Social Constructionism

Berger and Luckmann's Sociology

In The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) build their argument on “classic roots” of Western sociology: the work of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Schütz, and Mead. But classic roots for some are minor literatures for others, and Berger and Luckmann intended their book as a corrective to what they saw as an overemphasis on “purely structural” argument in the then-popular versions of structural-functionalism in U.S. sociology. They “correct” by forefronting acting and interacting human(ist) beings as the primary agents in the constitution, maintenance, and change of the social.

Berger and Luckmann (1966) contend that “reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyze the process in which this occurs” (p. 1). They treat this project as one equally relevant to academic philosophy and to everyday life, but their constructionism is distinct from philosophical argument and analysis. Rather than asking ontological and epistemological questions such as “What is real?” and “How is one to know?,” Berger and Luckmann shift attention to more specifically pragmatic considerations appropriate to an empirical, by which they mean “scientific,” sociology. Central among these are the following: What does a collection of people located at a particular time and in a particular place take to be “real,” and how is this construction to be understood as something they do? How are their conceptions linked to relevant social and historical contexts? How are differences in social realities/constructions/worlds across different collections of people understood as implicating those varying contexts? The very existence of difference in such social realities and contexts, they argue, underwrites the need for studying the social processes through which such difference has come about and by which it is maintained as well as changed. They assert that the sociology of knowledge “must concern itself with whatever passes for ‘knowledge’ in a society, regardless of the ultimate validity or invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such ‘knowledge’” (p. 3).

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