Theories of Social & Cultural Reality - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Theories of Social & Cultural Reality

The Social Construction of Reality

• Primary thinkers: The Social Construction of Reality
• Peter Berger
• Thomas Luckmann

• Illustrationof a classroom exercise in which students arrange a group of objects in different categories (size, use, color, etc.).
• Language gives me labels to distinguish the objects in my world.

• Communicative action is voluntary.
• Knowledge is a social product
• Knowledge is contextual
• Theories create worlds
• Scholarship is value laden.

• SC enables communication to be viewed as a perspective, rather than a subject matter.
• Barnett Pearce
• Communication and the Human Condition
• Perspective: A way of looking at or thinking about something.
• How should we look at something?
• Whenever I look at something in terms of how it is constructed in interaction among people, I am taking a communication perspective.
• Pearce’s Model (The Resource-Practice Loop)
• Resources: all the building blocks I work with in life (ideas, values, stories, symbols, meanings, institutions, etc. used to build my reality).
• Practices: what I do or perform (behaviors, forms of expression, actions).
• Resources & practices are closely connected through my interaction with others.

• Rom Harre: explains how I account for my behavior in particular situations.
• Ethogeny
• Developed by Harre & Secord
• Ethogeny: the study of how I understand my actions with a predictable sequence of acts, called episodes (an event with a beginning & end that all people would agree on).
• Helps determine what the episode means and how people understand the acts involved in it.
• Structured Templates
• These are theories about the course of action anticipated in the episode.
• Example: 2 people have a theory of what it means to be “in love” and how that should be acted out.
• Episodes are governed by rules.

• Also important to Symbolic Interactionism.
• I learn to understand myself by using a theory that defines myself.
• The two sides of Personal Being:
• Person (Public):
• a publicly visible being that is characterized by certain attributes and characteristics established within a culture or social group.
• Governed by my cultures theory of personhood.
• Self (Private):
• My private notion of my own unity as a person.
• Governed by my theory of of my own being.
• Learned through my interactions with others.

• Display: whether an aspect of myself is displayed publicly or remains private.
• Realization (the source): the degree to which some feature of myself is believed to come from me or the group of people around me.
• Individual realization: elements coming from me.
• Collective realization: elements coming from others.
• Agency: the degree of active power I attribute to myself.
• Active elements: such as speaking or driving
• Passive elements: such a listening or riding.

• Self-consciousness:
• I think of myself as an object.
• Double Singularity Principle (Harre): the consistency with which I define and practice I1 & I2.
• The group’s idea of self must treat each I as a consistent unity.
• I must see me as me, not as Batman, etc.
• Agency:
• I have certain powers to do things.
• Seen when I plan something.
• Autobiography:
• A sense that I have a history and a future.
• Seen when I tell you about me.

• Emotions (James Averill)
• Are belief systems that guide my definition of the situation.
• Consists of internalized social norms and rules governing my feelings.
• Syndromes: Averill’s label for emotions.
• A set of responses that go together.
• Socially constructed.
• Each emotion has an object.
• How an emotion is labeled plays a role in how the emotion is experienced.

• Rules of appraisal.
• Tells me what an emotion is, where it is directed, & whether it is positive or negative.
• Rules of behavior.
• Tells me how I should respond to the feeling: to hide it, express it in private, or vent it publicly.
• Rules of prognosis.
• Defines the progression and course of emotion.
• How long should it last, what are its different stages, how does it begin, how does it end?
• Rules of attribution.
• Dictates how an emotion should be explained or justified.
• What do I tell other about it? How do I express it publicly?
• Example: “She was acting like a jerk and that made me mad.”

• Accounts: how I justify or explain my behavior.
• John Shotter:
• Communication-Experience Loop
• Communication determines how reality is experienced.
• The experience of reality affects communication.
• I am inseparable from society. I am not independent.

Rules & Social Action

Rules: Guidelines for action & meaning.

• Susan Shimanoff
• Rule: “a following prescription that indicates what behavior is obligated, preferred, or prohibited in certain contexts.”
• Rules must be followable.
• Rules are prescriptive
• Rules are contextual
• Rules specify appropriate behavior.
• Rules are best stated in the if-then format.

• If you can answer yes to all three questions, you have found a rule:
• Is the behavior controllable?
• Is the behavior criticizable?
• Is the behavior contextual?
• Finding rules is not always easy.
• Overt sanctions are the easiest to find.
• Repairs, such as apologizing, often show that a rule has been violated.

• Rule-fulfilling & rule-ignorant behaviors
• Acting without knowing the rule.
• Conforming & error behaviors
• Governed by rules, although I am not thinking at the time about whether or not I am following the rule.
• Rule-following & rule violation behavior
• I consciously follow or violate a rule.
• Positive reflection or negative reflection
• Following or violating

• Barnett Pearce, Vernon Cronen, & colleagues.
• This is the most comprehensive rule theory of communication.
• CMM integrates work from:
• System theory
• Symbolic interactionism
• Ethogeny
• Speech acts
• Relational communication

• Two types of rules:
• Constitutive rules
• Rules of meaning
• To interpret or understand an event or message
• Regulative rules
• Rules of action
• To determine how I should respond.
• These rules are always chosen in a context.
• Context: a frame of reference for interpreting an action.
• Four typical contexts:
• Relationship context: the mutual expectations of all involved.
• Episode context: the event itself.
• Self-concept context: my sense of personal definition.
• Archetype context: an image of general truth.

• Text: an event or action being interpreted.
• Loop: each is used from time to time to interpret the other (Reflexivity).
• Charmed Loop: each context confirms the other.
• Strange Loop: each context disconfirms the other.

• Logical force: rules tell us what interpretations and actions are logical in a given situation.
• Four types of logical force:
• Causal Force (Prefigurative)
• I feel I am being pressured to spend the weekend with my in-laws.
• Practical Force
• I act to achieve a goal (study to get an A, pass the course, etc.).
• Contextual Force
• Pressure from the context. I may go to grad school because I feel this is just who I am (self-concept context).
• Implicative Force
• Pressure to change the context in some way, such as the context of family expectations.

• Coordination: involves the meshing of my actions with those of another to the point of feeling that the sequence of actions if logical or appropriate.
• It is possible with CMM for me to have a perfectly satisfactory coordination with you without understanding you.

Language & Culture

Sociolinguistics: any study of language that makes use of social data, or, conversely, any study of social life that makes use of linguistic data.

• Sapir Whorf Hypothesis
• The way I see the world is shaped by the grammatical structure of language.
• Study of the Hopi Indians.
• Reality is already imbedded in the language and therefore comes preformed (in contrast to the social constructivist approach).

• Basis Bernstein
• Shows how the structure of language used in everyday talk reflects and shapes the assumptions of a social group.
• Basic Assumption:
• the relationships established in a social group affect the type of speech used by the group.
• Further, the structure of speech used by the group makes different things relevant or significant.
• I learn my place in the world by virtue of the language codes I use.
• Codes: sets of organized principles behind the language employed by members of a social group.

• Provide a wide range of ways to say something.
• More complex.
• I can make my ideas and intentions explicit.
• Require more planning.
• Appropriate for groups who don’t share my assumptions.
• Restricted Codes
• Have a narrower range of options.
• Easier to predict what form it will take.
• Do not allow for me to expand on what I mean.
• Appropriate for groups in which my assumptions are shared.

• Open-role system
• Expands the number of alternative for individuals in the group.
• Use of elaborate codes.
• Person-centered families.
• Closed-role system
• Reduces the number of alternative for the participants.
• Use of restricted codes.
• Position families.

Commentary & Critique

• SC is popular because of its intuitive appeal.
• What is the role of interaction?
• SI assumes that language is an outcome of interaction (thought-language).
• Sapir & Wharf: language precedes interaction (language-thought).

• Because SC conflicts with the concept that reality is objective and independent.
• Many believe that the rock exist before we even begin talking about it.
• Structuralists contend that human experience is largely universal, owing to a common biological inheritance and common cognitive structure.
• Chomsky: language structures are universal.
• Osgood: the dimensions of meaning are universal.

• Communication cannot proceed without assuming that we live in a world of a priori realism.
• We must assume that we are all talking about the same thing.
• Based on two principles:
• Semantic Realism
• Words have standard meanings.
• When I say “football” to Craig, I assume that he knows what I am talking about.
• These meanings are fairly stable.
• Meaning itself is real.
• Coherentism
• Meanings must be verifiable in experience.
• A table is a table because I can see it and touch it.
• This does not mean that the table exist objectively, but that we can all assume it does based on our common experience of “tableness.”

• Social constructivists do not deny that the locomotive exits.
• The issue is not whether the locomotive exists apart from human construction, but how it it seen, what it is, and how it relates to other objects in my experience.
• The locomotive can never be viewed as meaningful apart from human experience.

• If reality is socially constructed, then how can we produce generalizable knowledge?
• If communication is context bound, then how is theory possible?
• Cappella: “In short, when competing knowledge claims are generated, how will they be adjudicated?”
• Good communication theory should not attempt to achieve a standard set of criteria.
• It should be judged in terms of its utility and its potential for enriching human experience.

Is communication a tool for communicating accurately about the world, or is it the means by which the world itself if determined?