Social Constructs

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Social constructs or social constructions define meanings, notions, or connotations that are
assigned to objects and events in the environment and to peoples notions of their
relationships to and interactions with these objects. In the domain of social constructionist
thought, a social construct is an idea or notion that appears to be natural and obvious to
people who accept it but may or may not represent reality, so it remains largely an invention
or artifice of a given society.
Games are an example of socially constructed entities and often exist because of certain sets
of conventional rules. These sets of social conventions and agreement to abide by them give
games their meaning in any given social context. The game of football could be played in any
way, but there have developed over the years known conventional rules governing the
players, spectators, and the games organization. The meaning given to games is therefore
socially constructed.
Gender, which represents ways of talking, describing, or perceiving men and women, is also
a socially constructed entity. Generally distinguished from sex (which is biological), notions
of gender represent attempts by society, through the socialization process, to construct
masculine or feminine identities and corresponding masculine or feminine gender roles for a
child based on physical appearance and genitalia.
Social class is yet another socially constructed entity. While most scholars agree that class
appears to represent a universal phenomenon, its meaning is often contextually located
because what determines class varies from one society to another, and even within a culture
different people may likely have different notions of class determinants.
Depending on the constructionist perspective, social construction may be the outcome of
human choices rather than of immutable laws of nature. Here, then, lies the core issue over
which social scientists diverge. Are human ideas and conceptions generated more on
subjective criteria than on objective realities? Debates have raged in the social sciences along
the divide of science versus objective truth. In the social construction of reality, the question
has often been asked: To what extent is our claim to knowledge supported by reality? In other
words, to what extent is this claim a social construct? Some writers believe that to the extent
that knowledge is aligned with reality, it approximates objective truth; anything less

represents a social construct. According to this thinking, even morality is a social construct.
However, others believe that all knowledge is social construction.
The basis of this debatein fact the point of departure among scholarsis the claim that
social constructions are based on social facts and surrounding social conventions. Thus
constructions based on factsfacts that are not ontologically dependent on the social
structures and conventions of societyare not. However, Ian Hacking (1999) believes that
there are few if anyuniversal constructionists, in which case few people would argue that
the sun or DNA are socially constructed, existing entirely independently of that construction.
On the contrary, the social arena is quite different, as vital social realities are socially
constructed, existing by virtue of that social construction by people over time and space. This
seeming narrow threshold between scientific construction and social constructs presents
problems in social analysisindeed hard nuts that need to be cracked and cracked
satisfactorily.
In the resulting ongoing science wars, one side argues that scientific results, including even
those of basic physics, are socially constructed. Others protest, arguing that these results are
usually discoveries about our world; they are not the production of society but exist
independently of consciousness. However, some sociologists, such as Barry Barnes and
David Bloor (1982), have taken a relativist view of social construction, claiming that any
notion is as good as the other. Thus, for instance, if a new social construction of the
Holocaust emerges, arguing that claims about Nazi extermination camps are exaggerated and
that the gas chambers are a fiction, that view may well then be at par with other beliefs about
the same phenomena, though this may represent historical revisionism. Nevertheless, the fact
remains that constructionists attempt to sort out their notions and beliefs using standards of
their own convictions and culture.
Peter Cohen (1990), in his discussion of drug use as a social construct, argues that concepts
used to describe and explain the phenomenon of drug use are surrounded by bias, a bias
produced by a cultural dependency rather than drug use itself. The so-called scientific
analysis of drug use, he argues, has often been used as an instrument for survival of the most
powerful; power is not only relevant to decision making and resource allocation but also to
the social construction of ideology and morality. Scientific constructions and concepts are
thus developed according to the interests and tastes of people in power (a trend that is
inescapable though may not be justified), and so these constructions often fit into
conventional standpoints on topics of research.

The implications of these varying constructionist positions is that, once again, it is not often
clear what is, or what should be, socially constructed. Radical constructionism best
underscores this basic problem in social construction. Radical constructionists are concerned,
for instance, with the domain of technology, with showing how social processes affect the
content of technology and what it means for technology to be seen as working. They claim
that the meaning of technology, including facts about its workings, are themselves social
constructs. Similarly, on the social construction of reality, radical constructionists believe that
the process of constructing knowledge regulates itself and that knowledge is a self-organized
cognitive process of the human brain, a construct rather than a compilation of empirical data.
If this is so, it is impossible to determine the extent to which knowledge reflects an
ontological reality.
The problem of social construction has become more pronounced in different constructions of
race based on diverging claims on racial distinctions. For instance, while William A. Darity
Jr. (2003) has argued that race does not exist because there is no biogenetic basis for racial
classifications, studies from Stanford University tend to contradict this claim by suggesting
that the way people classify themselves by race reflects real and clear genetic differences
among them. They argue that people of different races, even within the same population, have
different ancestries, meaning that different genes are inherited from ancestors. However,
Hacking (1999) insists that research studies have tended to challenge the idea of race by
presenting evidence that the scientific basis for racial distinctions is based on shaky grounds.
Attempts to confine race to social construction appear to be based on the potential dangers of
emotions that may be triggered by suggestions that racial differences reflect meaningful
biogenetic differences. This has meant that some experts are inclined to publicize the idea
that race does not exist. For instance, the New England Journal of Medicine, a prestigious
medical journal, editorialized on May 3, 2001, In medicine there is only one race, the human
race.
But as a social construct, connotations of race change as social, political, historical, and
economic structures of society change. Rodney D. Coates (2004) argues that notions of race
are created for people to fit into, to raise consciousness in line with conceptual boxes so
created, and often to generate racial outcomes, for instance, notions of racial inequality to
produce racial superiority. He observes that the construct black has in fact changed over
time and space, and he questions whether our conceptions of blacks have correspondingly
changed with the lived experiences and reality of blacks. This invariably reveals the dynamic
nature of social reality. If constructions of this lived reality fail to reflect that dynamism, it

may become an invalid analytic or discursive unit, that is, a unit or object of analysis or
discussion and debate.
Stephen Spencer (2000) has further asked: If race is a social construct, of what is it precisely
constructed if not the scientifically invalid false consciousness of biological race? He argues
that it is as necessary to problematize the social construction of race as it is to question its
scientific construction. He concludes that for those who believe in biological construction of
race but not in its social construction, the basis of their construction has an underlying
biological conception, whether or not they admit that. Such constructions often create false
consciousness, producing uncertainty as to what are or are not social differences and
ultimately creating a new consciousness, a new social reality.
These questions highlight the problem of what is and what is not a social construct. The
answer may well lie in the fact that it all depends on the researchers politics, theoretical
orientation, discipline, position in the class structure, or cultural context. It remains that
people may often attempt to justify self-serving definitions, but this raises yet another
fundamental question: Can this alter consensus on the validity of concepts? It is apt at this
point to note that the use of invalid concepts in social research, public discourse, or policy
debates may in fact lead to reification. However, in scientific construction, researchers must
move outside the boxes of existing notions of matters of investigation to evaluate and analyze
issues on such matters from radically different assumptions, even the assumptions of their
disciplines (Coates 2004).
SEE ALSO Communication; Critical Theory; Femininity; Gender; Linguistic Turn;
Masculinity; Meaning; Race; Social Theory

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barnes, Barry. 1974. Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory. London and Boston:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Barnes, Barry, and David Bloor. 1982. Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of
Knowledge. In Rationality and Relativism, eds. Martin Hollis and Stephen Lukes, 21-47.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A
Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Coates, Rodney D., ed. 2004. Race and Ethnicity: Across Time, Space, and Discipline.
Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
Cohen, Peter. 1990. Drugs as a Social Construct. PhD diss., Universiteit van Amsterdam,
Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Darity, William A., Jr. 2003. Racial/Ethnic Employment Discrimination, Segregation, and
Health. American Journal of Public Health 93 (2): 226-231.
Darity, William A., Jr., and P. L. Mason. 1988. Evidence on Discrimination in Employment:
Codes of Color, Codes of Gender. Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (2): 63-90.
Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah, Hanan Bruen, and Miriam Ben-Peretz. 1986. Perception and
Interpretation of Vocal Music: Constructs of Social Groups. International Review of the
Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 17 (1): 53-72.
Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York:
Viking.
Spencer, Stephen. 2000. Popular Culture and the Rural Dream: Cultural Contexts and the
Literary History of the Good Earth. Atenea (June): 125-138.
Spencer, Stephen. 2000. Racing Whiteness: American Culture and Construction of Race.
Paper presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, April 8.
Frederick Ugwu Ozor