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Social Construction of Reality

Social construction theory addresses the processes by which people jointly construct their understandings of the world. Advocates assume that meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately within each individual or in the world of things, making social interaction the loom upon which the social fabric is woven. A variety of terms has been used to identify this line of thought (social construction of reality, social constructionism, social construetionist, social constructivism, social constructivist), but the current term of choice is simply social construction, which can refer both to the process and to the movement of scholars who use this approach. Recently, several related terms have gained popularity, including coconstruction or joint construction (used to emphasize people working together), constitutive (used as a synonym, as in the constitutive approach), and the shortened version construction.

The term social construction was introduced in Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's book The Social Construction of Reality, but it has roots in American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism. Berger and Luckmann combine certain assumptions of sociology and philosophy, and the theory has since been taken up by other disciplines as well, including particularly education, psychology, and communication. Berger and Luckmann wanted to understand the construction of knowledge, not the communication process behind it, so many of their points are actually irrelevant to what is studied today by communication scholars under the phrase social construction.

In the communication field, two elements are most relevant: (a) the central assumption that people make sense of experience by constructing a model of the social world and how it works and (b) the emphasis on language as the most important system through which reality is constructed. The resulting implication is that conversation serves as a critical tool for reality maintenance. This entry is organized around the main parts of the social construction of reality, the special role of language, and social construction as a theory.

Three Parts

The Social

One of the implications of social construction theory is the acknowledgment that social reality requires interaction between people. Construction is social in the sense of requiring collaborative rather than individual effort. Whatever exists in the social world does so as a result of the words and/or actions of people talking and interacting together. Each culture or social group develops its own understandings of the world, creating its own meanings for behavior and how this is to be understood. People, acting together, develop traditions over time, and then begin to take them for granted. Status is a typical example: The fact that we treat presidents or CEOs differently than janitors or waiters has little to do with physically obvious differences, relying instead on socially granted characteristics. Margaret Mead demonstrated in the 1930s that gender roles were not linked to sexual characteristics: What one culture expects of men, another expects of women. The different ways groups create their own meanings underscores the significance of the context relevant to interpretation of a particular social construction. People create the meanings for behavior that make sense within their own group; the same behavior has different meanings to members of other groups. This applies equally to understanding the significance and implications of a word, an action, an object, or a media product.

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