Download Social Construction of Reality - Introduction to Sociology - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! The Social Construction of Reality 1 Introduction Some sense of the sociological vision will be given by considering the common sociological assertion that âreality is socially constructedâ. 2 The Weakness of Biology: Why biology does not explain much. 3 The World-Openness of Humans: Contrast with other animals explains importance of culture. Arnold Gehlenâs âworld-opennessâ. Problems for the individual in terms of self-management and for the group in terms of co-ordination. Habit- formation. 4 The Role of Regulation: A moral force, a shared culture which specifies what we can desire and how we can attain those goals, takes the place of the biological strait-jacket. Habits writ large as social institutions. Formal law and social conventions. 5 Language: The primary social institution in any group and the one that is central to coordination is language. 6 Roles: Society as an interlocking system of roles. Metaphor of an actor in a play neatly expresses the rule-governed nature or scripted nature of much of social life and the sense that society is a joint production. 6 Escape Attempts: Social life made possible by routinizing programmes of action and either painting them onto the âbackclothâ or writing them into a script but modern people periodically feel frustrated by the impersonality and predictability of life. Laurie Taylor and Stan Cohen, Escape Attempts, we distinguish between the social roles we play and the real âusâ. We may use hobbies, holidays, and weekend trips to establish a persona separate from our place in the paramount reality of everyday life. However, and this reinforces Gehlenâs case for the importance of shared order, even these escape attempts are commonplace and repetitious. 7 The Role of Culture in Interpreting the Physical: Further meaning of âsocial construction of reality. Even when objective stimuli are implicated in our actions, it is our interpretations of those stimuli that affect our behaviour.. 8 The Solidity of Social Constructions: Tempting to divide the world into the real and the imaginary. Sociology often deals with a third realm: the inter-subjective. Things which people imagine, provided they are imagined similarly by large enough numbers of people, can have an enduring and even oppressive reality indistinguishable from the âobjectiveâ world. Example of religion. Social institutions, although they are social constructions, can nonetheless be extremely powerful and can, in effect, shape us. 9 Denial of Authorship: Cultures often deny human authorship of social institutions. 10 Society predates the Individual One reason reification is common is that it contains a basic truth. None of us personally created the social institutions docsity.com
