Karl Tomm

A Dialectical View of Personal Change

Once one has been sensitized to it, the process of the social construction of reality presents little mystery. For example, Austin’s (1961) How to Do Things with Words satisfactorily demonstrates the existence of “performatives,” a category of utterances that derive their meaning from the social reality they create rather than from any sort of “referential” function. Touchdowns, marriages, debutants, saints, heros, and insults are no part of physical reality, but are social constructs. In more recent years the conception of social construction has been extended to embrace the concepts “mind” (Bateson, 1979) and “self” (Gergen, 1977; Harre.˙., 1977). This “new paradigm” research has in effect returned to Mead’s (1934) problem of illuminating the nexus of mind, self, and society as a process of social constitution.