Understanding Society: Social Construction and Social Imagination in the Context of Unemployment in Australia

Running head: UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY
UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY
A society is constructed through the active involvement of its citizens. The relationship
between an individual and the society is mutual where society influences the way individual’s
life is shaped and individual’s actions shape the way society is viewed. However, societal beliefs
exert stronger influence on the individual and the community.
In this essay, two key aspects of the society and their influence on the individual shall be
thoroughly discussed. The discussion will focused on the two aspects specifically from the
perspective of unemployment situation in Australia. The essay will first provide a detailed
description of the two aspects of societal beliefs that include social construction and social
imagination. Then, it will delve upon the issue of unemployment in Australia and attempt to find
the possible reasons using relevant theories. This will be followed by the use of social theories to
explain the problem of unemployment in Australia further.
According to the theory of social construction, human beings associate their experiences
by developing model of the social world. They share this model with their peer communities in a
well-constructed manner by communicating through messages and languages (Holmes et al.
2014). To put it simply, social constructions are common suppositions developed by the society
and may differ as per the contexts of culture (Whitty 2017).
The first use of the term social construction was found in Berger and Luckman’s work
titled Social Construction of Reality published in 1966 (Best 2017). However, the origin of the
concept is credited to theorists like Piaget and Vygotsky. According to Piaget, social
construction occurs through active alteration to reality in which beginners construct knowledge
by making and examining their own theories of world. Light (2017) while supporting his view
states that Piaget’s approach gave rise to the contemporary theories of cognitive development

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UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY
that contributed largely towards social construction. The author remarks, “The no-man’s land
between cognitive development and social psychology has recently been transformed into a very
busy place”. He further adds, “Much of the contemporary research identified by social cognition
is concerned with the interpretation of social behavior in cognitive terms”. In contrast to this
view, Lourenço (2016) argues that with the development of science, explaining social
construction in cognitive terms have become vague. According to the author, the developmental
stages proposed by Piaget although useful to chart developmental change, must be based on
strong conceptions.
Vygotsky is credited with the development of social constructivism, as he was the one
who completely rejected Piaget’s assumptions that upheld the possibility of separating learning
from social context (Amineh and Asl 2015). Vygotsky propagated that social construction help
understand the cultural development of human beings. In his view, cultural development occurs
twice in a person’s life, once at the individual level and next at the social level. Marginson and
Dang (2017) stated that Vygotsky’s theory helped develop the contemporary theories that define
social construction. The authors argue that the concepts of Vygotsky have helped understand the
social psychology of people.
Social imagination, on the other hand, links the life of an individual with the history of
the society. Social imagination helps individuals realize the connection between larger society
and personal experiences by developing a deeply rooted comprehension in the individual. The
American sociologist C Wright Mills first introduced the concept in 1959 in his book The
Sociological Imagination (Laliberte Rudman 2014). As per the views of Mills, sociological
imagination refers to the realization of the link between “personal experience and the wider
society”. Many experts claim that social imagination in the contemporary world assists in