Gwen:  Hi, my name is Gwen Sharp.  

Lisa:  And my name is Lisa Wade.  

Gwen:  And we are going to discuss social construction and why it is an important idea to understand.  

Social construction is one of the key concepts in sociology, and it refers to the way we create meaning through the social interaction with others.  In this slideshow, we're going to illustrate the depth to which a reality is shaped by shared social constructions, by talking about how language, symbols, color, food, gestures, and, even, people are socially constructed.  We're then going to talk about why social constructions are so important, and how they change.  

Lisa:  First, let's talk about language, a system of sounds and, sometimes, figures to which we collectively attach meaning.  Everybody speaking a common language agree that certain sounds mean certain things.  

[1:00]

This is my cat, Otis, and the written figures that English speakers agree stand for "cat."  As you can see, the word cat and the animal cat are not at all similar.  The word cat is nothing like the actual animal it refers to.  But we all agree the word cat stands for this animal; and that, when someone makes the sound that we say when we see the letters "C-A-T," we all imagine something similar to what we have here.  

Gwen:  Except, probably not so fat.  

Lisa:  Language is just a set of symbols.  We agree that certain arrangements of lines and curves represent a letter, and that that letter corresponds to a certain sound; and, in certain combinations, those letters or sounds translate into things like "cat."  So we can speak more broadly of symbols and social construction.  

Gwen:  A symbol is a thing that stands in for another thing.  

[1:55]

This is a symbol of America.  People all around the world know that.  But it only stands for America because we've all agreed that it does.  It doesn't actually say "America," and there's not a map of the U.S. on it.  It's only the fact that we all connect this image to the idea of America, that it is a symbol of America, and that it makes us think of other symbols, like bald eagles or the Statue of Liberty.  

Two fun example of the process of social construction are colors and food.  

Lisa:  Color is socially constructed when certain colors are associated with certain ideas, things, or groups of people.  

[2:32]

For example, in the U.S. today, we associate blue with boys and pink with girls.  However, it wasn't until the 1950s that our current gender color scheme became widely accepted.  Before that, the colors were reversed.  

[2:50]

In this vintage advice column, we learned that "the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl.  The reason is that pink, being a more decided and strong color, is more suited for the boy; while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.  Now, over time, of course, these gender rules have been reversed.  And today, everyone in the U.S. knows that pink is for girls and blue is for boys.  And if you doubt this, try giving your friend's infant son a pink shirt and see how it goes.  

Gwen:  We also socially construct what types of food should be eaten when.  

[3:38]

In the U.S., this would be widely recognized as breakfast.  Though we eat all of these products--eggs, bread, and pork--at other times of day, this particular grouping foods, cooked in these particular ways, is generally considered appropriate for eating in the morning.  We define spaghetti, soup, and baked potatoes as things you eat later in the day.  

Other cultures have different ideas about what foods are appropriate in the morning.  

[4:08]

This ad for the Korea Times encourages readers to wake up to the smell of coffee, the taste of your favorite breakfast, whatever wakes you up, which, in this case, is a bowl of vegetables and tofu in broth.  Most people who grew up in the U.S. would be startled if they were encouraged to eat vegetable soup for breakfast, but in Korea this is perceived as a perfectly normal breakfast.  

Lisa:  Although, it appears that coffee is culturally universal.  

[4:33]

Gwen:  We also socially construct connections between foods and certain cultures or groups of people.  This, of course, is a fortune cookie, which, in the U.S., is served at the end of a meal in a Chinese restaurant.  Everybody knows it's a Chinese food--except that it isn't.  American tourists are often surprised when they don't see fortune cookies in China.  It appears fortune cookies actually emerged in Japan.  But this historical reality is unlikely to change our social construction of fortune cookies as Chinese, at this point.  They've been defined as Chinese foods, and are served in Chinese restaurants, regardless of their origin.  

Lisa:  Many bodily gestures are socially constructed, too.  While people in the same culture usually more or less agree on what gestures mean, the same gesture may be meaningless or mean something else, elsewhere.  

[5:25]

For example, in the U.S., this thumbs-up gesture means "All right!" or "Good job!"  But it has different meanings in other societies.  Reportedly, in Iraq, it means "Up yours!"  This has caused some confusion for U.S. troops in Iraq, who get this gesture from Iraqis.  Is it being used in the American "Well done!" style, or with the Iraqi "Screw you!" meaning?  A little social construction can make a big difference.  

[5:52]

This image of Michelle and Barack Obama caused a lot of speculation in the U.S. about the meaning of a fist bump.  The public conversation about how to interpret this gesture revealed what's usually taken for granted--that a given gesture does not have an inherent meaning, but is the result of active social construction.  That is, meaning does not come out of nowhere, but is the result of people making claims about what something means.  

Gwen:  In addition to the social construction of language, symbols, gestures, and things like food, we socially construct people according to their characteristics.  

In socially constructing people, we create categories and ideas about what people in those categories are like.  

[6:35]

For instance, in the U.S. today, people generally believe that American Indians are more connected to nature, than other groups, and that women are inherently more interested in shopping than are men.  You might recognize these as stereotypes, which are forms of social constructions.  

Lisa:  Now, social constructions matter because they are collectively-held beliefs.  That is, something has been successfully socially constructed when the majority of people in a culture agree on its meaning.  Once they've been collectively adopted, social constructions can be difficult to change.  

[7:12]

For instance, we all agree that this piece of paper, printed by the government, is a one-dollar bill and symbolizes a certain amount of buying power.  You can, individually, decide that it stands for, say, 100 times as much buying power, but the cashier you explain this to isn't going to care too much about your redefinition of this symbol.  The socially accepted meaning of this symbol has a power and an inertia that exists beyond an individual's ability to change it.  

[7:39]

Similarly, in the U.S., you can't just decide to replace the thumbs-up gesture . . . with this one, the middle finger, and use it to mean is thumbs-up, without people getting upset and you probably getting fired.  This holds for many socially constructed meanings.  For example, in the U.S., no matter how much we dislike the fact that people are judged by the color of their skin, we can't just decide to personally ignore color and, therefore, expect racial inequality to disappear.  The color of people's skin is consequential in our society, whether we personally acknowledge it or not; and saying we don't see color doesn't erase those consequences.  

Of course, social constructions do change all the time.  Groups may actively try to renegotiate meanings.  The Obama fist-bump controversy is an example of this.  Some individuals on the political right tried to shape our collective understanding of what a fist bump means, when they suggested that it was related to terrorism.  Their efforts were generally mocked, however.  

[8:43]

Michelle Obama even went on The View and re-created the fist bump with the hosts.  So the attempt to undermine the Obama campaign by shaping the meaning of this gesture as a sign of terrorism, mostly failed.  

[8:57]

Gwen:  Another example is the way certain celebrities have been able to redefine pink as an appropriate color for men to wear.  Don Johnson popularized pastel pink for men in the early 1980s, but the trend didn't last much beyond the Miami Vice era.  More recently, a number of influential hip-hop stars, such as Kanye West and André 3000, appeared in pink, making it an acceptable color for heterosexual men to wear.  And suddenly pink was an in color for men again.  

Social movements can be understood, in part, as collective efforts to change socially constructed ideas about the world.  For example, both the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements worked to change socially constructed ideas about African Americans and women.  

[9:43]

These civil-rights posters challenged the common perceptions of African Americans as somehow less than fully human . . . 

[9:51]

. . . a challenge echoed by the classic feminist claim, "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."  

Lisa:  The last two examples illustrate why it's important to understand the process of social construction.  If the social constructions of black skin or female bodies are related to opportunities and constraints in our society, then those social constructions are extremely powerful.  It shouldn't surprise us, then, that socially constructed meanings are often the subject of intense struggles between different groups.