Professional Documents
Culture Documents
They only
exist coz we give them reality through social agreements. E.g. nations,books and
money dont exist in the absence of human society. Nations are group of ppl who
happen to share nation or history,books are paper with scribbles and money is
just pieces of paper and metal that have no value other than what we have
assigned them.
The concept of SELF can be considered a social construct too. Our identity is
created by social interactions with other people and our reactions to the
expectation of society.
There are two threads of Social constructionism :
Weak and Strong.
Social world is not simply given,natural rather made by ppl, transmitted by ppl.
95% of what we know is simply what we have accepted from the other ppl. The
question is not what is real,nor how do we know what is real rather how does
anything come to be accepted as real.
There are 3 stages of this process:
Externalization: process where individuals create their social world through their
activities.
Our envt consist of Naturegiven to humans and culturecreated by humans.
Culture can be divided into material(tools & tech) and non material
culture(beliefs,values,norms).
Rivers are nature and roads are material culture. But humans can even turn
nature into material culture by meanings we attach to nature and the uses we
make of nature. E.g. We can turn rivers into playgrounds,transportation
roads,political boundaries,sacred spaces.
So our total envt = nature+ culture. Nature consist of natural facts like
mountains,earth .
Our behavior depends not on the objective reality of a situation but on our subjective
interpretation of reality.
This theory is also used in modern juvenile justice system. The JJ system focuses
on rehabilitating offenders and returning them to society as a productive
citizens.The system is careful not to label young offender as criminal bcoz
sociological research shows that ppl often live up to their labels. Those
labelledcriminalsare more likely to display future criminal behaviours than
those labelled rehabilitated.
IF we label smone as criminal, he would live up to that terms and starts acting
like criminals though it wasnt part of his character to be one.
This concept is quite similar to RK mertons Self-fulfilling prophecy which states
that even a false idea can become reality if acted upon.e.g. Bank run. For some
reason ppl falsely fear that their bank is going to be bankrupt.Now bcoz of this
false notion,ppl run to their bank and demand all their cash at once coz of which
banks indeed run out of money.Hence here the reality got constructed by a false
idea.