The Social Construction of Reality
Cover of the first edition
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| Author |
Peter L. Berger Thomas Luckmann |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Sociology of knowledge |
| Publisher | Anchor Books |
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Publication date
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1966 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 240 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 3154402 |
| 306.4/2 20 | |
| LC Class | BD175 .B4 1990 |
The Social Construction of Reality is a 1966 book about the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann.
Berger and Luckmann introduced the term "social construction" into the social sciences and were strongly influenced by the work of Alfred Schütz. Their central concept is that people and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each others' actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized. In the process, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people's conceptions (and beliefs) of what reality is become embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Reality is therefore said to be socially constructed.
In 1998 the International Sociological Association listed The Social Construction of Reality as the fifth-most important sociological book of the 20th century.
Earlier theories (Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, Werner Stark, Karl Marx, Max Weber, etc.) often focused too much on scientific and theoretical knowledge, but this is only a small part of social knowledge, concerning a very limited group. Customs, common interpretations, institutions, shared routines, habitualizations, the who-is-who and who-does-what in social processes and the division of labor, constitute a much larger part of knowledge in society.
“…theoretical knowledge is only a small and by no means the most important part of what passed for knowledge in a society… the primary knowledge about the institutional order is knowledge… is the sum total of ‘what everybody knows’ about a social world, an assemblage of maxims, morals, proverbial nuggets of wisdom, values and beliefs, myths, and so forth” (p.65)
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