Social Worlds

Combining notions of culture, social structure, and collective action, social worlds are collections of actors with shared understandings and shared institutionalized arrangements that convene, communicate, and coordinate behaviors on the basis of some shared interest. The conceptualization originally stems from work by Tamotsu Shibutani, Anselm Strauss, and Howard Becker, with roots traceable to John Dewey.

Social worlds is a symbolic interactionist concept that distinguishes social actors as they negotiate interactions with one another. Actors negotiate conflict when their perspectives are different, since they represent different social worlds within the same arena. When their perspectives are shared, the actors develop and maintain a social world as they communicate with one another and coordinate their behaviors in regard to the phenomenon of interest. Whether it is a baseball game, a soap opera, an advertising campaign, or a medical treatment program, a social world emerges as those with shared perspectives on the phenomenon interact with one another about that phenomenon. In contrast, as those with different perspectives experience conflict over it, different social worlds within a single arena can be identified.

As an interactionist concept, social worlds can be applied at micro-, meso-, or macro-levels of interaction. However, most research using the social worlds concept has been either at the micro-level, such as research on “serious leisure”—including studies on role-playing computer games, bridge playing, and bass tournament fishing—or at the meso-level in science and technology studies (STS). While the former body of research has tended to focus on how social worlds are developed and maintained, the latter STS research has tended to describe how conflicts between social worlds are negotiated at the organizational and institutional levels.

The social worlds analysis in STS is most attributable to Strauss, who thought of social worlds as the unit of interaction in society. The concept allows the analyst to account for any actor involved in a contested phenomenon. Actors [Page 769]can include those who are little more than observers—such as consumers, an electorate, or community members—who help form the context of the contest. As actors become increasingly involved in the contest and mobilize their resources, their social world becomes more important in determining the contest's outcome. In this way, social worlds analysis is able to account for the influence of social movements and a society's emergent awareness of social problems on how phenomena are defined and treated.

Indeed, researchers in STS using social worlds analysis see conflict as the generic social process they study; cooperation and collaboration typically have to be mandated and cannot be taken for granted. The model of scientists producing science and recruiting supporters of it on the basis of reason and evidence was first challenged by an interests model in the 1970s. That model has since been supplanted by a number of others, including that of social worlds analysis. Unlike other perspectives, social worlds analysis tends to include nonscientific actors in its models.

Social worlds analysis raises the issue of how social worlds are distinguished. To address this issue, Adele Clarke developed the concept of boundary objects: things about which there is disagreement among members of different social worlds interacting in the same arena. Debate over the meaning of those boundary objects can reveal the conflicting nature of the different perspectives delineating the social worlds. For example, religious texts, government documents, and organizational policies can all constitute boundary objects; they serve as referents for common identity and consensus at a general level but can also be interpreted specifically and quite differently at local levels. The emergent conflicts over the meaning of boundary objects can thus reveal the varied perspectives constituting the different social worlds of the parties involved. Using such concepts, social worlds analyses often uncover the conflict beneath what is supposedly harmonious. These analysts have, for example, found that seeming congruous collaborations brought together by funding opportunities for democratic and community-oriented appearances are often characterized by mistrust and misunderstandings.

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