Here is a definition of frames as social constructions of reality:
Frames. What we value in our organizational life is found mostly in our interpretation of it. We know our organizational world only as we interpret it, as we "frame" it.
The main vehicles which convey our meanings to others are the tools we use to talk and think about things, including our language, our cultural myths, larger social meanings of objects, actions, signs, episodes, and the structure and practice of our institutions and organizations in which we live and work. These institutions and organizations , together with our experience in them, construct our world-view -- our sense of how the organizational world works, what is valuable, why things are the way they are and what we might do about them. These are our frames. They define:
Our sense of ourselves, our identity and purpose, how we think about ourselves in our organizational life.
Our organizational ideologies -- our sense of what is appropriate and meaningful , the structure of, and the exercise of power, leadership actions, and roles in organizations, and our relationships with others.
Reframing. In countless ways and unceasingly, our interpretation of our organizational life is often frozen into what we already believe about our organizational life. By "frozen" I mean we sometimes learn little new from our experiences. As a result, we often fix the wrong problem because we make faulty diagnoses, use incomplete knowledge or, to put it another way, we use the wrong or inappropriate frame(s) to make sense of things and to act upon our understanding of what is happening. We tend to "see" and act upon what we know from only what has gone before in our definition of organizational life, what our previous "frames of analysis" allow us to see. We are "locked into" these frames, these "social constructions of reality. " In short, we misdiagnose, and then often try to convince others of our incorrect or incomplete diagnosis.
What we often need to do is reframe our understanding (become social re-constructionists) and take a second, a third look, or even a fourth look. Perhaps with a new set of assumptions and a reframed way of looking at things, we can understand more than we did before, or at least, maybe we can gain insight into why others might interpret things differently from how we interpret them.
Our perceptions about organizational behavior are based on these learned interpretations. This learning is social: we learn from and among others in social interaction. For example, we can learn new ways of framing through the social interactions in this class, i.e., others help us learn by sharing their social constructions of organizational life which may be dissimilar to ours, but give us new insight.