The Social Constructionist View of Power in Sociology

The social constructionist view of power is the argument that power is not a thing that individuals or institutions simply possess, but something produced and sustained through shared meanings, language and everyday interaction, so that those who control how reality is defined hold a powerful advantage. It builds on the wider approach of social constructionism, which holds that the categories we use to understand social life are made by people and not given by nature.

Most classic definitions treat power as a capacity. Max Weber defined it in Economy and Society as the chance of a person to carry out their own will, even against resistance. On this view power is something that can be held, measured and compared, whether by a ruler, a company or a class. Social constructionists do not deny that people can force others to act, but they ask a prior question: how do some definitions of what is normal, legitimate or true come to prevail, so that force is rarely needed?

The answer they give is that power works largely through meaning. A social order depends on shared understandings of what is acceptable, who is entitled to command and what counts as knowledge. Those who are able to set these understandings, through law, education, media and the language of everyday talk, can shape what other people want and what they see as possible. Power is therefore treated as relational and cultural. It exists in the way that categories, labels and stories organise social life, and it is exercised whenever one group’s way of seeing the world is accepted as the way things are.

This position is often contrasted with functionalist and Marxist accounts, which see power as based in social structure or economic ownership. Constructionists do not usually reject those accounts, but they add that structures themselves are held in place by beliefs and practices that can change.

How did Berger and Luckmann link reality and power?

The foundations of the approach lie in Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, published in 1966, which is summarised in the post on Berger and Luckmann. They argued that human beings externalise their activity in habits, that these habits become institutions when they are shared and repeated, and that new generations then experience the institutions as an objective fact. Institutions are made to seem natural and unchangeable, a process they called reification. To sustain this, societies develop legitimations, explanations that justify the existing order and make it appear inevitable.

Power enters in because there is competition between definitions of reality. Berger and Luckmann noted that those with the greater means to enforce their view have the better chance of making it prevail. When one group’s definition becomes accepted widely enough, it is no longer experienced as a view at all, and the power behind it becomes invisible. This is why a constructionist analysis of power often looks at what has been taken for granted, as well as at open conflict.

How does the three-dimensional view of power help?

The political sociologist Steven Lukes provides a useful frame in Power: A Radical View, published in 1974. He distinguished three dimensions. The first, associated with Robert Dahl’s study of New Haven in Who Governs?, looks at who wins in open decision making. The second, developed by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, looks at who can keep issues off the agenda, so that some matters never become subjects for decision. The third dimension is the ability to shape people’s wants and beliefs so that they accept their situation without complaint.

The constructionist view fits most closely with the third dimension. If power can shape what people think is natural, fair or desirable, then the absence of visible conflict does not show that power is absent. It may show that power is working well. The same idea appears in Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, in which the ruling group maintains control through winning consent and not only through coercion, and in the Marxist account of ideology discussed in the work of Gramsci.

How do Foucault and Bourdieu contribute to the constructionist view of power?

Michel Foucault is not strictly a social constructionist, but his ideas have shaped the approach. He argued that power and knowledge are bound together, because the claim to know something, whether in medicine, criminology or psychology, gives authority to act on those who are known. Power in his account is not only repressive but productive, creating categories of person such as the patient, the delinquent or the pupil. It is exercised through everyday practices and not from a single centre. See the postmodernist view of power for a fuller treatment, and discourse for the concept he used to describe the systems of language through which this works.

Pierre Bourdieu offers a different route. His concept of symbolic power describes the capacity to impose meanings as legitimate, and his idea of symbolic violence describes how the dominated come to accept the dominant view of the social world as natural, a process he called misrecognition. His account of habitus explains how this acceptance is built into the body and the feelings of individuals through upbringing, so that a person may feel at ease or out of place in particular settings without being told. In education, for example, the standards of the school appear neutral but reward the cultural background of some pupils over others, as discussed in the post on social reproduction in education.

How does language construct power relations?

Language is central to the constructionist view because it is the main means by which categories are created and shared. Naming something can make it real and can give it a particular moral colour. The difference between describing a person as an asylum seeker, an illegal immigrant or a refugee presents the same individual in ways that suggest different rights and different responses. Whoever controls the dominant vocabulary has an advantage in debate, since opponents must argue in terms already set.

Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, gave an influential example. Said argued that European scholars, writers and officials produced a body of knowledge about the East that presented it as exotic, static and inferior, and that this knowledge helped to justify colonial rule. The construction of the Orient was not just an idea but a way of dominating it. Similar analyses have been made of the language of disability, mental illness and poverty. The study of the way language and talk shape social reality can be pursued further through discourse analysis.

The creation of social problems is a clear example. Howard Becker used the term moral entrepreneurs in Outsiders in 1963 for people who campaign for rules and for the labelling of certain behaviour as deviant, and the process is analysed in labelling theory. Which behaviours are criminalised, and which harms are ignored, reflect the ability of groups to have their definitions accepted, a theme developed in discussions of white collar crime.

Childhood provides another case. The historian Philippe Aries argued in Centuries of Childhood in 1960 that the modern idea of childhood as a separate and protected stage of life is relatively recent. His claims have been criticised by later historians, but the underlying point, that childhood is defined differently in different societies and that adults hold power in defining it, remains widely used. Definitions of mental illness, which have changed over time, and of disability, which the social model describes as created by barriers in society and not by bodies alone, show the same process.

The way experts and professions gain authority is a further example. The power of doctors, teachers and officials rests partly on their ability to define what counts as health, ability or need. The article on authority sets out how this authority is made legitimate, and the study of legitimacy examines why people accept it.

The first criticism is that it understates material power. Marxists and critical realists argue that control of resources, weapons and jobs gives some groups power regardless of how reality is defined. A worker who cannot pay rent is constrained by something other than an idea. They say that the constructionist emphasis on meaning risks turning domination into a matter of perception and downplaying the need to change economic structures. Critical realists such as Roy Bhaskar distinguish between the reality that exists independently and our changing knowledge of it, and they criticise constructionism for merging the two.

The second criticism is that the approach cannot say why some definitions win. If all definitions are constructed, an explanation is needed for why powerful groups are able to impose theirs. The constructionist answer tends to return to resources and institutions, which suggests that the structural accounts are still needed. Ian Hacking, in The Social Construction of What?, published in 1999, argued that the idea of construction is often used vaguely and that each claim must be examined to see what exactly is said to be constructed and with what consequences.

A third criticism concerns relativism and politics. If standards of truth and justice are themselves socially constructed, it is not clear on what basis one can criticise an oppressive order. Constructionists reply that showing how a category was made undermines its claim to be natural, and so opens it up to challenge. A fourth criticism concerns agency. If power is spread through all social relations, as in Foucault, it can seem to have no particular holders and so to be impossible to resist. The feminist and symbolic interactionist views of power offer contrasting treatments of this question.

The approach matters because it draws attention to the quiet forms of power that other theories can miss. It explains how inequalities can persist without constant force, because they seem normal to those affected, and it supplies methods, such as discourse analysis, for studying them. It also encourages a questioning attitude towards categories that appear natural. Students should be able to state the claim, illustrate it with Berger and Luckmann, Lukes, Foucault, Bourdieu and Said, and weigh it against the objection that material resources and structures also matter. The related treatments of the same approach to politics and inequality can be read alongside this post.