Behavior Analytic Grounding of Sociological Social Constructionism

Abstract

Despite the fact that many sociologists see their work as being decidedly empirical, those who conduct social constructionist analyses of social organization and social order are often criticized for not adhering to more stringent empirical protocols. Failure to do so has also resulted in many behavioral scientists, including behavior analysts, rejecting social constructionism outright. Social constructionism offers a valuable insight into human social behavior, however, and should not be disregarded. What needs to occur is a more precise accounting of how social constructions are created and maintained and how they manage to exert influence over human beings despite their lack of materiality; behavior analysis can provide this additional accounting. Ironically, as behavioral scientific enterprises, both behavior analysis and social constructionism share a basic understanding: human society in general and social order in particular, are created and maintained through the ongoing interaction between and among individuals. The differences between the two approaches lie in the specifics of precisely how human society and social order are created and maintained. Despite the fact that some have concluded that the differences are insurmountable, a closer inspection reveals that the differences are paradigmatically significant, but practically, minimal. The following article demonstrates similarities between behavior analysis and a sociological approach to social constructionism and also demonstrates how behavior analysis can serve to empirically ground most forms of social constructionism, but most importantly, sociological social constructionism. Sociological social constructionism There are many variations of social constructionism practiced among social scientific disciplines. Although most share a common view that human beings are reflective and interpretive actors, within the field of sociology, in keeping with our centuries-old focus, social constructionism is generally employed as an analytical approach in the accounting for recurrent, repetitive, individual and collective behavior, otherwise known as social order. As such, for purposes of this paper, and to distinguish the social constructionist approach discussed in this paper from other social constructionist formulations, the qualifier sociological will be added to the term social constructionism so as to maintain the focus on this distinctly sociological preoccupation with social organization and social order. Thus, sociological social constructionism is a social constructionist approach to the study of human behavior, but more importantly, it is an approach to the study of the ongoing production and maintenance of social order among and between human actors. Within the field of sociology, there is no definitive treatment of social constructionism as a unified, systematic theory of either social behavior or social order (a review of several textbooks on formal sociological theory confirms this; see Handel, 1993, Ritzer, 1988, Turner, 1991; one exception might be Berger & Luckmann, 1967). One author doesn't even refer to it as a theory, but as merely an argument (Ritzer, 2005). Despite this fact, social constructionism abounds as an analytical method. A recent (8-22-2007) keyword search of the term, "social construction," in the JSTOR index, revealed 182 pages of articles from 46 journals that primarily feature sociological literature. A perusal of some of the titles reveals how the sociological social constructionist perspective is being used; specifically to account for race (Obach, 1999), difference and discrimination (Rodgers, 2003), peacekeeping (Segal, Segal, & Eyre, 1992), grievance (Marx & Holzner, 1977), deviant behavior (Victor, 1998), meaning (Maines, 2000), the medical malpractice crisis (Flielding, 1990), grades (Pestello, 1987), HIV transmission and prevention (Maticka-Tyndale, 1992), and sexual sin (Johnson & Weigert, 1980. …