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Social Construction

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Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics
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Synonyms

Constructionism; Social Process Theory; Phenomenological Sociology

Definition

Social construction refers to the processes that accompany the joint acts through which the social world is created. Social constructionism is one of the two main traditions within the sociology of knowledge (along with social determinism). Social constructionism attends to processes such as objectification, internalization, and reification as they relate to substantive areas such as social problems, gender, the medicalization of deviance, science, knowledge, and truth claims more generally. As Berger and Luckmann (1967: 1) assert, “reality is socially constructed and … the sociology of knowledge must analyze the processes in which this occurs.”

Description

The social constructionist tradition is interested in everything that constitutes knowledge in any given society and the various subcultures therein. In this sense, social constructionism is a radical tradition, in that it does not give primacy to...

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Correspondence to Scott Grills .

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© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG

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Grills, S. (2018). Social Construction. In: Poff, D., Michalos, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1_29-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1_29-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23514-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23514-1

  • eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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