Social Constructionisms by Titus Hjelm

Author:Titus Hjelm [Hjelm, Titus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781350314467
Google: __JGEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-05-22T04:18:56+00:00

5

The Power of Construction: Critical Discourse Analysis

By now it has become more or less apparent that despite different disciplinary emphases, the social production of knowledge and beliefs through language is at the very heart of all the different perspectives on social constructionism. The ways we think about social institutions and aspects of our personal identity are shaped by interaction with other people, and the most common form of interaction is through language. ‘Social intercourse’ might as well, up to a point, be called ‘social interdiscourse’.

There is one aspect of social relations, however, that has so far received little attention in the perspectives on constructionism I have discussed in the preceding chapters. That is the concept of power. Power permeates all social relationships, and language use is imbued with power. Most of us would rather trust a doctor’s diagnosis over a neighbour’s in a case of suspect flu – and even more so in a case of suspect cancer. Why? The simple answer would be because the doctor’s status as a trained expert and her expert language in diagnosing the symptoms make her assessments more convincing than the neighbour’s. The doctor – at least in her capacity in diagnosing illness – has more power to shape how we think about the situation.

The concept of power has been an integral part of social analysis ever since Marx and Weber, and a variety of theorists have elaborated and expanded the original classical conceptualizations. My emphasis here is on what could be called the ‘cultural’ approach to power. From this perspective, power is seen as something that is ‘diffused throughout a society rather than concentrated in sovereign organizations’ (J. Scott, 2006: 128). That is to say that power is present also outside of the more obvious institutions that wield power over people, such as the state or the military. The focus, then, is on the construction of social relationships, especially domination, in everyday life. What has later been called, broadly speaking, ‘critical’ social theory (Calhoun, 1995; Agger, 2006)1 is especially interested in the role of power in the shaping of the social world. I have chosen critical discourse analysis (CDA) and especially the work of Norman Fairclough, its best-known proponent, to represent the fourth distinctive perspective on social constructionism (e.g. Fairclough, 1989; 1992; 1995a, b; 2003).

Although I am tempted, I will refrain from using the term ‘critical constructionism’2 and retain Fairclough’s own term, because there are some good grounds for questioning whether critical discourse analysis should be included in a listing of different strands of constructionism at all. Especially in his later writings (Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer, 2002; Fairclough, 2003: 14), Fairclough has identified himself explicitly with critical realism, a view that is often pitted against constructionism (Bhaskar, 1993; Shotter, 1993; Elder-Vass, 2012). However, at the same time he readily acknowledges that reality is socially constructed, but the construction process is constrained by the context in which the discourse takes place (Fairclough, 2003: 8). In his most constructionist line of thought, Fairclough states:

Social practice

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