The Discursive Construction of Society

Abstract

The overall concern of this paper is to consider the concept of society and present some analyses of how `society' is used in participants' discourse as a rhetorical resource. After schematically reviewing several traditional notions of society as they appear in the sociological and allied literatures, we point out some of the difficulties associated with theorizing society and assess the appeal of the work of those who follow Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard in eliminating `society' from theory or proclaiming its `end'. As an alternative to fashionable announcements of the `death of the social', we investigate the plausibility of taking society as a topic for discourse analysis rather than as a resource for sociological explanation or postmodern theory. On the basis of an extensive corpus of largely interview data, we identify various constructions of society in participants' discourse and characterize the rhetorical functions associated with each. Discursively constructing society is an important and flexible rhetorical resource for identifying responsibilities, characterizing social actors and groups, praising and blaming, criticizing conventional knowledge or accepting it, legitimating courses of action or political strategies, and for promoting the factuality of otherwise contestable claims. Finally, extending the work of Bruno Latour, a `performative' account of the nature of the social bond is offered as appropriate for discourse analysis and contrasted with social constructionist, relativist and idealist explanations of discursive and social phenomena.