Summary
Contents
How do we understand health in relation to society? What role does culture play in shaping our experiences of, and orientation to, health and illness? How do we understand medicine and medical treatment within a sociological framework?
Social Constructionism
Social Constructionism
The basic premise of social constructionism is that reality is a product of definitional practices and the task of sociology is to explain the social processes involved in the production of knowledge pertaining to, or which constitutes, this reality.
In their book The Social Construction of Reality (1967), Berger and Luckmann attempt to bring together the two key strands of classical sociology: the first, which emphasizes the objective structures of society and their influence in shaping human action (constraining individual action), and the second, which emphasizes the role of human agency in constructing the social world through (inter)subjective meanings. Berger and Luckmann are concerned with everyday knowledge, as distinct from expert knowledge; that is, the social stock of knowledge that constitutes the background ...