CHAPTER 3
BUILDING REALITY:
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE

Sociologists at Work

Harold Garfinkel
Putting Meaning into Meaningless Situations

People often go to great lengths to establish and preserve meaning, even in situations that may in fact be meaningless.1

Sociologist Harold Garfinkel designed an experiment in which subjects were led to believe they were taking part in a study of a new approach to counseling. 2 Each subject was paired with a person who was portrayed as a trainee counselor.

The subject was escorted to a room and told to formulate a series of yes/no questions about a personal problem he or she had. The subject then asked the "counselor" the questions and received either a "yes" or "no" response. After each response, the subject was instructed to comment privately into a tape recorder about what he or she had learned.

The catch was that the answers provided by the "counselor" were completely random and had nothing at all to do with the questions being asked. Some answers were confusing and contradictory.

For example, a subject might be told "yes" in response to a question about whether someone would make a suitable mate. But a short time later, when the subject asked whether to continue dating this person, the answer was no.

Although many subjects expressed tremendous frustration and anger, they kept struggling to find a pattern of meaning in the replies. Some subjects thought the counselor had learned something new about them between the two contradictory replies or had discovered some sort of deeper meaning.3

The subjects were always able to come up with a "sensible" explanation for the confusing responses they received. If the counselor advised against continuing to date a desirable mate, the subject might have concluded that the counselor was telling him or her to "test" his or her love for the other person.

By showing how people can give meaning to an intrinsically meaningless situation, Garfinkel provided insight into the creation and maintenance of reality in everyday life. One of the taken-for-granted assumptions we make in social interaction is that events are relatively orderly and predictable. Thus even confusing developments "make sense" to us on further examination.

1 McHugh, P. 1968. Defining the situation. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Also Watzlawick, P. 1976. How real is real? Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
2 Garfinkel, H. 1967. "Common sense knowledge of social structures: The documentary method of interpretation in lay and professional fact finding." In H. Garfinkel (Ed.), Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
3 Wooton, A. 1975. Dilemmas of discourse. London: Allen & Unwin.

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson
Pygmalion in the Classroom

Self-fulfilling prophecies are powerfulóparticularly within social institutions. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson demonstrated the power of self-fulfilling prophecies in a school setting.1

The two researchers had spent much of their careers in education and had become increasingly concerned that teachers' expectations of lower-class and minority children were contributing to the high rates of failure among these students.

Such ideas were not without support. In the early 1950s sociologist Howard Becker had found that teachers in slum schools used different teaching techniques and expected less from their students than did teachers in middle-class schools.2

Rosenthal and Jacobson's experiment took place in a public elementary school in a predominantly lower-class but not impoverished community. At the beginning of the school year, the researchers gave the students an intelligence test they called "The Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition."

They told the teachers that not only did this test determine intelligence quotients (IQs), but it could also identify those students who would make rapid, above-average intellectual progress in the coming year, whether or not they were currently "good" students.

Before the next school year began, teachers received the names of those students who, on the basis of the test, could be expected to perform well. In actuality, Rosenthal and Jacobson had randomly picked these names from the class list. The test did not identify "academic spurters" as the teachers had been led to believe.

In short, any differences between these children and the rest of the class existed only in the heads of the teachers.

A second intelligence test was administered at the end of the year. Those students who had been identified as "academic spurters" showed, on average, an increase of more than 12 points on their IQ scores, compared to an increase of 8 points among the rest of the students. The differences were even larger in the early grades, with almost half of first- and second-grade spurters showing an IQ increase of 20 points or more.

Teachers' subjective assessments, such as reading grades, showed similar differences. The teachers also indicated that these "special" students were better behaved, were more intellectually curious, had greater chances for future success, and were friendlier than their nonspecial counterparts.

Rosenthal and Jacobson concluded that a self-fulfilling prophecy was at work. The teachers had subtly and unconsciously encouraged the performance they expected to see. Not only did they spend more time with these students, they were also more enthusiastic about teaching them and unintentionally showed more warmth to them than to the other students.

As a result, the special students felt more capable and intelligent. And they performed accordingly.

1 Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. 1968. Pygmalion in the classroom. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
2 Becker, H. 1952. "Social class variations in the teacher-pupil relationship." Journal of Educational Sociology, 25, 451-466.

Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb
The Hidden Injuries of Class

Even if a poor person has a home to live in and is healthy and eating enough, the consequences of poverty can still be psychologically damaging. In a society that measures individual worth in terms of occupational achievement and accumulated wealth, feelings of self-worth tend to be based on one's ability to amass and consume material goods.

According to economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, the wealthy do not acquire wealth in order to consume goods conspicuously; rather, they consume goods in order to display their accumulation of wealth to others.1 Poor and working-class people are unable to indicate their social worth to others because by and large they have no goods to display.

Inspired by this idea, in the early 1970s sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb interviewed working-class men to examine the lives and conflicts of people near the bottom of the occupational scale.2 These men were employed and not officially poor.

However, they were sufficiently insecure economically to have the sorts of identity conflicts experienced by many poor people. One garbage collector, for instance, clearly defined his failures as the result of his own inadequacies:

Look, I know it's nobody's fault but mine that I got stuck here where I am, I mean . . . if I wasn't such a dumb - - - - óno, it ain't that neither . . . if I'd applied myself, I know I got it in me to be different, can't say anyone did it to me.3

To survive in this world of perceived failure and self-blame, working-class people must somehow restore dignity and value to their lives. They begin to see their work as meaningless and irrelevant to their core identity and self-worth. Instead, they define their work as a sacrifice they make for their families. A bricklayer put it simply: "My job is to work for my family."4

Rather than focusing on the dreariness of their dead-end jobs or the insignificance of the work they do, working-class men come to view their work self-righteously as a noble act of sacrifice.

Defining a job as sacrifice solves the problem of powerlessness in a couple of ways.

First, in return for their sacrifice, working-class men can demand a position of power within their own families: "In exchange for my sacrifice, you will obey and respect me."

Second, framing degrading work as sacrifice allows these men to slip the bonds of the present and orient their lives toward a better future, which gives them a sense of control they can't get through their jobs.

Ironically, however, framing work as sacrifice causes some hidden injuries within working-class families. On the one hand, the parents want to spend time with the children and show concern for them. On the other hand, they know that the only way they can provide a "good home" for their family, which, in turn, will give their own lives greater meaning, is to work longer hours at an unfulfilling job and be absent from home more frequently.

Unfortunately, from the perspective of the child, parental absence is precisely what constitutes a "bad home."

In addition, it is more difficult for working-class parents to sacrifice "successfully." Upper-class parents make sacrifices so that their children will have a life like theirs. Working-class parents sacrifice so that their children will not have a life like theirs. Their lives are not a "model" but a "warning."

The danger of this type of sacrifice is that if the children do fulfill the parents' wishes and rise above their family's quality of life, the parents may become an embarrassment to their children.

The everyday experience of class thus goes well beyond financial stability or instability. People who struggle to make ends meet are caught in a vicious trap. Their work offers no glory or prideóas culturally definedóunless framed as future- and family-oriented sacrifice. But by making such sacrifices, other painful wounds are opened upóincluding resentment, hostility, and shame.

1 Veblen, T. 1953. The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. New York: Mentor. (Original work published 1899)
2 Sennett, R., & Cobb, J. 1972. The hidden injuries of class. New York: Vintage Books.
3 Sennett, R., & Cobb, J. 1972. The hidden injuries of class. New York: Vintage Books. p. 96.
4 Sennett, R., & Cobb, J. 1972. The hidden injuries of class. New York: Vintage Books. p. 135.