Social Constructionism

Berger and Luckman

The first book to have the term social construction in the title was Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman's influential book published in 1966, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, and this is often acknowledged as the origin of social constructionism—at least, in its epistemological version. As they see it, things that are ‘real’ for humans, for example, social institutions, are aspects of their experience that are independent of their own volition, or things that are there whether they like it or not—they cannot wish them away. Berger and Luckman defined ‘knowledge’ as the certainty that experienced phenomena are real and possess specific characteristics.

The term sociology of knowledge, they pointed out, had already been coined by Max Scheler, but it was [Page 705]from Karl Marx’ earlier work, they say, that the sociology of knowledge derived its root proposition—that man's consciousness is determined by his social being. It is important to note that Berger and Luckman were careful not to focus their efforts just on the world of theorizers. As they saw it, theoretical formulations of reality, whether they are scientific or philosophical or even mythological, do not exhaust what is ‘real’ for the members of a society. It is what people treat as real in their everyday, non-theoretical or pre-theoretical lives that must, they said, be the central focus for the sociology of knowledge. For it is precisely this common-sense knowledge that constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist and function as such. In saying this, they acknowledged that they owed this fundamental insight into the nature of people's everyday, common-sense knowledge of their society's reality to the work of Alfred Schutz.

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