Definition
Social construction is the idea that many of the categories we treat as natural facts — money, corporations, nations, races, genders, laws, and even crime itself — exist because enough humans agree to act as if they do. The categories are not arbitrary illusions: they carry enforceable rules, institutional weight, and consequences as real as gravity. But the rules apply only because of sustained, intersubjective belief. Remove the belief collectively enough, and the category dissolves or reshapes.
The concept spans disciplines. In history and evolutionary anthropology, Harari calls these arrangements imagined orders — shared fictions that allow millions of strangers to cooperate in ways no other species can manage. In criminology, the same insight goes by names like social constructionism, labelling theory, and constitutive criminology: what counts as a crime is not a natural kind but a contested political achievement, and the boundaries of that category are fought over continuously by legislators, police, courts, media, and communities.
Why it matters
How it works
The three-layer mechanism
A socially constructed category becomes durable through three reinforcing layers.
Belief comes first: enough people accept that the category exists and matters. Institutions come second: laws, schools, religions, police forces, and markets enforce the category, punish defection, and reward conformity. Habituation follows: each generation grows up inside the institutions and experiences the category as obvious, transmitting it to the next with no explicit teaching required.
The third layer hides the first two. By adulthood, most people do not experience constructed categories as collective agreements — they experience them as features of reality. Harari's analytical move, and a move that runs through critical criminology as well, is to peel that layering back: to ask which features of the present are facts about the universe and which are facts about what humans have negotiated.
Three pillars that protect imagined orders
Harari identifies three structural supports that keep an imagined order standing even when individuals begin to doubt it.
Physical infrastructure makes the order tangible and costly to dismantle — cathedrals, capitals, courthouses, prisons, and borders materialise belief in stone and wire. Shared rituals synchronise belief across large populations — national anthems, courtroom procedures, tax filing, and religious ceremonies create the experience of everyone doing the same thing at the same time. Intersubjective feedback is the subtlest prop: the fact that everyone else also believes means that unilateral disbelief is socially costly even if epistemically rational. Knocking out one pillar is rarely enough; the others carry the load until the whole structure is undermined simultaneously.
How imagined orders justify hierarchy
A society of thousands cannot hold together on personal familiarity alone, as a chimpanzee troop can. Shared beliefs about gods, laws, money, and cosmic hierarchy substitute for that familiarity at scale. But Harari stresses that every hierarchy needs a story disguising it as natural or divine law — otherwise it is experienced as arbitrary and therefore vulnerable.
Hammurabi's Code declared that the gods established a ranking of superiors, commoners, and slaves. The American Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal by their Creator. Both claim cosmic authority. Both contradict each other. Both are imagined orders. The function of such stories is not to describe reality but to make a particular arrangement of power feel like the only rational one — so that the people on the bottom internalise it as thoroughly as those on top.
Social construction in criminal justice
Criminology arrives at the same insight from a different direction. Crime is not a natural kind: it is a category that depends entirely on a legal system deciding that a particular act warrants that label, followed by institutions equipped to detect, prosecute, and punish it. Change the law, or change the resources allocated to enforcement, and the crime rate changes — even if behaviour stays constant.
This matters most when asking whose behaviour gets labelled. Contemporary criminology, and especially the entries on corporate crime and constitutive criminology, draws attention to an asymmetry: the criminal-justice apparatus is extraordinarily sophisticated at measuring, mapping, and managing everyday street-level crime committed predominantly by poor people. The much larger financial and physical harms perpetrated by corporations are, by design and by lobbying, kept outside the system's primary view. Crime statistics therefore do not measure harm — they measure the enforcement priorities of a particular institutional moment.
Data infrastructure as a construction site
Crime data — police statistics, victimisation surveys, self-report studies — does not record crime; it records the intersection of behaviour with institutional attention. Each measurement instrument has a blind spot: police statistics miss unreported crimes and are inflated by enforcement surges; victimisation surveys miss corporate victims; self-report studies miss the least candid respondents. Crime mapping takes this further by converting patchy counts into spatial confidence, making some neighbourhoods legible as 'high-crime' and rendering others invisible regardless of the harms occurring in them.
Understanding the data-construction layer is essential for reading any contemporary 'crime is up / crime is down' argument correctly. The figure being reported is the product of the measurement apparatus as much as of the underlying behaviour — and the apparatus was itself built by politically contested decisions about what to look for.
From foragers to cities: when construction became civilisation
Harari's evolutionary account locates the origins of social construction in the cognitive revolution that occurred roughly 70,000 years ago. Before that, cooperation was limited to small bands held together by personal acquaintance — the same upper limit that constrains every other social primate. After the revolution, sapiens could cooperate in groups of thousands, then millions, because they could hold shared fictional categories in mind and act on them together.
The Agricultural Revolution that followed compounded the dynamic. Once grain surpluses allowed cities and bureaucracies to emerge, the constructed categories — property, debt, taxation, divine kingship — became the infrastructure of entire civilisations, with armies and priesthoods available to enforce them. The categories were no longer just helpful fictions; they were load-bearing structures. To dismantle one was to threaten the whole edifice.