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American Pragmatism, Sociology and the Development of Disability Studies
theoretical and experiential understanding of what it means to be a
disabled person.
Social interactionism is well equipped to analyze how social
problems, behavior and institutions are socially constructed. As
ROBERTSON (1977: 135) aptly remarks, “We are not born with any
sense of time, of place, or cause and effect, or of the society in
which we live. We learn about these things through social interaction,
and what we learn depends on the society in which we live
and our particular place within it.” According to BERGER and
LUCKMAN (1963), reality is socially constructed through three
processes: externalization, objectification and internalization.
Externalization occurs when people produce cultural products
through their social interactions. Examples of this in the disability
arena are lip reading and signing among deaf people and group
cohesion among spinal cord injured individuals due to the visibility
of and meanings attached to wheelchair use. Objectification occurs
when these externalized products take on a meaning of their own.
For example, the wheelchair symbol is used worldwide to denote
parking spaces and bathrooms that are intended to be accessible
for disabled people. Internalization takes place when people learn
purported “objective” facts about reality from others through the
socialization process and make them a part of their own subjective
“internal” consciousness. Thus, individuals socialized in similar
cultures share the same perceptions of reality, rarely questioning
where these beliefs originated or why. Stigmatization of and
attitudes towards persons with mental illness are an example of
such an internalization process.
Within this intellectual tradition, Irving Kenneth ZOLA made a
substantial contribution to the development of disability studies as
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