Talk:Social construction

message: The article defines social construction as
:A social construction, social construct or social concept is an institutionalised entity or artifact in a social system 'invented' or 'constructed' by participants in a particular culture or society that exists solely because people agree to behave as if it exists, or agree to follow certain conventional rules.
This is wrong, as:
:(i) They don't necessarily 'agree'. They might be socialised into it and never have any choice - or conceive there could be any other way. They unconsciously accept it and experience it as their 'reality'. See for example Bourdieu's notion of habitus.
:(ii) it is not always easy to point at a single artefact as a social construction - the whole social system is socially constructed and deeply intertwined in a  complex manner 
:(iii) it is not always 'invented' (in the sense of deliberately and volitionally constructed) by particpants - this can happen, but more often it doesn't. The construction is more often tacit and subtle and evolves with the interaction of many people rather than the clear actions of one person. It may or may not be an intended outcome of the actions. See for example Bhaskar's work (he argued that society is always transformed, never created) or Berger & Luckmann's account of social construction 
:(iv) the page is about social construction, not social construction*s*. Why is the definition focused on social construction*s* rather than social construction?
The definition needs an overhaul - athe least, we need a valid definition, not one with as many fallacies and holes in it as this one. I might have a look at it in a week or two, if it has not been fixed by then.
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: (i),(iii): How about "any entity or artifact in a society, that exists purely because the participants in the society behave as if it exists or follow certain conventional rules." -Pgan002 04:06, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: (ii): Can you give examples, and an alternative definition? -Pgan002 04:06, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

text: (iv): The phrase "social construction" has two related meanings: (1) any entity that is socially constructed; and (2) the process of creating such entities.  I think the first meaning is more basic, and should be used as the definition at the start of the article.  The second meaning can also be discussed afterwards, of course. -Pgan002 04:06, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Definition

message: I noticed that someone added Wikipedia internal links (the double square bracket ones) for the TMSA and other items, that did not go anywhere (i.e., went to an empty page with only the link title, saying there was no page - please make one).
I would have thought it would be better to leave it unlinked, unless one was going to actually at least add a stub of some sort into the link destination page. For example, a sentence "The Transformational Model of Social Activity" is a critical realist model relating volitional activity of social agents to the development and articulation of social structure - which in turn shapes the articulation of human agency in social systems." By contrast, linking to an empty page seems to me to be either pointless or lazy. If you want to make a link for something, put something in it! :)
What are others'thoughts on this? What is Wikipedia policy?
LMackinnon 05:07, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Links policy?

message: I ran across this page, and was thoroughly confused what this topic was really about. Would it be possible to put some sort of (obviously rough) definition at the top, to at least get the gist across?
: I shall attempt. Pjrich 00:41, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Intro request

message: If there's going to be a merge, I'd rather not see it go this way, but from social construction to social constructionism.  -Seth Mahoney 02:09, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, as far as someone does do it. The content of the articles is almost the same!Velho 02:57, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge [[social constructionism]] to [[social construction]]? 

message: I think this was a very good edit, but at the same time some relevant information might have been lost. I noticed that some of the examples of obvious social constructions were deleted. I guess there is no reason for that and I'll put them back. We should check whether there are some other losses. Velho 04:13, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The only reason I didn't add all of them is because the list is long, and I didn't want this page to become a list of lists.  Hopefully there will be a way, as more edits are made, to add them back as content rather than just as items in a list.  -Seth Mahoney 05:36, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I had put them back (in the introduction) so that somebody who doesn't know anything about SCs could come here and have a good grasp of their pervasiveness in everyday life. Velho 09:16, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

text: *Right, hence the or.  Some, like games, clearly are inventions.  -Seth Mahoney 19:20, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

text: *Agreement can be implicit or explicit.  To take the example of a game again, agreement is explicit.  Gender performance, on the other hand, rarely involves conscious, explicit agreement, though it may, or may involve explicitely not agreeing to the rules.  I follow what you're saying here, and while I think the agreement part should stay, I would be fine with a revision of the wording to make the point more specific.  -Seth Mahoney 19:20, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

text: *I wouldn't say they're the same.  Social constructions rely on convention, certainly, though often they seem to be more than that.  The reason convention is brought into that particular sentence is to make a distinction between conventional rules - those which adhere because we agree to them - and non-conventional rules - those which adhere because, say, some powerful person or group has imposed them on us by force (though there is, of course, some blurring between the two categories).  Regardless, while I appreciate your taking the time to discuss your proposed changes here, you are, of course, free to edit the article any way you wish.  -Seth Mahoney 19:20, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Nicely done!  I don't know if these were your changes or not, but I felt the bold + italics was a bit much, so I went ahead and unbolded them.  -Seth Mahoney 03:40, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Edits by Sethmahoney 

message: Is law a social construct? (What about natural law?) Neutralitytalk 19:31, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Law as "lex" is certainly a social construct. It is debatable that law as "ius" or law as an interpretive concept (or as "integrity") is (just) a social construct. If there is such a thing as natural law, it has the same status as morality. Velho 19:43, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Social construct examples 

message: I cleaned up some POV issues, removing a semi-rant about gender and replacing it with a more academic bit.  I also added a bit about the John/Joan case there, as when I was reading it, I kept thinking about that.  I hope that's okay.  I'll be adding this page to my watch list, as I hope to clean it up a bit more in time to come.Minidoxigirli 06:07, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've changed things a bit (1) to comply more closely to the actual history of the John/Joan case. One of the things Money was criticized for was the coercive methods he used during this child's early years to try to make the constructed gender identity stick. (2) to try to get at what it seems to me is often the crucial fact about social constructs that are the most socially potent -- that they have a basis in reality, but lots of stuff is constructed on that basis that comes from somewhere else, e.g., it is obvious that the average of 1000 Chinese people is going to look different from the average of 1000 "white" people. There are genetic reasons for the differences as there are genetic reasons for the similarities. But lots of claptrap gets added that are stereotypes that may derive from all sorts of strange places.  The "squinty eyes" provide a "reason" to say that the Chinese are sneaky, but nobody ever made a real measure of sneakiness and correlated it with a real measure of the squintiness of eyes. It's just a "likely story." P0M 17:26, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gender edits 

message: Why the smaller font on this page? --142.204.31.41 19:43, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Small Font? 

message: Why is the debate section empty but with a stub notice? some one fill it in. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.27.231.250 (talk) 22:55, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Debate section 

message: Surely there are more examples of theories of social constructions in medicine than just ADHD. I don't personally subscribe to these views, but I have more than once heard autism and PMS described as social constructions. If this information were to be included, we could rename the section to not be ADHD specific. RobertJWalker | Talk 15:55, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  ADHD only medical example 

message: Why should the term0 "social construct" not isntead redirect to Social constructivism? FatalSubjectivities (talk) 07:02, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Questioning The Redirect from this page.