social context

Knowledge

2022

We explain what the social context is, its types and a detailed example. In addition, its relationship with the historical and cultural context.

The social context impacts the development of people, organizations and events.

What is the social context?

The context social, social environment or social environment is the space within the society that an event or a thing occupies, that is, the situations of a social nature (that is, referring to the functioning of society) in which it occurred or which conditioned its appearance. That is, it is the configuration of society at the historical moment in which an event occurred, or in which an organization operates, or in which an individual lived his life.

In this sense, every social context is at the same time a historical context. However, it is a less ambitious and less comprehensive category, since the historical context even includes the state of other societies, unrelated to the one that is of interest to us.

For example, if we think about the Irish poet Oscar Wilde, many aspects of his life were determined by the historical moment in which he lived, but at the same time that historical context was different for people of different social classes. The latter is precisely a form of the social context.

Thus, when talking about this type of context, the way local society operates is taken into account, but also the way the object studied is positioned within it. For example, one company may operate better than another in a certain social or socioeconomic context, and a scientific discovery may well be conditioned by the social context of the organizations involved in it.

The set of emotional, social and psychological support networks of an individual at a given time is also called social environment. In this sense, they are very important for the san development of each person.

Types of social context

The social context can refer specifically to:

  • The social class, that is, the place that an individual occupies within the strata of society.
  • The socio-political situation, insofar as the balance of powers of a society can determine (through social policies) the way in which an event occurs.
  • The collective imagination, that is, the speeches that circulate more frequently among the media and the citizens themselves, forging in their journey certain ways of thinking and feeling.
  • The national idiosyncrasy, which is equivalent to the collective temperament or the traditional, customary way of doing and thinking things in a given society.

Example of social context

The reaction to Floyd's death is understood in the social context of racism and violence.

A clear example of a social context is what happened in the United States with the murder of citizen George Floyd at the hands of the police in 2020, which led to an intense wave of protests throughout the country. The social context in which this homicide occurs is that Floyd was African American, and that this group has a long history of systemic racial discrimination in the United States.

Furthermore, every once in a while an African American is executed by the police in questionable conditions. Thus, the social context explains why it was such a significant homicide as to trigger a series of civil and street actions throughout the country.

Social context and cultural context

A very fine line separates the social context from the cultural one. Strictly speaking, the first refers to the configuration of society, and the cultural context encompasses the discourses that a society produces, that is, the way of thinking that sustains it. But one thing cannot logically occur without the other, since societies respond to a great extent to themselves and to their own impulses.

Thus, we could say that the social context of an individual is the way in which he lives the culture in which he is immersed; while the cultural context is the collective mental pattern that society manages. It is possible to differentiate them as practice and theory.

However, we can also refer to "cultural context" as a synonym for educational context, especially if we are talking about a person. In this way, we would be referring to how much he was educated and what type of ideas and training he had access to, for example.

Historic context

Just as the social context exists, it is also common to speak of the historical context, that is, of the conjuncture of local events that are relevant when thinking about or studying a specific event or object.

In other words, the historical context refers to the panorama of the moment, to all the aspects of interest that are contemporary with what has been studied. Only by taking into account the historical context can you avoid making unfair judgments, due to retrospective or extemporaneousness.

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