The socio-cultural tradition views communication and language as central to the construction of culture and reality. Pioneered by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, this tradition posits that the structure of a culture's language shapes thought and behavior. Through interaction and communication, meanings, norms, and rules are constructed and cultures are established. Reality is seen as an interactive social process rather than an objective fact.

2. The socio-cultural tradition is
based on the premise that as
people communicate they
produce and reproduce
culture

3. University of Chicago linguist
Edward Sapir and his student
Benjamin Lee Whorf were
pioneers in the socio-cultural
tradition

4. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
of linguistic relativity states
that the structure of a culture’s
language shapes what people
think and do

5. Language structures our
of reality

6. Our cultural differences are
reflected in our diverse
languages

7. Contemporary socio-cultural
theorists claim that it is
through the process of
communication that our
reality is produced,
maintained, repaired, and
transformed

8. Socio-cultural approaches to
communication theory
address the ways our
understandings, meanings,
norms, roles, and rules are
worked out interactively in
communication

9. Such theories explore the
interactional worlds in which
people live, positing the idea that
reality is not an objective set of
arrangements outside us but is
constructed through a process of
interaction in groups,
communities and cultures.

10. Our interactions construct our
realities; our realities establish
our cultures

11. Key ideas of the socio-cultural
traditions
0 Focus is on patterns of interaction between people
rather than on individual characteristics or mental
models.
0 Interaction is the process and site in which meanings,
roles, rules, and cultural values are worked out.
0 This tradition is very interested in the processes of
communication that occur in actual situations.

12. Key ideas of the socio-cultural
traditions
0 The tradition is interpretive rather than positivist.
0 Variations in the tradition: symbolic interactionism,
constructionism, and socio-linguistics.
0 Ethnography and ethnomethodology have been great
influence on the socio-cultural tradition.

13. Symbolic Interactionism (SI)
0 The key idea is that social structures and meaning are
created and maintained in social interaction.
0 Pioneers are sociologists, Herbert Blumer and George
Herbert Mead, who emphasized the importance of
participant observation in the study of
communication as a way of exploring social
relationships.

14. Social Constructionism
0 Originally called social construction of reality after the
work Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, this line of
research has been investigating how human
knowledge is constructed through social interaction.

15. Sociolinguistics
0 The study of language and culture.
0 Philosophy of language: meaning of language depends
on its actual use; the works of German philosopher,
Ludwig Wittgenstein.
0 Language as speech acts. When you speak you are
actually performing an act.

16. Ethnography
0 The observation of how actual social groups come to
build meaning through their linguistic behaviours.
0 Ethnomethodology – the careful observation of micro-
behaviours in real situations.