Transcript

John Clarke

That's really important cos it's the bit that gets away from the quibbly sense of ‘it depends what you mean’. Cos what that does is allow us to see how the process of defining or constructing has consequences for policy, for politics, for action, and in the end for peoples lives and how they live them. I mean I want to take that a little further because it seems to me that the examples fill out what we mean by social construction, and I want to ask Esther if there are other examples in relation to social policy where social construction can be seen having that sort of implication.

Esther Saraga

Yes I mean I think what's so interesting about the example that Gail's just given is how subtle that difference is, and that's quite hard sometimes for students to get hold of, that it's in a sense one word which might not seem until you start thinking about it very significant, makes an enormous difference in terms of meaning, and I think that's probably an example in which the struggle about meaning isn't immediately obvious to everybody, because there's probably a dominant meaning that comes across in the press and the news broadcasts.

I think there are other examples where it's much easier to see that there is a struggle that goes on and, an example that's been in the news over the last few years which comes to mind is around the age of consent for young gay men, where I think it was really clear to see that there were different kinds of meanings about whether this was something that's a different form of sexuality, equally valid, with heterosexuality and therefore the consequences as we're saying of that meaning is that people should have equal rights within the law, and the other version was that this is abnormal, to be discouraged in every possible way and therefore certainly not to be encouraged as it was assumed by giving people the same rights within the law.

And I think it's very easy to see that there was a struggle going on, and I think what's important is to recognise that those struggles are going on when there seems to be one dominant view that comes across.

I mean the other example that came to mind for me which again has has been in the news a lot recently and over the last few years is around asylum seekers, where you do get a dominant view that asylum seekers are a problem. But what's interesting is to see how the terminology has changed, and that whether or not you talk about people as refugees or asylum seekers may have different kinds of meanings.

If people get called economic migrants that's become something that is almost like a term of abuse, and yet you know I think about it and I think but people have always migrated for economic reasons, but suddenly it's become a terrible thing to be, and of course again when I was saying earlier like the one word makes a difference, and you get this word bogus that comes in, you know, so you get somebody who becomes a bogus asylum seeker, and immediately the meaning is completely different, somebody who's obviously undeserving, shouldn't be here and should be treated in a very different way from somebody who's not bogus. So I think those are different kinds of examples of how just the words we use are very significant but how sometimes we can see the struggle that's going on about meaning and sometimes we have to search a little bit more carefully.

John Clarke

And it seems to me that's very helpful and I particularly think I mean those questions around bogus versus genuine, or deserving versus undeserving I mean are part of the sort of range of constructions that play a particularly strong role in relation to social welfare.

I mean, governments and professionals and public debates often circle round and round who has legitimate claims to welfare and that sort of division of people into bad, undeserving, scrounging, bogus, against decent, legitimate, deserving, respectable, is I think one of the sort of recurrent features that students might find throughout D218.

Gail Lewis

May I add one other point in relation to that as well that as Esther was talking it occurred to me as well that one of the consequences of these struggles over which definition which meaning becomes the one that we all know, is that the one that we all know establishes itself as the unquestionable, the truth, the thing that just is, one doesn't ask the question about it.

And that becomes terribly important in terms of thinking about the relationship between competing definitions, because one does seem to occupy the position at the centre, the one through which everybody else is positioned so the deserving, the single mother who's the widow, whose husband may have died in the Gulf or in Kosovo, in that sense she's deserving and entitled to the range of benefits, and there's no question about her.

But the label single mother somehow, as a definitional sense, doesn't really conjure her up, that's not who we mean, so immediately when you say single mother we conjure up a particular kind of woman, young probably, carries with it the idea that she's probably trying to do that to get public housing in some way, etc, etc. And so there are competing definitions, but some are stronger than others, stronger in the sense that they're the ones that become established as truth, and that's also carried in that notion of social construction and that we'll see throughout the course.

John Clarke

I think that's very helpful cos I think it takes us back in a sense to where Esther started with the idea of having to be sceptical and standing back from the most obvious clear true, apparently true, statements about the world and welfare and the relations between the two.

So it seems to me we…we've rehearsed in a sense some of the key things about social construction, that it involves naming, that it involves definition that it involves attaching as it labels to particular types of people or particular types of condition, and that they have consequences, both for welfare policies and for peoples lives, but also that we ought to be attentive to the fact that there may be other definitions struggling to be heard sometimes, very tiny voices as it were at the edges, but nevertheless as social scientists we ought to be attentive to them.

So that as it were has taken the first word, that's taken social construction. But there was a second word attached to what D218's approach to the course is, which was social constructionism. So can I turn to you again Gail and say, what's social constructionism?

Gail Lewis

Social constructionism is the overall perspective that runs throughout the course. It signals to us the stages, sets of questions, that we want to ask as we go through all the different components of the course. Its starting point is the notion embedded in social construction, in the way that we'd be talking, and that is that language is active. It doesn't simply describe homeless people etc., it sort of brings them into being, it shapes them in a sense, in the sense that we talked about that we know who is being referred to when you say particular terms.

So social constructionism starts from that notion of language as active, but in the D218 context it moves slightly beyond that and talks about…I suppose we could identify seven to eight elements. The first one would be that question of naming or labelling, or making something mean something.

Then the consequences of making things mean things - particular things - is that groups or conditions get categorised in some way: deserving, undeserving, black, white, ablebodied, disabled, etc. So there's categorisation.

But then I think it's particularly in the policy context, what happens is is that different degrees of value are attributed to those categories. For example the married mother in this day and age who manages successfully to bring up especially her boy children and handle some form of paid employment, is valued more highly in policy terms than the single mother who may be recognised but who some way is not quite of the same order.

So this then valuing of the categories leads to some degree of hierarchical ordering. There's a way in which you can see tiers of groups of people or states of being, conditions of life, or behaviours – I mean Esther's reference to the idea of young homosexual activity on the part of men as opposed to heterosexual activity among young men.

Then in social constructionism in the 218 erm sense we would want to then move on to say well how does this sequence get reflected in policies, and how in other words, do policies take a particular shape because they're premised on a particular understanding, a particular definition given to a group or condition, and then in being embedded in that policy and therefore guiding welfare practice, they begin to reinforce and reproduce those dominant meanings.

Then I guess, and this is where a kind of bricklaying metaphor earlier comes in again, is the layers, the sedimentations, the idea that a particular kind of family is seen as the best, and therefore if that's the case there must be particular kinds of gender relationships that gets laid on the top of that family because that family presupposes husband and wife and children living together etc.

So in social constructionism then we're wanting to move through those six elements, but key as well and this is perhaps the seventh element, is the question of power. Whose definition wins out as the one against which others have to struggle, whose definition is embedded in the policy. Whose definition guides professional practice in welfare agencies, and then finally but not least, where and in what forms are contestations to those dominant constructions emerging, influencing policy, reshaping it in a particular kind of way with more or less effectivity. Social constructionism in 218 goes through those layers. We can look at policies in a number of ways and start at any point in those layers.