Sociocultural/Social Construction Tradition
This approach takes the view that conflict is constructed by participants who also produce and reproduce societal norms of conflict through their interaction within groups, communities, and cultures.
Conflict is seen neither as objective sets of arrangements outside people nor as confined to the realm of individual characteristics and mental models. Rather, the meanings, norms, roles, and rules of conflict are worked out interactively through communication. Following Carey’s (1989) definition of communication as “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed” (p. 23), researchers in the sociocultural/social construction approach toward conflict emphasize how the norms of conflict (macrolevel phenomena) are created, maintained, and transformed through microlevel interactions and processes. Conflict occurs when there is a lack of shared rules, rituals, or expectations among members (see Craig, 1999). Variations on this approach include symbolic interactionism, social constructionism, sociolinguistics, ethnography, and ethnomethodology.Given the sociocultural/social construction assumption that conflict is constructed interactively and socially, the methods employed to study conflict are often interpretive. Differing from the interpretive lens used in herme- neutic/phenomenological studies of conflict, the sociocultural/social construction focus is placed on everyday practice of metadiscourse that may give rise to, or transform the nature of, conflict. Researchers embrace holistic, reflexive approaches, such as ethnography, interviews, focus groups, various forms of discourse analysis, and multimethodologies.
In their classic study of teachers’ collective bargaining, Putnam, Van Hoeven, and Bullis (1991) treated conflict processes as social constructions of reality. They focused on rituals and fantasy themes invoked by bargainers and team members during the bargaining process.
They demonstrated how the meanings, norms, roles, and rules of conflict were worked out interactively in two school districts and between the labor management teams. Bargaining produced and reproduced social reality through rituals, narratives, and myths as well as individual and collective meaning making.A more recent study that focused on myth, narrative, and individual and collective sensemaking is Lucas’s (2011) examination of discourse from 62 interviews with people having working class ties. As she describes her grounded theory approach, she notes that she “sensitized myself to issues of social class as I analyzed participants’ words. What does the term working class mean to them? How are they talking about class even when they are not being specifically queried about it?” (p. 367). She uncovered “deep-seated ambivalences [that] arise from the paradoxical conflict between two ubiquitous macrolevel discourses: the American Dream and the Working Class Promise” (p. 348). These conflicts play out in everyday decision making, interactions with family members and others, and associated action about mobility and careers.
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