Social Construction of Reality
Berger and Luckmann's account of how shared meanings come to feel objectively given.
The Social Construction of Reality was articulated by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their 1966 book of the same name, synthesizing Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology, George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism, and Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. Berger and Luckmann's central thesis is that what people experience as objective reality is socially constructed through three dialectically related moments: externalization (humans produce a social world through their activity); objectivation (the produced world acquires apparent objectivity, confronting individuals as fact); and internalization (the objectivated world is taken back into individual consciousness through socialization). The framework analyzes how institutions arise from habitualized action, how legitimation systems explain and justify the institutional order, how reality is maintained through everyday conversation and 'plausibility structures,' and how individuals are socialized into reality through primary and secondary socialization. The book's enormous influence — it remains one of the most-cited sociology texts of the 20th century — extends across sociology, anthropology, education, and beyond, providing the foundational vocabulary for the broader 'social constructionist' or 'social constructivist' approaches that became prominent across humanities and social sciences from the 1980s onward, including in science studies (where social construction of scientific facts became contested), gender studies (gender as socially constructed), and critical race theory.
Core components
- Three dialectical moments: externalization, objectivation, internalization
- Habitualization and institutionalization
- Legitimation and symbolic universes
- Plausibility structures
- Primary and secondary socialization
- Reality-maintenance through conversation
- Connection to Schutz's phenomenological sociology
- Distinction between everyday reality and other 'finite provinces of meaning'
- Foundation for broader social-constructionist tradition
Primary use case
Foundational text in sociology of knowledge and the broader social-constructionist tradition; analysis of institutions, identity formation, and shared reality; reference framework across sociology, anthropology, education, organization studies; foundation for substantial subsequent work in science studies, gender studies, critical race theory, and other constructionist traditions; basis for many qualitative-research methodologies.
Common criticisms
- Strong-constructionist readings have been argued to undermine the analytical force of distinguishing between socially constructed phenomena (gender categories, professional identities) and physical phenomena (gravity, virus transmission) — the science-wars debates of the 1990s tested how far social construction extends
- Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What? (1999) provided substantial taxonomy of different constructionist claims
- the tradition has been argued to be politically ambivalent — descriptive social construction can support either status quo (reality is as it is, socially constructed) or progressive change (reality could be otherwise)
- methodological challenge of identifying when something is 'really' socially constructed vs only described as such
- Berger himself substantially modified his views in later work
- the popular 'everything is socially constructed' usage substantially exceeds Berger-Luckmann's actual claims
- cross-cultural application of European-Christian-modernity-grounded analysis is contested.
Lineage
- Child of
- Symbolic Interactionism
- Siblings
- Symbolic Interactionism, Goffman's Dramaturgy, Actor-Network Theory
- Derived from
- Symbolic Interactionism