The Construction of Social Reality

Citation

Whitley, E.A. (1999), "The Construction of Social Reality", Information Technology & People, Vol. 12 No. 4, pp. 403-408. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.1999.12.4.403.2

In information systems it is common to talk about the organisational setting of an information system as being “socially constructed”. That is, the shape of the organisation is not some “given”, absolute thing, rather it is constructed by individuals according to their purposes and interests. Whilst this interpretation has proved to be very useful in analysing the impact of new information systems, for example, explaining why resistance to change occurs, very little thought has been given to what we mean by a “socially constructed” reality and what the implications of this perspective are.

Fortunately, these questions have been addressed by the philosopher John Searle in his new book on The Construction of Social Reality which continues his application of carefully considered ideas presented in an easy to read manner with many examples to explain his points.

Searle’s early work was in analysing the concept of speech acts. Speech acts occur when certain utterances, for example saying “I promise ...”, actually perform an act, in this case promising. Searle analysed in some detail the conditions that were necessary for such a speech act to be performed correctly. The importance of the meaning of what is being said was developed further in his famous “Chinese room” example (1980) which argued against the possibility of computers understanding language by simply manipulating symbols. Speech act analysis has been applied to many subject areas, including information systems (Lehtinen and Lyytinen, 1986; Winograd and Flores, 1986) where computer systems are viewed as mechanisms for analysing the communications between people.

In this book Searle uses the ideas of speech acts to explore how “facts” in the social world come into being and what their structure is. These facts, for example marriage, money and sports games, cannot exist without people. He argues that such social facts are created and sustained by collective intentionality of the form “X counts as Y in context C”. Thus, a piece of paper with certain ink markings on it counts as a five pound note in the context of the British economy. The Y term (five pound note) assigns a new status on the object that the object does not have in virtue of satisfying the X term (being a piece of paper with certain ink markings on it). The social fact of money is a result of our continued collective acceptance of this attribution. Moreover, this new status is expressed in language because the features of X are not enough; money is more than just pieces of paper.

This process of attribution of status can iterate so that, for example, saying “I do” in front of a suitable priest can count as getting married but being a priest is a status applied to an individual in a certain context and so on.

The explanation provided is fascinating and lucidly presented; characteristically Searle uses the first part of the book to specify the terms he is using and clarifying the way that he is using them. What I found particularly intriguing about this book, however, is its direct relevance to the information systems field and its linkage with a number of research projects, such as Ronald Stamper’s NORMA and MEASUR projects (Stamper, 1994; 1996) and Jim Backhouse’s work on semantic analysis (Backhouse, 1991; Backhouse and Dhillon, 1995). Perhaps what is most surprising about this relationship is that the work of Stamper and Backhouse was heavily influenced by Searle’s earlier work on speech acts.

Searle states, for example, that “there is a distinction between positive and negative conventional powers, the distinction between enablements and requirements. There is also a distinction between the creation and destruction of conventional powers. Examples of this are the distinctions between marriage and divorce, and between appointing someone to an office and removing him or her from office. There is moreover a distinction between procedural and terminal conventional powers” (Searle, 1995, pp. 104‐5).

In the context of information systems, Stamper and Backhouse came up with similar ideas, devising methods of analysis and design in which computer based systems record the new status, together with when it was created and who was responsible for its creation. For example, a marriage database could store who was married, when and which priest was present when the couple said “I do”. By recording details about the responsible agents, they are ensuring that the computer is not just manipulating signs, but is also directly linking them to agents in the world. Searle has therefore developed his ideas on socially constructed reality in much the same way that other researchers have developed them independently of him.

The book also deals with how the use of these new statuses becomes part of our form‐of‐life so that “[W]e don’t stop and think, consciously or unconsciously, Ah ha!Money is a case of the imposition of function through collective intentionality according to a rule of the form ‘X counts as Y in C’ and requires collective agreement”. Rather, we develop skills that are responsive to that particular institutional structure” (p. 143). This movement towards the idea of a background against which human activity is comprehensible rather than an explicit formulation of all features of the situation has been developing within parts of the artificial intelligence and information systems literature and it is interesting to see Searle coming to accept it as well.

Searle does not, however, believe that reality is purely socially constructed as some authors suggest, rather he believes that “the world exists independently of our representations of it” (p. 155). Although this “does not imply that there is a privileged vocabulary for describing it” (p. 155) and further “[A]ny system of classification or individuation of objects, any set of categories for describing the world, indeed, any system of representation at all is conventional, and to that extent arbitrary” (p. 160). Thus Searle accepts that there is a single reality out there and that different actors come to describe it differently.

In summary, this is an excellent text that should be required reading for all researchers of information systems who believe that they are studying socially constructed artifacts as it provides a well argued framework for analysing such concepts and will provide many insights to help guide their work.