Construction Of Social Categories Research Articles

Between Humans and Machines: The social construction of the generative AI category

ChatGPT’s debut in 2022 heralded the entry of generative AI into mainstream public attention. The radical technology could do what no machine had done before: mimic humans’ complex linguistic abilities. The ghost had entered the machine. In their essay, Phillips, Kalvapalle and Kennedy (2024) argue that one of the important aspects of generative AI is that it participates in the social construction of categories. Many other technologies also participate in the social construction of categories, yet this process often goes unnoticed. Why? We argue that the degree to which technologies are perceived to participate in the social construction process depends on three elements: the degree to which we anthropomorphize the technology, whether its affordances allow for easy interaction, and the vested interests of powerful stakeholders. We agree that humans and machines co-construct categories, but we argue that this process is itself socially constructed through an iterative process among participating stakeholders.

‘Learned Perception’ as a Form of ‘Religious Experience’: Jīva Gosvāmin’s Vaiduṣa-pratyakṣa

Abstract: This article interprets the religious epistemology of the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava theologian Jīva Gosvāmin, specifically his division of perception in ‘learned’ and ‘ignorant’, to argue that ‘learned’ perception is supersensible cognitive experience shaped by learning and language. The article goes on to show that the contemporary scholarship on religious experience can learn an important lesson from Jīva’s epistemology, namely that the social construction of categories that shape religious experience need not involve ontological agnosticism with respect to the existence of objects presented in it.

Beyond their years: Unaccompanied minors and the social construction of categories

Beyond their years: Unaccompanied minors and the social construction of categories

Defining the “queers” in India: The politics of academic representation

ABSTRACTIn the last 20 years, research and academic writing on “non-heterosexual” lives, identifications, and sexualities have developed considerably in India, in a context where lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and queer politics have become more and more visible in the public sphere. When it comes to gender and sexuality, researchers are often activists, and scholarship is highly political. In particular, by documenting non-heterosexual lives, practices, and groups, social scientists participate in the construction of social categories that can be mobilized in the public sphere. Using both Pierre Bourdieu’s and Stuart Hall’s views on representation as a discursive process by which representatives shape the group they claim to represent, this article contends that social scientists are engaged in a “work of representation” when it comes to LGBT and queer individuals and groups. Yet, this process is not without tensions, as there is a deep contradiction between the making of an “object of study” that is spoken about, and the promotion of a political subject, who can speak for him- or herself. Drawing on a corpus of about 45 academic publications on LGBT and queer people and issues in the last 25 years, this article explores the contentious discursive formation of “LGBT” and “queer” as analytical and political categories.

Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing

Against the background of recent methodological debates pitting ethnography against interviewing, this paper offers a defense of the latter and argues for methodological pluralism and pragmatism and against methodological tribalism. Drawing on our own work and on other sources, we discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of interviewing. We argue that concern over whether attitudes correspond to behavior is an overly narrow and misguided question. Instead we offer that we should instead consider what interviewing and other data gathering techniques are best suited for. In our own work, we suggest, we have used somewhat unusual interviewing techniques to reveal how institutional systems and the construction of social categories, boundaries, and status hierarchies organize social experience. We also point to new methodological challenges, particularly concerning the incorporation of historical and institutional dimensions into interview-based studies. We finally describe fruitful directions for future research, which may result in methodological advances while bringing together the strengths of various data collection techniques.

Envy and Exemplarity in The Book of Margery Kempe

This essay reexamines Margery Kempe’s competitiveness as a facet of the emotion of envy. Long seen as a petty, nasty emotion, envy has recently been recuperated by Sianne Ngai as possessing critical agency in its capacity to address social inequality and negotiate one’s relationship to exemplary models. Kempe’s Book is suffused with portraits of Margery’s envy of her neighbors (and vice versa), her envy of holy women such as Mary Magdalene, and depictions of envy as a form of suffering that brings her closer to Christ. Kempe strategically structures her book via the logic of envy, depicting a holy woman navigating her relationships with her neighbors, clerical authorities, and female saints. She uses envy — with its simultaneous identifications and aggressions — to explore the construction of social categories and ideal femininity, as well as to portray herself as an exemplary, singular individual. Kempe shows envy to be an essential component of the practice of critical imitatio, positing new possibilities for exemplarity and community formation.

Essentialism, historical construction, and social influence: Representations of Pomakness in majority talk in Western Thrace (Greece)

Social psychological research has been particularly interested to study essentialism in the construction of social categories and to manifest its potential consequences in intergroup attitudes. Drawing upon this literature, the present study focuses on the argumentative resources employed to construct ethnic categories in a specific rhetorical context: focus group discussions between majority Greek educators about the minority group of Pomaks, historically residing in Western Thrace (Greece). Discussions were framed as an attempt to capture the particularities of minority education and data were analysed by the use of tools and concepts of discursive and rhetorical psychology. Analysis indicates that participants have multiple and complex recourses available to construct Pomakness. Representations of Pomakness as an essential a-historical entity coexist with conceptions of category membership and identification as a result of certain historical conditions and processes of social influence. Essential and de-essential category constructions are approached as rhetorically situated, oriented towards specific rhetorical ends in specific argumentative contexts. They are also considered, however, to be nested within a complex and dynamic intergroup context which reflects the ideological contradictions of the Greek policy towards the minority and which constitutes (but it is also reconstituted by) shifting group definitions and boundaries.

Categories and categorization: towards a comprehensive sociological framework

This article presents a comprehensive framework for the study of categories and categorization. Sociological studies of the classic theme ‘categorization’ seem to have faded in favor of psychological research and – most recently – policy studies, and we argue that present theories lack an adequate conception of the distinction between political and social categories as well as an adequate conceptualization of the different social contexts for categorization. Concerning the first point, we suggest separating an understanding of the political as legitimate use of state power and performative and dislocative practices, corresponding to a conception of the social as that which is beyond political institutions and that which is sedimented and stable. Drawing mainly on French epistemology, the article further discusses three important contexts for social (i.e. beyond political institutions) categories and categorization, namely systems of exchange, symbolic lifestyles and bodily schemes, and moral boundaries and perceptions of normality. These contexts are complementary and each presents an autonomous arena for processes of categorization and construction of social categories. In conclusion, we suggest that much can be gained from addressing political categories in the sociological study of categorization.

La construcción social de dificultades de aprendizaje en las prácticas educativas

De acuerdo con los sistemas de clasificación y los procesos de tipificación, la construcción social de categorías y la concepción transaccional que asumimos en la comprensión de las Dificultades de Aprendizaje, entendemos que éstas no son un hecho objetivo, sino un constructo culturalmente determinado, interpretado y explicado por una comunidad, en un contexto educativo, sociocultural e histórico determinado por la práctica discursiva de las dificultades de aprendizaje.

Gender and diversity from a management perspective: Synonyms or complements?

AbstractBecause of challenges in organizational environments such as the increasing heterogeneity of the work force new management concepts are being developed. There are many contributions such as gender mainstreaming, women promotion, diversity management, multi-cultural communication, inter-cultural teams and the like focusing on different social categories of people. Many of these concepts are used synonymously, even though there are important differences. Thus the paper will present and compare human resource management models focusing on gender and diversity and highlight the similarities, analogies and differences. Furthermore the role of intersectionality in terms of the mutual construction of social categories will be emphasized and practical implications discussed.

Contentious Freedom: Sex Work and Social Construction

In this article, Brison extends the analysis of freedom developed in Nancy J Hirschmann's book, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, to an area of controversy among feminist theorists: that of sex work, including prostitution and participation in the production of pornography. This topic raises some of the same issues concerning choice and consent as the three topics Hirschmann discusses in her book—domestic violence, the current welfare system in the United States, and Islamic veiling—but it also raises some distinct ones concerning the social construction of sexuality and possible conflicts between the freedom of some women (who may choose to engage in sex work) and the freedom of others (who may be harmed by the contribution of such work to the social construction of categories such as “women” and “sex”).

Contesting Category Salience: A study of the perceptions of the sides involved in the Persian Gulf War

Previous studies of political rhetoric in general, and the rhetoric surrounding the Gulf war in particular, have suggested that social categories are not defined by perceptual features of context, but rather rhetorically constructed and contested for the purposes of mass mobilisation. Thus western leaders portrayed the conflict as ‘Civilisation against Saddam Hussein’ in order to maximise the pro-war constituency, while leaders of the western anti-war movements portrayed it in terms of ‘Western leaders against ordinary (Iraqi) people’ in order to minimise the pro-war constituency. However these studies focus exclusively on leaders and fail to show whether ordinary people differ in their construction of social categories and whether those supporting a given stance share the category constructions of leaders. This study of 229 schoolchildren in Britain and Spain was undertaken in the course of the Gulf War. Subjects were given a series of images, which they could choose to describe the nature of the war, and another series from which they could choose images to symbolise the sides involved in the war. Factor correspondence analyses of these two measures showed, firstly, that those subjects who either supported or opposed the official war policy did indeed construe the categories involved in the war in different ways. Secondly, their constructions matched those of the pro- and anti-war leaders. Thirdly, while the constructions of British and Spanish subjects who shared a similar stance (pro- or anti-war) were broadly similar, there were nevertheless differences which suggest that category construction is mediated by culturally (rather than intrapsychically) available resources. In conclusion, the importance of acknowledging that people's definition of categories may differ even in the same context, and the need to add a rhetorical dimension to the understanding of salience is stressed.

Reading Dress: The Construction of Social Categories and Identities in Bronze Age Europe

AbstractThis paper proposes that social identities can be studied through the cultural construction of appearance, since this is a powerful visual mediation of identities and is a component in the learning of social roles. Three analytical principles about the construction of appearances are outlined and applied to different case studies. This illustrates how differences are created in appearance. The main characteristics and trends in appearance during the Bronze Age are then outlined. The studies show that some of the categories cross-cut other principles of identity formation. In particular it seems that while the categorical distinction between male and female affects material culture from the earliest Bronze Age, during the Middle Bronze Age different categories of women are created as well. Through the studies neglected aspects of Bronze Age social relations and ideology are brought to our attention.

‘The Crowd’ century: Reconciling practical success with theoretical failure

On the centenary of the publication in English of Le Bon's The Crowd, this paper examines its legacy. On the one hand, many recent theorists point to the flaws of Le Bon's crowd psychology which are centred on an abstraction of crowds from their social and ideological context. On the other hand, many leaders claim to have based their techniques of mass manipulation on his ideas. How come, if Le Bon's ideas are so flawed, they were so useful? The paper tries to resolve this apparent paradox by examining the crowd rhetoric of Le Bon's most notorious followers, Mussolini and Hitler. It is argued that, far from simply using assertion and repetition to sway a mindless mass, both leaders rooted their rhetoric in a particular construction of social categories through which the audience was defined and by reference to which actions were legitimated. However, they also obscured this ideological basis so as to render it inevitable and unchallengeable. It is therefore concluded that the very weakness of Le Bonian theory is what renders it a useful rhetorical resource. This makes it all the more important to study how social categories are constructed both in order to understand mass political rhetoric and also to undermine future authoritarian practices.