Constructionism Theory

In a premodern societal setting, values and norms are concrete and fundamental, even if their truths are not necessarily taken for granted. The values are institutionally fixed and, consequently, not open to reflection and relativization. In the modern world, society is institutionally pluralistic, humanly individualistic, and culturally generalized. This allows for a constructionist view of society. Although constructionism is rooted in continental European sociology, it is certainly not a typical European perspective. It was John Dewey who in 1916 argued that society is not only maintained by communication, but also constituted by it. E. M. Rogers shows in his History of Communication Study (1994) how the founding father of Social Science in Chicago, Small, developed his faculty into the “Chicago School,” which became famous for its constructionist approach to social science. Although strongly influenced by German thinking, they did not simply copy it. Whereas continental European scholars focused on fundamental thinking and philosophical and rhetorical theory building, U.S. scholars focused on the empirical study of society and thereby were able to develop empirical theories of social life, including the role of communication in it. Nevertheless, the fundamental critical thinking of European scholars at that time was very influential for sociology and communication studies in the United States (see Rogers, 1994). It enabled the development of what in 1937 Herbert Blumer called “symbolic interaction” (Ritzer, 2000) and is now known as constructionism (see Bentele & Rühl, 1993). But it has not yet significantly influenced theories of public relations or communication management.

The start of sociology can be located in the Enlightenment period, where reasoning was seen as a fundamental human activity for the first time. Traditional authority became unacceptable (i.e., [Page 185]“irrational, that is, contrary to human nature and inhibitive of human growth and development,” Ritzer, 2000, p. 12). Or, as Klaus Krippendorff pointed out, “Social theories must be livable” (1994, p. 102). The roots of sociology are critical to an unbalanced social structure and authority. Sociology has been based on the idea that human beings create society, and that society in turn creates its institutions, and thereby the reality for the human beings, in a dynamic process. That is where the roots of symbolic interactionism are located, and that is the basis for constructionism.

The idea that reality is not “something out there,” but that human beings construct reality themselves was popularized by one of the most frequently cited works in social sciences, The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. For them reality is a quality pertaining to phenomena we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition: we cannot wish them away. Knowledge is the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics. The sociology of knowledge is therefore concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality. Social structure can be seen as an essential element of the reality of everyday life.

Languages, as the most important system of vocal signs, build up semantic fields or zones of meaning that are linguistically circumscribed. Although it is possible to say that man has a nature, it is more significant to say that man constructs his own nature, or simply, that man produces himself. This self-production is always, and of necessity, a social enterprise, as Berger and Luckmann argue. Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its sociocultural and psychological formations. It may be that a given social order precedes any individual organism's development. But social order is still a human product, or, more precisely, an ongoing human production. By playing roles, the individual participates in a social world. By internalizing these roles, the same world becomes subjectively real to him. Roles represent institutional order. Some of these, however, symbolically represent that order in its totality more than others do. Such roles are of great strategic importance in a society, since they represent not only this or that institution, but the integration of all institutions in a meaningful world. These are the roles that have a special relationship to the legitimating apparatus of society. Historically these roles have most commonly been located in political and religious institutions. This is no longer the case, however; it is said that nongovernmental organizations and corporations now have more power than politics and religion. According to Berger and Luckmann, legitimation (the term is from Weber) as a process is best described as a “second-order” (1966, p. 110) objectification of meaning. Its function is to make objectively available and subjectively plausible the “first-order” (1966, p. 110) objectifications that have been institutionalized. It embodies the institutional order by ascribing cognitive validity to its objectified meanings and justifies them. But in the modern world there is always a rivalry between definitions of reality. Social structure can predict its outcome. That is why, in our view, communication management must be studied from a public point of view.

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