Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction | Date: 21 April 2011, 10:57
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How is reality manufactured? The idea of social construction has become a commonplace of much social research, yet precisely what is constructed, and how, and even what constructionism means, is often unclear or taken for granted. In this major work, Jonathan Potter offers a fascinating tour of the central themes raised by these questions.
Representing Reality provides a unique and accessible overview of the different traditions in constructionist thought. Potter provides an integrated account that both shows how descriptions are made factual by the use of specific procedures, and offers a helpful guide for future research on these issues. The points are illustrated throughout with varied and engaging examples taken from newspaper stories, relationship counselling sessions, accounts of the paranormal, social workers' assessments of violent parents, informal talk between programme makers, political arguments and everyday conversations.
Ranging across the social and human sciences, this book provides a lucid introduction to several key strands of work that have overturned the way we think about facts and descriptions:
· the sociology of scientific knowledge, covering work by Bloor, Collins, Knorr Cetina, Latour, Mulkay, Schaffer, Shapin and Woolgar
· conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, including Garfinkel, Jefferson, Heritage, Pollner, Pomerantz, Sacks, Schegloff, Smith and Wooffitt
· the tradition of work running though semiotics, post-structuralism and postmodernism, for example Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Haraway, Lyotard, Rorty and Saussure
This broad-ranging and elegantly written book moves beyond an account of major themes and developments to address questions that lie at the root of all social research. What space is there for a politics of criticism? What are the reflexive implications of these for social science itself? The book will be invaluable for students and academics throughout the social and human sciences.
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