The Socio-cultural TraditionCommunication as the creation and enactment of social reality

The socio-cultural tradition is based on the premise that as

people communicate they produce and reproduce

culture

University of Chicago linguist Edward Sapir and his student

Benjamin Lee Whorf were pioneers in the socio-cultural

tradition

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity states

that the structure of a culture’s language shapes what people

think and do

Language structures our

of reality

Our cultural differences are reflected in our diverse

languages

Contemporary socio-cultural theorists claim that it is through the process of

communication that our reality is produced,

maintained, repaired, and transformed

Socio-cultural approaches to communication theory address the ways our

understandings, meanings, norms, roles, and rules are worked out interactively in

communication

Such theories explore the interactional worlds in which people live, positing the idea

that reality is not an objective set of arrangements outside us

but is constructed through a process of interaction in groups,

communities and cultures.

Our interactions construct our realities; our realities establish

our cultures

Key ideas of the socio-cultural traditions

0Focus is on patterns of interaction between people rather than on individual characteristics or mental models.

0 Interaction is the process and site in which meanings, roles, rules, and cultural values are worked out.

0This tradition is very interested in the processes of communication that occur in actual situations.

Key ideas of the socio-cultural traditions

0The tradition is interpretive rather than positivist.0Variations in the tradition: symbolic interactionism,

constructionism, and socio-linguistics.0Ethnography and ethnomethodology have been great

influence on the socio-cultural tradition.

Symbolic Interactionism (SI)

0The key idea is that social structures and meaning are created and maintained in social interaction.

0Pioneers are sociologists, Herbert Blumer and George Herbert Mead, who emphasized the importance of participant observation in the study of communication as a way of exploring social relationships.

Social Constructionism

0Originally called social construction of reality after the work Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, this line of research has been investigating how human knowledge is constructed through social interaction.

Sociolinguistics

0The study of language and culture.0Philosophy of language: meaning of language depends

on its actual use; the works of German philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

0Language as speech acts. When you speak you are actually performing an act.

Ethnography

0The observation of how actual social groups come to build meaning through their linguistic behaviours.

0Ethnomethodology – the careful observation of micro-behaviours in real situations.