Meaning
Meaning
In the social sciences, the concept of meaning has been understood theoretically in three different ways, which can be called the mirroring, constructivist, and production perspectives.
The mirroring perspective derives from the work of Max Weber (1864–1920), who called attention to the subjective interpretations that people create to describe or explain their social experience. Whether or not these meanings are conveyed to others, they are social to the extent that they are broadly characteristic of those who share a similar position within the structure of social relationships. For example, according to a study of television audiences in Israel, the meanings viewers ascribed to the American television series Dallas had much more to do with ethnicity than with whatever meanings might have been intended by the show’s scriptwriters and directors. Arabs saw the show as a moral drama exemplifying how American immorality inexorably led to chaos in interpersonal relationships, while Jews who recently immigrated from Russia saw it as a social drama portraying the evils of the capitalist system (Liebes and Katz 1990). Similarly, in the United States and United Kingdom, men and women have been repeatedly found to view corporate leadership roles differently. For most men, effective leadership means setting up a forceful and consistently applied system of rewards and punishments. For most women, it means showing others how to transform one’s individual goals into group goals so that teams can work more effectively and harmoniously (Alimo-Metcalfe 1995). In the mirroring perspective, the social meanings that people are found to have about the social world are seen to stem from their differing experience of a social structure in which prestige, wealth, and power are unequally distributed. Although shared social meanings can foster a sense of shared identity, when viewed through the lens of the mirroring perspective, they are essentially epiphenomenal and close to irrelevant for explanatory purposes. For example, studies of corporate leadership styles have largely failed to demonstrate that these differing meanings are related to the style female leaders actually choose.
The constructivist perspective, in contrast, emphasizes how people employ agency in order to create and deploy social meanings within fields of social relations that are contentious, fluid, and imperfectly defined: a world of becoming rather than being. This perspective derives from a variety of 1960s theoretical innovations, including symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, ethnomethodology, structuralism, social movement theory, pragmatics, and social constructivism. The constructivist perspective turns the mirroring perspective on its head: Social structure is seen as the consequence of the constant and contentious efforts people make to create meanings and, by means of communicative behaviors, to frame social situations in terms of those meanings. In its most radical forms, constructivists deny that what Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) would call “social facts”—objectively measurable patterns of social behavior that are external to individual motivations—have any a priori existence whatsoever. For example, medicine has struggled unsuccessfully for decades to define a “self-neglect syndrome” in objective, medical terms. If a self-neglect syndrome can be said to exist in an objective sense, it is only because, within the field of medical relations, some patients have emphasized “self-neglect” behaviors in order to frame the situation in light of their understanding of it; alternatively, a medical organization has identified certain patient behaviors as “self-neglect” in order to alter the patient’s position and rights within a medical organization.
The production perspective, the most recent of the three, derives from the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1993) and, more recently, the flourishing subfield of cultural sociology. It seeks to strike a balance between the mirroring and constructivist perspectives by emphasizing the dialectic between, on the one hand, social forces that really are larger than the individual (such as institutionalized discrimination), and, on the other hand, the attempts by individuals and groups to try to frame situations to their advantage. In order to do so, they draw on the stock of meanings at hand, but they also create new ones or repackage the old ones in new ways. From the production perspective, the interpretation of Dallas offered by Arab citizens of Israel is part of a broader meaning-formation strategy that is being pursued by Sunni Arab communities throughout the Middle East: It involves a rejection of the secularism and perceived immorality of Western societies in favor of a radically reformulated, fundamentalist version of Islam known as Wahhabism. In contrast to constructivist approaches, which almost invariably emphasize interpersonal interaction as the medium in which meanings are defined, the production perspective is equally attuned to the institutions, technologies, and media that meaning-producers appropriate as they attempt to frame the meaning of situations. For example, the rise of Islamic moral and religious fundamentalism in Sunni Arab communities is clearly related to Saudi Arabia’s lavishly funded and influential system of religious schools and to the rise of Arabic media, including satellite television stations, that are independent of Western control and censorship.
SEE ALSO Anthropology; Constructivism; Durkheim, Émile; Giddens, Anthony; Identity; Islam, Shia and Sunni; Linguistic Turn; Media; Phenomenology; Representation; Television; Weber, Max
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alimo-Metcalfe, Beverly. 1995. An Investigation of Female and Male Constructs of Leadership and Empowerment. Women in Management Review 10 (2): 3–8.
Giddens, Anthony. 1993. New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies. 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Liebes, Tamar, and Elihu Katz. 1990. The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of Dallas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Weber, Max. [1921] 1968. Economy and Society. Trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster.
Bryan Pfaffenberger