Human Behavior in the Social Environment:
Social Constructionism
L. Daughtery, Ph.D., LICSW
Objectives
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Articulate some of the basic principles of social
constructionism
Understand application of social constructionism
concepts to social work practice
Social Work Knowledge Base
Social Work Knowledge Base
Social Work Knowledge Base
General Questions
What is the nature of man?
 What is the nature of the self?
 What is the nature of society?
 What is the relationship of self to society?
 What is the nature of reality?
 What is the nature of the study of man?
 What is the nature of knowledge?
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Social Work Knowledge Base
Robbins, Chatterjee, & Canda
Philosophy
Sociology
Phenomenology
Phenomenology of
everyday life
•Ethnomethodology
•Social
Constructionism
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
Psychology
Other Disciplines
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Clinical Social Work Practice
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Strengths perspective
Social constructionism
Constructivism
Narrative
Postmodern practice
Robbins, Chatterjee, & Canda
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An interconnection between consciousness, cognitive
process, the individual and larger social and cultural
structures at the individual and small group levels
Robbins, Chatterjee, & Canda
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People are interpretive beings who give meaning to their
experiences and lives. These meanings are not neutral and
have real effects on their lived experience.
The sociocultural context plays a large role in shaping our
common, everyday assumptions and behaviors.
People have the capacity to shape their own lives.
The helping situation is client-centered and involves
“growth” or the alleviation of “problems”
Literature Review
Literature Review
Question?
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What is social constructionism?
Robbins, Chatterjee, & Canda
Philosophy
Sociology
Phenomenology
Phenomenology of
everyday life
•Ethnomethodology
•Social
Constructionism
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
Psychology
Other Disciplines
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Sociology
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Sociological theory is neither unified nor a completed
project
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The topics and approaches of sociology are broadly
traceable to the work of three major, late-nineteenth
century figures, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile
Durkheim, only the last two of which regarded
themselves as sociologists, and only Durkheim exclusively
so.
Waters, M. (1994). Modern Sociological Theory
Sociology
Subjective
Objective
Individualistic
Constructionism
Human beings are regarded
as competent and
communicative agents who
actively create or construct
the social world.
Utilitarianism
Human beings are
regarded as calculating and
maximizing, always seeking
advantages at the expense
of others.
Holistic
Functionalism
Human beings are regarded
as religious and cultural
conformists who cannot
survive without social and
moral support.
Critical Structuralism
Human beings are regarded
as the victims of their
socioeconomic and
historical location which
manipulates and twists
them into distortions of
their true selves
Social Constructionism
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Simmel and Weber
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Human behavior is different from the behavior of natural
objects
Human beings are always agents in the active construction of
social reality—the way they act depends on the way in which
they understand or give meaning to their behavior
The job of sociological observers is to interpret the meanings
established by the participants
Social Constructionism
Simmel
Mead
Weber
Schutz
Social Constructionism
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Schutz read Weber from the perspective of the
philosophical tradition of phenomenology
Chatterjee et. al.
Philosophy
Sociology
Phenomenology
Phenomenology of
everyday life
•Ethnomethodology
•Social
Constructionism
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
Psychology
Other Disciplines
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Phenomenology
Husserl--We mistakenly came to believe the world of mathematical
objectified nature is the nature of reality. We should seek to understand
the general structures of meaning of our Lebenswelt and how they are
constituted. In order to do this we must bracket or suspend our
customary preconceptions about the world so we can discover the
structure of a phenomenon.
Phenomenology
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Phenomenology says the self as a conscious subject is
worthy of study as are the practical methods such as
language that we use to identify or display our “self.”
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Husserl thought we would discover that the Lebenswelt
and humanity itself is a “self-objectification” of a
“transcendental subjectivity.”
Phenomenology of Everyday Life
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Phenomenological sociology concentrates on the ways in
which actors interpret the social world by turning sensedata into typifications or mental pictures.
Phenomenology of Everyday Life
Schutz --- The real issue is the realm or area in which behavior takes place. He
identified four : umwelt our physiological and physical surroundings; mitwelt
the social world of other people; folgewelt the future and vorwelt the past.
Although he believed the social construction of reality takes place within the
umwelt, the mind could not be studied scientifically because people are
unpredictable thus his work focuses on the mitwelt because he believed that
scientific study of general types of subjective experience would help us
understand the general processes that people use in dealing with the world.
Phenomenology of Everyday Life
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His major work rejects the transcendental conclusion of
Husserl.
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Social life is based on the idea that one’s experiences are
not identical with those of others in everyday face to face
interactions but we do as humans participate in each
other’s consciousness in such a way that there is a
synchrony of two interior streams of consciousness.
Phenomenology of Everyday Life
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Observe facts and events within social reality
Construct typifications
Develop and coordinate to these patterns modes of ideal
human actors or agents
Ascribe to this fictitious consciousness a set of typical
motivations, purposes and goals …such a model yields
types or puppets interacting with others in patterns
Chatterjee et. al.
Philosophy
Sociology
Phenomenology
Phenomenology of
everyday life
•Ethnomethodology
•Social
Constructionism
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
Psychology
Other Disciplines
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Psychology
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Phenomenology helped articulate how people organize
their self interpretations, feel their emotions, create their
fantasies, use reason and logic and generate their actions.
It provided a base for :
transactional analysis,
existential psychology,
Gestalt psychology,
Rogerian client centered therapy.
Chatterjee et. al.
Philosophy
Sociology
Phenomenology
Phenomenology of
everyday life
•Ethnomethodology
•Social
Constructionism
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
Psychology
Other Disciplines
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Phenomenology of Everyday Life
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Ethnomethodoloy by Harold Garfinkle.
Ethnomethodologists, who believe that research and theorizing
are to be done in conjunction, analyze commonplace everyday
activities in social settings. Unique to this approach are the
techniques of experimentation that disrupt the normal flow of
events. These are called “breaching experiments” and they are
used to illustrate the fragility of social reality.
Social Constructionism by Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckman
Social Constructionism
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Berger and Luckman wanted to extend phenomenology
and integrate the individual and societal levels
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The Social Construction of Reality: A treatise in the Sociology of
Knowledge (1967)was an attempt to integrate Schutz’s
work with Mead, Marx, and Durkheim.
Social Constructionism
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Human beings are born into a pre-existing society and through
socialization and shared cultural patterns of behavior they
keep doing what they have learned to do.
Behaviors that are constantly repeated become patterns or
habits. Habitualizations lead to institutionalization.
Institutions have some control over human behavior.
Socialization also plays a role in our internalization of
institutional norms for conduct and it is through this process
that socially acquired ways of doing things develop what
seems to be an existence of its own.
Once our subjective reality is created by internalization, we
then reify the external world and legitimize it by ascribing
validity to it and come to perceive it as though it were
separate from the human process that created it.
Robbins, Chatterjee, & Canda
Philosophy
Sociology
Phenomenology
Phenomenology of
everyday life
•Ethnomethodology
•Social
Constructionism
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
Psychology
Other Disciplines
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
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Michel Foucault , French philosopher, social scientist, and
historian wrote human science and professional expertise
have become mechanisms of social control.
Post-modernism
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All beliefs are relative ..there is no universal,
transhistorical self, only local selves, no universal theory
about self, only local theories.
Because the self is a process, it is never static and we
consciously create, re-create, and give our self meaning
through accounts, descriptions, assumptions and
common-sense knowledge.
The individualism that 20th century science has presumed
is false because it pictures a DECONTEXTUALIZED
masterful self confronting an objectified world that it
seeks to represent and manipulate.
Social Constructionism in the
Post-modern era
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Rorty & Gergen
The terms in which the world is understood are social
artifacts, products of historically situated interchanges between
people.
There is no truth through method and no correct procedure.
Social constructionism itself offers no alternative truth criteria.
Social constructionism helps us get past the traditional subject/
object dualism. This means that social and psychological inquiry
is derived of any notion of experience as a touchstone of
objectivity. So-called reports or descriptions of one’s
experience are really just “linguistic constructions guided and
shaped by historically contingent conventions of discourse.”
Robbins, Chatterjee, & Canda
Philosophy
Sociology
Phenomenology
Phenomenology of
everyday life
•Ethnomethodology
•Social
Constructionism
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Hermeneutic
Philosophy
Psychology
Other Disciplines
Post-modernism
Post-modernism
Social Work Discipline
•Ontology
•Epistemology
•Methodology
Knowledge
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Ontology is the study of what there is. Many classical
philosophical problems are problems in ontology, like the
question whether or not there is a God, or the problem
of the existence of universals.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the
nature of knowledge, in particular its foundations, scope,
and validity.
Methodology is understood as the methods or organizing
principles underlying philosophy, a particular art, science,
or other area of study
Egon Guba, The Paradigm Dialog, 1990.
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Positivist
Post-positivist
Critical Theory
Constructivist –realities are multiple, constructed; knower and
known are interactive; inquiry is value-bound; all entities are in
a state of mutual simultaneous shaping, so it is impossible to
distinguish causes from effects.
See Robbins, Chatterjee & Canda, p. 326.
More Philosophy
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Hermeneutic thought begins by re-thinking ontology.
Hermeneutics is the study of understanding.
Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics
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Philosophical hermeneutics describes the human
phenomenon of interpretation itself. It is about the most
fundamental conditions of man's being in the world.
Humans are self-interpreting beings and the meanings
they work out in the business of living makes them what
they are.
Our own life stories only make sense against the
backdrop of possible story lines opened by our historical
culture. Instead of thinking of the self as an object,
hermeneutic thought conceives human existence as a
happening or becoming.
Social Work Knowledge Base
Narrative Therapy
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Freedman & Combs, 1996
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Am I asking for descriptions of more than one reality?
Am I listening so as to understand how this person’s
experiential reality has been socially constructed?
Whose language is being privileged here?
What are there stories that support this person’s problems?
Are there dominant stories that are oppressing or limiting this
person’s life?
Am I focusing on meaning instead of on “facts”?
Am I evaluating this person or am I inviting her/him to evaluate
a wide range of things (e.g. how therapy is going)?
Narrative Therapy
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Freedman & Combs, 1996
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Am I situating my opinions in my personal experience? Am I
being transparent about my context, my values, and my
intentions so that this person can evaluate the effects of my
biases?
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Am I getting caught up in pathologizing or normative thinking?
Are we collaboratively defining problems based on what is
problematic in this person’s experience? Am I staying away
from ‘expert” hypotheses or theories?
Robbins, Chatterjee, & Canda
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Strengths of social constructionism
Consistent with social work values
Give preeminence to the client’s experience and selfdetermination
Highest respect to the dignity and worth of the individual
and their plight in the world
Support the strengths perspective
Robbins, Chatterjee, & Canda
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Weakness of social constructionism
Pays little attention to the biological basis for behavior
Phenomenology and social constructionism can also be
criticized for ignoring or discounting psychological
structures and processes.
Phenomenology, social constructionism and hermeneutics
have more to offer regarding spirituality
Primarily emphasize the social and relational basis of
behavior rather than larger social forces
Does not promote social change or social justice