Sociocultural Tradition

Our interaction constricts out reality

Our reality establish our culture

Six theories in the Sociocultural Tradition

Social Constructionism

Sociocultural Tradition

Ethnomethodology

Symbolic Interactionism 

Actor Network Theory

Ethnography of Communication

Structuration Theory

Edward Sapir (1884-1939) Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941)

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Symbolic Interactionism

Through communication our culture reality is:

“The structure of a culture’s language shapes what people think and do”

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Language structures our reality

Cultural differences reflect in our diverse language

produced

repaired

maintained

transformed

Ethnography of Communication

The study of how communication shapes individual identities

Communication is fundamental to the development of the self

Role taking - I & Me

Focuses on micro communication practices and macro communication structures

Communication practices = specific interactions within groups and cultures

Communication structures = social roles and rituals of the groups and cultures

Introduction

Regards social actors as simultaneously using multiple channels (i.e., verbal and nonverbal) and codes (rules for creating and interpreting signs) to create meaningful interaction (such as that required for determining group membership)

Our identity is constructed through or social interaction

We are an extension of the group we belong to

We present our self like we wish to be perceived and we are the product of how people see us

How they perceive us affects how people act towards us, which reaffirms our identity

* One of the seven traditions of communication

* Focused of one’s relation with the whole culture

* How understandings, meanings, norms, and rules are communicated in our culture

* The idea that culture is created through communication

Social Constructivism

Actor Network Theory

in social interaction, nonhuman artifacts play as significant a role as do human actors

the potential elements of a network (both human and nonhuman) are selected, activated, configured, and regulated

Reality is a social construction

Communication is the fundamental activity by which humans constitute their social world as a “real” phenomenon

Structuration Theory

Ethnomethodology

practices - system - structure

we simultaneously use rules and resources to act in our social systems as well as to reproduce the system and its structure

Seeks a fundamental understanding of how social life comes to have significance

to understand the methods and procedures people use to conduct rational and orderly ways of conducting everyday life (HOW?)