessible overview of the theories and applications of both post-structuralist, and post-modern arguments; and as a bonus the last chapter gives a great example of discourse analysis in practice.
October 13, 2015
Wow, this book is amazing! I recommend it to all humanities and social science scholars, and I wish I had read it earlier in my doctoral program. It really helped me to better understand social constructionism theories and poststructural theories, along with discourse analysis. Burr breaks down important theories of Foucault, Derrida, and other key scholars in a way that is accessible and easy to understand. If you're interested in doing humanities and social science research, pick it up and read it today! It's worth it.
December 5, 2009
Burr clearly articulates the concepts of social constructionism to an academic audience while also writing in a style accessable to practitioners and professionals. This book is both interesting and challenging.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews