Dóra S. Bjarnason
Paper – Social Constructionism – Theoretical
Perspectives from Symbolic Interactionism to
Postmodernism
Introduction
I am putting forward my thesis ; The social construction of disabled adulthood. A
qualitative study of the perspectives of 36 disabled people aged 16 to 24, for the defense
of a dr. philos to morrow.
I located the study within disability studies, and within a social constructivist, interpretive
framework, drawing on symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and hermeneutics, so it
is fitting that you gave me this task. At first the title looked somewhat overpowering as it
invited me to draw on one of the major theoretical traditions within sociology from the
late19th through much of the 20th century; Verstehende sociology and developments
within postmodern scholarship.
I decided to look at the social construction of young disabled adult identity as my point of
departure. I will start by re-invoking the story of Björg, whom you met in my first lecture
here today. Then I will discuss the important and complex perspectives of social
construction and social constructionism, as I understand them, referring to how I use
them in my work. Next I will explore briefly how others have come to use these
perspectives in thinking about self/self identity and society –and how they align with a
broader conceptual framework from symbolic interactionism to postmodernism. Finally I
will move back to my own work – to how I think it could be aligned with the interpretive
promise to reconstruct our notions of disabled young adulthood and affect change in the
perception of disabled individuals.
Example from my work
I locate my work within a social constructionist, interpretive paradigm. The broader
interpretivist paradigm can be connected with the social constructionism approach in a
variety of ways. The interpretivist focus is on the ways humans interpret or construct
their social world in specific linguistic, social and historical context. It fits under the 19th
century German hermeneutics tradition (Dilthey) and the Weberian concept of Verstehen
( Weber, Gadamer), along with several other theories often referred to as “ the
Verstehende Sociology” including e.g. symbolic interactionism, phenomenological
sociology, ethnomethodology and others.
I claim that both “disability” and “adulthood” are socially constructed phenonena,
idealist products of interactions and relationships, embedded within society and its
history, and generated from its culture, norms and values. Disability is seen to be
constructed, embodied and embedded in Icelandic society and culture.
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Björg
Let us look quikly at the example of Björg, an example of a social construction of
a disability identity:
Björg´s mother gave a clear picture from her perspective as she shared her story about the
birth of her daughter. She said:
As soon as they gave her to me I saw that something was the matter. I said it aloud.
They all heard me and the delivery room grew instantly quiet. ...It hit like
thunder...it was just awful. The child was not normal... it was a crisis.
Björg is their second child, so the parents could compare her at birth with their former
experience. The staff in the delivery room also brought their much broader experience of
delivery and of a “normal” and “not normal” baby to bare on the situation. Here
something was seen to be very different. In stead of the joyful experience of birth, this
was interpreted as a tragic event. Her father, who was present at the birth, went through
twenty-four hours of intensive grief by himself. "Then he came", said his wife, "and did
what had to be done." The father took over, talked to professionals, family and friends,
and supported his wife. The new perspective on the baby, and the label of disability
began to stick, altering significantly the preconceived parental carrier at that point, and
forged a very different life course for Björg, compared to that of her sibling.
This became reaffirmed and reinterpreted at regular intervals in the families life. The
mother said that periods of deep sorrow and crisis come when Björg goes through
transition, or when events draw attention to the difference between Björg´s life and that
of her siblings.
Björg's parents felt that their families and friends have shown little understanding. They
explained: “People did not know how to behave; they did not understand…, some judged
us, others were clumsy, and still others were embarrassed and stayed away when we
needed them most.” This implied changes within the family’s relationships with in their
social network, affecting their perspective on their every day lived world. Even though
they maintained contact with some of their friends and relatives, they learnt to avoid
discussing crucial issues regarding their child’s impairment and their own needs for
support.
On the other hand they said that they got exceptionally good help and support from
professionals from the very beginning. Björg was given her first physiotherapy, when she
was only four days old, and soon she was also taken to therapeutic swimming.
The professionals with their skills, care and perspectives upon Björg’s impairment and their
understanding of the family’s needs, helped the parents embrace the carrier of parenting a
disabled child, and interperate that experience.
As a young woman, Björg has formed a clear identity of who she is as a disabled person.
She shines with joie de vivre and she lives happily "inside the outsiders camp" where she is
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an active and important member. Still her mother wiped her eyes when she told me that
her daughter had "a great life but..."
Her status as an adult is more in jeopardy. I defined the status of adulthood as socially
constructed, endowed with rights and obligations of what it is taken to mean to be an adult
in modern Icelandic society, confirmed and reconfirmed through symbols (e.g. via
language) within interactions and relationships. Despite the fact that Björg had reached the
status of legal and bureaucratic adulthood, she feels much younger than her years, and her
parents, sibling, professionals and community members see her as a young teenager, and
treat her as such. This perspective affects the way Björg thinks about herself and her future,
and the way others interact with her. Her claims to reaching adulthood sometime in the
future are not recognized or not taken seriously.
In the interpretation of Björgs situation, I invoked the interpretivist paradigm, social
constructionism and symbolic interactionism (Goffman' s stigma, Beckets labeling
theory), and drew also upon the phenomenological focus (not the whole tradition) on
capturing aspects of the lived world of Björg and her family.
Social constructionism emphasizes the actor’s definitions of the situation (and has thus
great affinity to symbolic interactionism). We need to know how all the actors understand
their situation, before we can begin to describe the rules of the game or their actions in
more general terms. Thus through social constructionism I seek to understand how social
actors, such as Björg and the people around her recognize, produce, and reproduce social
actions, and how they come to share an inter-subjective understanding of her specific life
circumstances, manifested in social text.
Social constructionism
Social constructivism
Broadly speaking, social constructivism is about how people construct and make sense
of their world. The over-all perspective is that all social phenomena are social
constructions. The position traces its origins to philosophers such as Spinoza, Kant and
Nietzsche, who considered the construction of knowledge, dependent on processes,
endemic to the human organism. According to social constructivism, human criteria for
identifying action or events are highly circumscribed by culture, history and the social
context.
The perspective is by no means monolithic. There is no single description which would
be adequate for all the different kinds of writers who can be referred to as social
constructionists. Different writers share some characteristics with others, but there does
not appear to be anything that they all have in common. What seems to link them
together is a kind of “family resemblance”. For example – You can line up all of my
family and most would conclude that we are related, because of our family resemblances.
However no two members share exactly similar features, but taken together you can find
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the set of Bjarnason’s chin, nose, walk etc. In the same way, the various traditions and
versions of interpretivist share a set of overriding premises or principles, but no one
tradition lists all of them or lists them in exactly the same way.
According to Gergen (1994), there are two main strands (intertextual relationships) of
constructivist thought:
1. The first is distinctly psychological in nature, and focuses on how learners construct
their learning, that is on the individual ‘s psychological construction and the experiential
world , on the knower and his acts of cognition . Examples of this are e.g. Piaget who
following Kant, believed that the knowledge of the world is mediated by cognitive
structures that he viewed as products of processes of construction resulting from the
interaction of mind and environment - via assimilation of new knowledge into a child’s
existing systems of understanding , and through accommodation process - the cognitive
system adapts itself to the structure of the world.
I will not go up the cognitive psychological/learning theory garden path here, but try and
make sense of the more sociological strand - known as Social constructionism.
2. Social constructionism is about how meanings get constructed in social context.
That makes meaning – making open and flexible.
Social constructionism draws upon symbolic interactionism (Mead-Blumer tradition)
in that fundamental to symbolic interactionism is the view that we as people construct our
own and each others identities (mind–self dialectic) through our every day encounters
with each other in social interactions via language/symbols, and upon phenomenological
sociology. Phenomenological sociology is concerned with how we come to interpret
others and their actions; with the complex ways in which we understand those with whom
we interact, and with the ways we interpret our own actions and those of others within a
social context.
Phenomenological sociology builds upon Phenomenology, a complex multi strand
philosophy dating back to Husserl (or for that matter all the way back to Nietzsche).
Generally speaking phenomenologists reject scientific realism and the view that the
empirical sciences have a privileged position in identifying and explaining features of a
“mind-independent” world. For Schutz the world of everyday life is mans fundamental
and paramount reality, and thus intersubjectiveness is the givenness of the social world.
He argued for the description of the experience of every day life as it is internalized in the
subjective consciousness of individuals, and tried to explain the essence of what he called
“natural attitude”- i.e. how it is that we do not doubt the existence of the every day world
and its intersubjective, social character . Alfred Schutz, influenced the social
constructionist view of Berger and Luckman. (The Social Construction of Reality 1966)
I relate Social Constructionism to phenomenological sociology through the work of
Berger and Luckman. They reintroduced an object/subject distinction into the heart of
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their theory of institutionalization. They were also influenced by a “subjective” version
of the functionalist paradigm in that, that they adopted Husserls term the life world, but
“by which they meant every day reality to be understood by a hierarchy of meanings
through which its conventional order was realized and maintained.-that is as
interpretations of social actors themselves within natural attitudes”. ( Ferguson, H. 2001).
For Berger and Luckman the term life world, which I apply to my work, includes
common sense knowledge, which they see to be the fabric of social meanings. As social
constructionist theories developed in the late 20th century, the object premise gave way to
intersubjectivity.
Common to both symbolic interactionism and phenomenological sociology (of Schutz) is
the notion of human perception and the construction of meaning (language) as grounded
in Everyday life. Every day life, or for Schutz the life world, are for both symbolic
interactionists and phenomenologists, the fountain to the river of the construction of
meaning – about self, social players and society, that feeds the sea of social
constructionism .
This is the Social constructionism position as I understand it: It focuses on social
processes, intersubjectivity and interaction. Human criteria for identifying action or
events are highly circumscribed by culture, history and the social context. From that
perspective we are invited to consider critically the social origins of our taken for granted
assumptions about our perceived reality.
Four key suppositions of Social constructionism
account of knowledge
(From Gergen –Realities and relationships: Soundings in Social Construction 1994)
The four suppositions are the assumptions that create “family resemblance” amongst
social constructionists They are what they belief in and use for building the many
different versions of what has been labeled as social constructionism. This typology can
be applied to the concepts of “disability” and “adulthood” as I use them in my research.
1. The terms by which we account for the world and ourselves are not dictated by
the stipulated (tilskilin) objects of such accounts.
Social Constructionism insist that we take a critical stance towards our taken for granted
ways of understanding the world, including ourselves.
2. The terms and forms by which we achieve understanding of the world and of
ourselves are social artifacts products of historically and culturally situated
interchange amongst people.
Social Constructionism argues that the ways in which we understand the world, the
categories and the concepts we use, are historically and culturally specific.
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3. The degree to which a given account of the world or self is sustained across time
is not dependent on the objective validity of the account, but on the vicissitudes
(shifting and unforeseen) of social processes.
Social Constructionism argues that people construct knowledge of their world between
them, through daily interactions and in the course of the processes of our every day life.
4. Language derives its significance in human affairs from the way in which it
functions within patterns of relationships.
Here they invoke e.g. Wittgenstein’s perspective that “The meaning of a word is in terms
of its use”…..and that words acquire their meanings within language games, and that the
meaning within the game depends on the use of the game in wider cultural patterns.
Social constructionism argues that because we negotiate understandings, and because
these understandings can take a wide variety of forms, we can talk of many social
constructions of the world. Each different construction brings with it different kind of
action. Particular forms of knowledge in any culture are thus seen to be social artifacts.
E.g. what we have thought of as childhood, youth and adulthood has changed in history.
(Aries, Frönes, Guttormsson, etc), and similarly what we have thought of as “disability”.
This implies ways of understanding that are historically and culturally relative, specific to
time and space, and products of culture. Thus socially constructed categories such as
youth, adulthood, disability, self-identity and so forth can be seen to be flexible to
change.
Social Constructionism – theoretical perspectives from Symbolic
Interactionism to postmodernism: How others have come to use these
perspectives thinking about self/identity and society
(The conceptual map – self/self identity - society )
I will here try to map out how scholars have come to define and use these perspectives.
The schema is intended to help me reflect upon “Social constructionism”, as it has been
used in different ways by different scholars. I think of the schema as a mosaic, with
different size bits fitted together in many different ways to form “Social
constructionism”, with roots that intertwine, some shallow, others that go deep into the
fertile ground of the sociological traditions. Different mosaic combinations forge out
different perspectives on self/identity and society.
The theoretical roots of all these perspectives are to be found in 19th century European
thought and in American pragmatism. The “From…” and the “to…” does thus not make
a strict chronological sense, because the roots are intertwined. However, the perspectives
began to impact mainstream sociological analysis and its focus on how to make sense of
the link between e.g. the individual self/identity and society at different times during the
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20th century. Thus symbolic interactionism in the Blumer sense took flight in the 1950s
and 1960s, and the term postmodernism, used in architecture and the arts pre WW2.,
became influential, more as an attitude towards the social world, a form of a diagnosis,
rather than a theory, in sociological thought in the last decades of the century.
I will start this by stating very briefly what I take symbolic interactionism and
postmodernism to imply.
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interactionism combines a definition of social life and a method of study into
one theoretical framework, with roots is American pragmatism. Symbolic interactionism
became an influential perspective in American sociology for much of the 20th century.
Many of the shared assumptions of the perspective come from the work of Herbert
Blumer, who was influenced by the social theorist G. H. Mead. But the roots go deeper
and can be traced to Simmel, who argued that the origins of society are in the minds of
people, who are conscious of their relationships to other people. This theory comes in a
variety of forms and is thus hard to describe briefly.
Central to the perspective are the following three premises:
1. Humans act towards the objects and people in their environment on the basis of
the meanings these objects and people have for them.
2. These meanings derive from the social interaction between and amongst
individuals. Communication is symbolic because we communicate through
language and other symbols and in communicating we create significant symbols.
3. Meanings are established and modified through an interpretive process
undertaken by the actors. ( Schwandt 1997 building on Blumer 1969)
Meads theory can be said to be located in pragmatism. Symbolic interactionism, is
characterized by its rejection of behaviorist psychology. On the other hand it shows
respect for the empirical world: To understand the process of meaning making the
researcher must attend to overt behaviors, speech, and particular circumstances of the
settings where interaction takes place. Thus it gives voice to the individual, and respects
his accounts of his experience and perspective. This and the importance of language as a
social phenomena feeds into Interpretivism, and into Social Constructionism, in which
language which is constantly changing and varied in its meaning is seen to be a major key
stone.
Symbolic interactionism has been criticized for focusing on the psychological processes
of the meaning making of social actors, but ignoring the apparently external objective and
constraining realities in society, and for being idealist, situationalist, and empiricist.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is radically interdisciplinary and rejects conventional stiles of academic
discourse. As an intellectual movement, postmodernism can be said to form a kind of
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background for late 20th century social constructionism, and to have given it some of its
particular flavor and texture.
Postmodernism has its antecedents in the critique of modernity provided by Nietzsche,
Heidegger and others, and is championed by for example Foucault. Postmodernism is
sometimes also referred to as post structuralism, and then fitted under social
constructionism. Self confessed post-structuralists like Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck
reject that and define themselves as anti-postmodernists.
For example post structuralism (see Giddens 1991) claims that:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Subjects, authors or speakers are irrelevant to the interpretation of texts.
Pantextualism –everything is a text – all texts are interrelated.
Meaning is unstable, never fixed, never determined, never representational
Deconstructionism is a post structuralistic strategy for reading texts that unmasks
the supposed truth, or meaning of text by undoing, reversing or replacing taken
for granted binary oppositions that structure texts.
Post structuralist “arguments” by their very nature attempt to destabilize received
conceptions of science, order, society and self.
In general postmodernism can be described as a direct opposite to positivistic theory.
Few scholars agree what the term means exactly, - except that it represents a reaction to,
critique of , or departure from modernism. It has risen against the background of loss of
faith in the power of reason and the shattering of traditional political and religious
orthodoxies. It is linked e.g. to feminism, post colonialism, and disability scholarship
(see for example Corker and Shakespeare 2001). It draws inspiration from cyberspace
and the virtual world of hyper realities. Post modernism is prominent in discussions of
contemporary culture, and it is hard to find an area of study where it has not had some
impact.
Postmodernism opposes as no longer believable four central doctrines that form the core
of the Enlightenment tradition. These are:
1. the notion of a rational autonomous subject. (A self that has an essentially
human nature)
2. the notion of foundationalist epistemology (it is not possible to say that one
knows something without being absolutely certain: rationalism, empiricism)
3. the knows ion of reason as a universal, a priori capacity of individuals.
4. the belief in social and moral progress through the rational application of
social scientific theories.
Postmodernism is also characterized by its distrust of and incredulity towards all
totalizing discourses or meta-narratives; large scale or grand theories that purportedly
explain culture and society.(Bauman) The grand narratives of western civilization are
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treated with incredulity, and seen as codenames for a crisis of confidence in western
conceptual systems. In place of such theoretical frameworks postmodern theory endorses
heterogeneity, difference, fragmentation, and indeterminacy.
Postmodernism sees knowledge as dependent on socio-cultural contexts,
unacknowledged values, tacit discourses, and interpretive traditions, and it recognizes the
significance of language, discourse and power in any knowledge claim. Thus, it forms the
back drop of some of the more recent versions of social constructionist theories. It
opposes conceptions of knowledge as secure and disinterested. In stead all knowledge is
produced through discourse, all knowledge is constructed, contested, incessantly
perspectival and polyphonic, and inextricably bound up with power.
At the methodological level postmodernism stands for the questioning and doubting of
all methods. Research is a socio-cultural practice, and can be read as a text which is
dependent on available discourses. This is so because available discourse define the
possibilities of meaning, and since meaning is “radically plural and always open “
(Bruner 1993). Language is here central and the constant process of interpretation and
reinterpretation by which social reality is created and maintained. My work does not draw
systematically upon postmodernism, but is inevitably affected by some of its conceptions
and methodologies that have developed out of postmodern- interactionism. I use for
example notions of embeddedness and embodiment of disability and impairment in my
text, think in terms of flexibility of disability and adulthood as social phenomena and in
terms of rapid social transformations that evoke a sense that the world is in the process of
basic change, and argue for the credibility, trustworthiness, vesimmilitude and
transferability of my results, rather than for their reliability, validity and truth.
Critics of postmodernism, like the modern interactionist scholar, Maines describes
postmodernistic scholarship as inherently flawed, and thus irrelevant to interactionist
work (Denzin 1996a)
Attempts to reconstruct our perspective on disabled young adulthood
Finally I will move back to my own work – to how I think it could be aligned with
attempts to reconstruct our notions of disabled young adulthood. In that I will refer to the
vision of Norman Denzin, who is alternatively described in the literature as postmodern
interactionist and as a social constructionist – and on my firm conviction that it is us
(ordinary people going about our business in our daily lives) who in effect construct
reality. I will use the schema again to reflect on my use of concepts, and my place within
the social constructionist tradition.
In the late 20th century postmodernism, with its departure in fundamental social
transformation of modern societies, has been seen to be set up as a fundamental challenge
to interactionist theories; but it has also cross fertilized these and many other theoretical
perspectives including feminist theories, neo-Marxist theories, post structuralism, cultural
studies, disability scholarship and others.
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Dentzin and other contemporary social constructionists, attempt to make sense of the
modern turmoil of change, diversity and fragmentation seen to characterize contemporary
society, both at the level of theory and methodology. For example in his reply to Maines’
criticism of postmodernism as irrelevant to interactionist work, Denzin (referring e.g. to
Guba and Lincon) reminds us that:
[…while during the 1980’s] beliefs in ontological realism, objective
epistemologies, and the use of quantitative methods to verify hypothesis came
under increasing attack. The notion of knowledge as accumulation was replaced
by a more relativist constructionist position. (Guba and Lincon 1994:114)
and
In this same period the postmodern constructionists developed complex criteria
for evaluating interpretive work, including credibility, plausibility, context
embeddedness, dependability, confirmability, authenticity, dialogue, narrative
truth, emotional vesimilitude, and so on . (see Lincoln 1995; Altheide and
Johnson 1994) (Denzin 1996: 346)
Dentzin urged his more mainstream colleges of the interactionist school to return to the
spirit of Dewey and early pragmatists and remain open to innovations and concerned with
fostering progressive social reforms. He envisages that by so doing interactionists could
forge a rapprochement between the ideas of pragmatism and postmodernism, that he
hopes could result in an interactionist theory with democratic participation and practice.
I am a researcher, taking my questions to the field of disability studies and inclusive
education. My “posture” as Harry Wolcott would say, is; that I try and understand where
I am at regarding my data and theory and method, and use it as well as I can. But if I
claim to be a social constructionist where would I place my concepts and work on the
Schema and why?
In my thesis I have given voice to Björg and other 35 young disabled Icelanders, their
parents, and some of their friends and teachers. I focused on the individual perspectives
and their experiences of their every day lives as they see it. Because humans are social
animals, we are the ultimate source of organization and change in any social setting. This
is my firm belief, and at the heart of interpretive theory. This fits with Dentzins argument
for aligning theory with democratic practices – holding on to ideology , and the
importance of both deconstruction and reconstruction, for peoples lives.
Even though Interpretivism emphasizes description rather than intervention,
"description itself can be reformative if it gives voice to those not usually asked to
describe anything". Thus, following in the footsteps of Becker and other symbolic
interactionist, the voice of people who usually have little power in society can become
powerful through complete description, "by legitimating the perspectives of those usually
at the bottom of society as well as those at the top". (Ferguson, D.L. and Ferguson, P.M.
1995) In this lies my hope for my work. I bring attention the social construction of
disability and young disabled identities and of adulthood with a difference. It is a way of
furthering understanding of disability and difference. I hope that with time my work can
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bring others to different understandings of disability , and thus serve to improve the lot of
disabled people within my society.
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