Transcending various topic areas and useful to all students of sociology, this article will be of particular interest to students of the ‘Mass media’ and ‘Power and politics’ options. Tim Davies shows, through the use of many helpful examples, how language is related to power in society. Along the way, he covers other important concepts such as social construction, reification, culture and discourses — concepts that sometimes prove difficult for students to understand. He makes the important point that language not only reflects but also constructs our social world, and that the labels used both reflect and shape ways of thinking about society. The article ends with a brief but important discussion about the use of language in political discourse, in particular about different ways of describing the role of the state.
You may have already come across the idea of a social construct in your studies of sociology. For example, if you’ve studied labelling theory you will be familiar with the idea of crime and deviance as a social construct. Or, if you’ve studied feminism, the idea of gender as a social construct. The point of describing these concepts in this way is to highlight the fact that what counts as ‘deviant’ or as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ is not fixed and universal, but culturally and historically variable.
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