The Social Constructionist View of Inequality: An In-depth Explanation in Sociology

The social constructionist view of inequality is the argument that the categories on which inequality rests, such as class, race and gender, are made meaningful through social processes and not given by nature, so that inequality is created and sustained by what people define as different and valuable. It applies the ideas of social constructionism to the study of stratification.

Social constructionists do not deny that inequalities in money, health and power are real. Their claim is that the meaning of the categories used to rank people is produced socially, and that these meanings could be different. The idea that some groups are more deserving, more intelligent or more suited to certain work is a belief that is built up and repeated, and it then helps to justify unequal treatment. The approach asks how those beliefs arise, who benefits from them and how they come to seem natural.

The foundations come from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, whose 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality argued that shared understandings become institutionalised and then appear to be objective facts (see Berger and Luckmann).

How are race and gender inequalities constructed?

Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s concept of racial formation shows how race is produced by political and social struggle. Categories of race were created and redefined by states, for example through census classifications and laws, and these categories then structured access to land, work and citizenship. Biological arguments for racial hierarchy were used to defend colonialism and slavery, which shows how a constructed idea can carry material consequences.

Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s concept of doing gender, from 1987, argues that gender is accomplished in everyday interaction, and that this continually reproduces the difference between men and women that supports unequal treatment. A fuller account of the way gender categories are treated appears in the social constructionist view of gender.

Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse argued in 1977 that social problems are defined by claims-making activities and not by the existence of harmful conditions alone. Poverty, for example, has existed in all societies, but whether it is seen as a problem of individual failure, structural injustice or natural misfortune depends on who is able to make their definition count. This links to social class inequality, since public debate about the poor has often distinguished the deserving from the undeserving.

How does it connect to power and Bourdieu?

Constructionists stress that power affects whose definitions prevail. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence describes how the dominated come to accept the categories that disadvantage them as legitimate, and his work on social reproduction shows how this operates through education and culture. The result is that inequality is maintained without needing constant coercion.

The treatment of intelligence testing is one case, where tests presented as neutral measures have been shown to reflect the cultural assumptions of the groups that designed them. The notion of the undeserving poor in welfare debates is another. Occupations dominated by women are often paid less, and a constructionist explains this by pointing to the way care work is valued, not to any inherent difference in its worth. The way stratification systems differ between societies also shows that rankings are not universal.

Critical realists, following Roy Bhaskar, argue that constructionism confuses what we know with what exists. Poverty and ill health are material conditions that cause real harm whatever people believe about them. Marxists, who offer a different explanation from functionalists and constructionists alike, say that inequality arises from the structure of the economy and not mainly from definitions. Others say that the approach can lead to relativism, with little basis for judging which constructions are harmful. Compare also the postmodernist, feminist and neoliberal views.