Social Constructionism

1. Realism and Social Constructionism

Critical realism as defined by Haslanger (2012), as a process of: identifying which social practices are distinct from one another as a result of not being recognised as socially established; focusing on specific social structures in our everyday ‘reality’ world and what influence they place on it. Danermark (2006) further outlines that the theory base beliefs on the idea of our knowledge being independent of the existence of a real world and that there are ‘facts’ that enrich our knowledge of this world. Critical realism has many social practices and structures and as a result our experiences (the empirical) influences the events (the actual) of the ‘real’ world that we witness (Danermark, 2006). There

A contributing illustration of this cycle is Wilson and Kelling’s ‘broken windows’ thesis where the initial stages of a physical or social disorder represented a breakdown of social control or at least a low social control, and when these physical or social disorders go unimpeded these offences increase in severity. Left critical realists believe, unlike right realists, that social inequality is the cause for increased crime rates. The contributing three factors of the social inequality as proposed by Lea and Young (1984) are relative deprivation, subculture and marginalisation. Relative deprivation is a consequence of people’s denied or ‘deprived’ basic needs for a dignified lifestyle as recognised by the structures set by society (Marshall, 2007), in order to obtain the basic needs for this dignified lifestyle deviant acts are committed. Subculture is a notion of a group that joins together, as a result of relative deprivation issues, to achieve a solution to obtaining the same values as the rest of society. Marginalisation is where these produced subcultures are somewhat ostracised from the rest of society and as Lea and Young (1984) further indicate, the increased marginalisation of these subcultures may transfer to crime and thus violent

Social constructionism does not believe in an independent reality, like critical realists do, but instead believe that our experiences exist within a context that is dependent of social agreements, practices and actions. The main components of social constructionism are social constructs, social reality and artifacts (Haslanger, 2012). Social constructs are things that do not exist outside a framework of human subjective understanding that allow these objects to be meaningful. Social reality is where the influence and interactions of our everyday practices occur. Artifacts are objects that only have meaning within a specific context i.e. a photograph without a social reality is only ink on paper (Haslanger, 2012). A main perspective that is made by social constructionists in relation to crimes and other forms of difference, like mental illness, is that people are the ones that create the rules leading to the creation of rule breakers as a result of society telling them they are so—coincides with Becker’s (1963) labelling theory. Two known distinctions of social constructionism is weak and strong construction. Weak social construction uses “descriptive terms and classificatory schemas” to determine between brut facts within their social realities i.e. differences between male and female. Strong social construction believe in no brut facts that create social constructs and do not make the