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WEEK 7 READING (2) - Discourse, Language and Narrative (IDEOLOGY:
The…
WEEK 7 READING (2) - Discourse, Language and Narrative
The ways we think about the world (our knowledge) are related to the ways in which power is made and exercised.
IDEOLOGY:
The system of ways in which our ideas about social world make (and often confine us to) our place within it.
Or in other words, the processes that form and maintain the social awareness of the individual members of that society.
It's about how people's thinking about their social world and their relative place within it is created, developed and sustained.
Having an understanding of the functions of ideas allows us to make links between the social structure and individual lives, by explaining how people internalise thinking about the social structure and their place within it.
It provides directions for social workers about how and where to challenge inequitable social arrangements through direct practice with individual people.
Main concepts of ideology:
- Content of the ideas
- Processes which maintain that thinking (of ideas)
These help define the person's social place, and there are structures in place that ensure these ideas are built upon and continued.Therefore - Ideology is a set of ideas and processes which functions t maintain individual people in their social place.
WAYS IN WHICH IDEOLOGY IS EXPRESSED:1. Practical:
- The specific behaviour and practices which arise from ideological beliefs
- There may be certain customs or roles which are an expected part of membership in a particular group.
- EG. Social workers are expected to dress and behave like professionals.
2. Theoretical:
- The ideas, rationalisations or conceptualisations which explain or underpin these specific behaviours or practices.
- EG. The idea that professionals should be able to be differentiated from non-professional because of their specialist status.
3. Institutional:
- The systematic organisation of these specific ideas and practices which ensures that they are maintained, and in some ways may take on a life of their own.
- EG. The ideology that a 'professional' denotes an identifiable set of roles, behaviours and beliefs which helps preserve the superior status of the members of that social group.
Ideologies can exists as single ideas, held by individuals, or as total world views that form the basis of the thinking of whole civilisation.
Ideologies are usually expressed as beliefs, actions or in structures.
Question to ask yourself = Does the particular idea in question serve to create or maintain the social boundaries of the people/group, and if so how?
LIMITATIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY:False Consciousness - Truth/falsity distinction:
- The idea that ideology makes a distinction between true and false, and this requires the exercise of power.
- This is an issue for social workers as we are usually the ones imposing the label of 'false' upon the ideas of people who are already oppressed and disempowered.
Clear split between interests and awareness:
- There is often a split between our experience and the awareness/ability to act upon it.
- People do not necessarily experience on a daily basis how their interests might or might or might not be changed.
- This awareness needs to be changed in order to be able to distinguish whether their interested are served or not, and how they are acted on.
Directionality (in favour of some, not of others):
- There is an assumption with ideology that the interests of some groups are always favoured over the interests of others.
- So while some people are advantaged, others are inevitably disadvantaged.
- It keeps disadvantaged groups from recognising how they participate in their own subordination, and thus from access to the means to do something about it.
Overarching superstructure:
- It talks more about powerful phenomena and ideas, and disregards lower/middle-class ideas and phenomena, making it hard to understand the full context.
Lack of plurality/contradiction:
- It doesn't recognise variance in life. (it's more about right and wrong, rather than different levels).
DISCOURSE:
The ways in which we make meaning of and construct our world, through the language we use (verbal and non-verbal) to communicate about it.
- An understanding of how the ways we talk about our world (our frameworks for understanding social worlds) actually also construct it.
- Having an understanding of discourses and their functioning enables us to understand how power functions.
IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE:
Both concepts are to do with the same aspect of social life - How people participate in understanding the social arrangements in which they live.
Discourse places an emphasis on the context in which individual people live and how this not only frames our understandings of our social world but also how we construct our own identities within it and through social relations.
Language:
It provides a medium for communication and channels and shapes that communication and hence the meanings derived from it.
We are naturally limited in expressing ourselves by the medium we use as no communication form can perfectly represent a phenomenon. Our language or form of communication therefore naturally leaves a gap between what we want to convey and what is actually conveyed.
It is in this gap where there is a lot of room for variance, which are influenced by changes in contexts.
Discourse is derived from:
- Expressed beliefs and ideas in society
- The related social practice
- Particular forms of subjectivity
- The power relations (which are inherent in the knowledge and relations between different forms of this knowledge)
Discourse, language and narrative all help to develop our ideas about critical practice in challenging dominant power arrangements.
Narratives:
Specific frameworks / ways of talking about and understanding specific phenomena.
It is one person's story - one version of reality that is depicted by the position and perspective of the person whose story it is, and this version might change according to the context of time and place.
Constructive narrative - When a person tells a story to make sense of an incident, their lives or their situations. They might construct a story from a multiple set of perspectives relative to their changing needs and circumstances, as they revise their views in the light of new experiences.
The role of the reader is therefore to interpret.
LANGUAGE:
- The gap between the actual phenomenon we are labelling and the label we assign to it provides the basis of room for debate about the meanings of the labels we use.
- We have a choice about how we convey what we think, see, feel or experience to other people.
- The way we talk about phenomena, and the choices which this implies about their nature and relative importance, are crucial in determining how we see, understand, act upon and construct our situations and experiences.
- The labels we select, determine what is emphasises, given importance, recognised, included or silenced.
Language labels may carry particular connotations or emotive implications, or may be based on certain assumptions, often unquestioned/not spoken about.
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LANGUAGE IS ABOUT POWER:
Language is deliberate, not neutral.
The language we use is an indication of which value systems or which groups are dominant.
Power in this sense, is exercised through the control of discourses. This is also why dominant meaning systems often go unquestioned.
INTERPRETATIVE APPROACHES:
Approaches to practice which emphasise the importance of meaning, and hence the interpretation of meaning from different perspectives, are crucial in social work practice.
Because stories and meanings might change over time and in context, an interpretative approach is important in that it acknowledges that meanings are and made do not exist independent from the reader (interpreter).
Both the teller and reader can interact in the making (and remaking) of meaning.