617489

research-article2015
CUS0010.1177/1749975515617489Cultural SociologyVera

Editorial Article
Cultural Sociology
2016, Vol. 10(1) 3­–20
Rebuilding a Classic: The Social © The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
Construction of Reality at 50 sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1749975515617489
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Hector Vera
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico

Abstract
This paper traces the eventful legacy of The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann, which has been widely acclaimed as a classic text in sociology, but also has
been subject to glaring and persistent misinterpretations. The paper discusses the inception
and significance of the title along with the principal arguments of the authors’ work. The main
achievements and shortfalls of the intellectual project behind the book are considered. The
paper also introduces the contents of a special issue of Cultural Sociology to commemorate the
50th anniversary of the book’s publication.

Keywords
Berger, Luckmann, social construction, reality, social theory, sociology, sociology of knowledge

An Eventful Legacy
In the world of academic social sciences, one that is overpopulated, utterly competitive,
permanently eager for novelties – no matter how superficial – and shaped by the endless
cycle of rising and declining fads, it is rare for a publication to receive far-reaching and
perennial acknowledgement. The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann, is one of those extraordinary volumes.
First published in 1966, while its authors were still in their 30s, The Social Construction
had an immediate, unforeseen, and enduring success according to all the conventional
indicators including readership, sales, translations, commentary, and citations.1 Thus far,
it has been translated into 18 languages and has never gone out of print. The vocabulary
utilized and a number of the central themes of the book are seen as precursors to the theo-
retical outlook of what today are defined as the ‘new sociologies’ (Corcuff, 2011). It is a
fixture within the catalogs of ‘major works of sociology’ (e.g. Kaesler and Vogt, 2000:

Corresponding author:
Hector Vera, Instituto de Investigaciones Sobre la Universidad y la Educación, Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, Ciudad de Mexico, 04510, Mexico.
Email: hhvera@hotmail.com
4 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

39–44). Ultimately, professional sociologists classify The Social Construction among

the most relevant books of the previous century.2
Despite the aforementioned achievements, the publication has had a complex trajec-
tory. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of The Social Construction, Luckmann
(1992: 4) wrote a brief piece that opened with the Latin phrase ‘habent sua fata libelli’,
an aphorism usually understood as ‘books have their own destinies’. Moreover, it is the
concluding section of the expression ‘Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli’, which
means ‘According to the capacity of the reader, books have their destiny’. It is not clear
to which of those two meanings Luckmann was referring, but he suggested that a meas-
ure of the success of The Social Construction was due to inattentive readings, and that
among the people who frequently refer to the book, a few probably only read the title
(and do not understand it).

Nomen est Omen – Name is Destiny

‘A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them’, said Umberto Eco (1984:
3) when referring to his novel The Name of the Rose. It is difficult to envision that such
was Berger and Luckmann’s intention when they chose the title of their book, but it
certainly complicated the understanding for numerous readers. The formula of ‘social
construction’ contained in the title remains one of the most apparent legacies of the
book, but also perhaps the most perfunctory. Comparable to other distinguished con-
cepts in the social sciences and humanities, such as ‘paradigm’ and ‘deconstruction’, the
formula of ‘social construction’ has been appropriated and used – or misused – in exten-
sive and diverse social circles.
The trajectory of the maxim ‘social construction of …’ and the exhausting effect of its
overuse has been documented elsewhere (Abbott, 2000; Hacking, 1999). It is a phrase so
suggestive and catchy that it became a fertile source of inspiration for pastiches; for
example, it is commonplace to encounter titles such as ‘The Social Destruction of
Reality’, ‘The Reality of Social Construction’, ‘The Construction of Social Reality’, etc.
Additionally, academics repeatedly apply the phrase to name their works, and the con-
notation of ‘social construction’ has become notably obscured.
Furthermore, the concept of ‘social construction’ is frequently professed behind aca-
demic walls. It regularly appears in the mass media associated with topics such as race
or gender. Even the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) currently includes questions
in which the prospective medical students who take the standardized exam have to define
‘social constructionism’ (Dembosky, 2015). But despite the prevalent application of the
expression – or maybe because of it – its connection with the substance of Berger and
Luckmann’s book has often been lost completely.
For many, suggesting that something is ‘socially constructed’, simply purports that
it is not ‘natural’, that it is an entity that exists in the human realm. That is what people
usually convey when they proclaim that age or family structures are merely ‘social
constructions’ – unlike asteroids, trilobites, Mount Everest, or photosynthesis.
However, this is not the most accurate employment of the concept. In Berger and
Luckmann’s work there is a more precise meaning that makes the idea of ‘social con-
struction’ more helpful. In this narrower, primitive sense, ‘social construction’ draws
Vera 5

attention to what people conceive to be real and what is taken for granted while con-
ducting everyday life. Those definitions of what is real have to be sustained by institu-
tions, explained by legitimations, and maintained by social and symbolic mechanisms.
Moreover, the social construction of reality is an element of the continuing human
activity in the world, and one of the essential dynamics in the production and reproduc-
tion of social life (Vera, 2015: 173–175).
The misconceptions surrounding The Social Construction are a fascinating case of
what Anthony Giddens (1984: 284) called the ‘double hermeneutic’, the process in
which scientific terminology is appropriated by non-experts, involving the constant
slippage and intersection between the metalanguages invented by social scientists and
the understandings of lay actors, or as Berger referred to it, the ‘unintended conse-
quences of publishing one’s ideas’ (2011: 93). Ironically, it is one of the fundamental
teachings of The Social Construction that the products of human activity, when they
become objectivated, can act back upon their creators and look as something com-
pletely alien to them.
In considering the aforementioned issues, it seems appropriate to reconstruct the
meaning and the making of the concept as initially developed by Berger and Luckmann.

Forging a Memorable Title

Berger and Luckmann’s first joint collaboration was the article ‘Sociology of Religion
and Sociology of Knowledge’ (1963). In that text, they presented, in nascent form, a few
of the essential ideas that comprise The Social Construction; however, the phrase ‘social
construction of reality’ was not present. Before it became the title of the book, the phrase
was used particularly by Berger to synthetize his vision of what the sociology of knowl-
edge should be.
Three years prior to The Social Construction, in his Invitation to Sociology, Berger
(1963) stated one of the basic principles in the sociology of knowledge: society supplies
individuals with the values, logics and stocks of information that constitute their knowl-
edge. However, he added a particular element that emanated from the phenomenological
tradition: the majority of individuals do not feel the need to reevaluate the worldview that
they inherited, which appears to them as self-evident and self-validating. He summarized
this position by proclaiming that ‘to put this perspective of the sociology of knowledge
into one succinct statement: Reality is socially constructed’ (1963: 117–118). Further
down, Berger described the relevance of reference-group theory to the sociology of
knowledge, signaling that the social affiliation of a person carries with it particular cog-
nitive commitments – i.e. groups are vantage points on the world. In this context, Berger
asserted that if ‘the sociology of knowledge gives us a broad view of the social construc-
tion of reality, reference-group theory shows us the many little workshops in which
cliques of universe builders hammer out their models of the cosmos’ (1963: 119–120,
emphasis added). To my knowledge, this was the first time that the phrase ‘social con-
struction of reality’ appeared in a printed text.3
The Social Construction of Reality is a title containing three prevailing words, each
carrying a heavy load of semantic associations and theoretical traditions. Analyzing each
of those individual words can reveal much concerning the intentions behind the book.
6 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

Social
The adjective ‘social’ was required in the title to differentiate the collective and historical
processes of the construction of reality from the ‘psychological’ phenomena studied, for
example, in Jean Piaget’s The Construction of Reality in the Child (1954 [1937]).4 The
work of Piaget examines how children make the elementary concepts that constitute their
intelligence. More specifically, Piaget said that he was trying ‘to understand how the
real categories of sensorimotor intelligence are organized, that is, how the world is con-
structed by means of this instrument’ (1954 [1937]: 350). These ideas were related to
Berger and Luckmann’s project, but they were clearly insufficient. One of their aims was
to demonstrate that the world is already structured before the individual arrives on the
scene. It is not by accident that we construct reality in almost identical ways to the people
who guide us through primary socialization. The processes that shape our definition of
reality are collective; whatever a person considers to be real is something that this indi-
vidual shares with other members of their own society (i.e. members of their reference
group, community, or culture).
For any reality to be firm and enduring, it must be a shared reality. Personal or indi-
vidual realities, whatever these may consist of, are precarious and highly contingent.
Realities are taken for granted, looked upon as self-evident, and possess a massive facticity
only when they are inherited from others in our initial years of life, and when they are
maintained and reinforced by collective mechanisms. Our paramount reality (everyday
reality) exists as an intersubjective reality.
Without the adjective ‘social’ in the title, this critical dimension would not be cap-
tured. This clarification is pertinent because even today one of the most common mis-
conceptions regarding the idea of ‘construction’ is to see it as a proxy for subjectivism or,
even worse, for an individual’s unique point of view – for instance, psychologists who
have adopted the banner of ‘constructivism’ define it as a theory that considers that ‘each
person perceives the world differently and creates their own meanings from events’
(Burr, 2003: 201).

Construction
What ‘construction’ signifies in the phrase ‘the social construction of reality’ is more
challenging to elucidate, principally because it means at least two distinct things.5 It is
interesting to read the respective interviews with Berger and Luckmann in this volume
and to compare their comments regarding the term ‘construction’. Berger claims that they
could have employed ‘interpretation’ instead of ‘construction’ – and the book would
have been called The Social Interpretation of Reality. Luckmann, on the other hand,
attests that perhaps he would have preferred to adopt the term ‘building’, using it as both
a noun and a verb (and he mentions Schutz’s Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt).6
According to this alterative application, their book would have been titled The Social
Building of Reality.
These seemingly discordant views reflect the fact that The Social Construction is
making inroads both in the subfield of the sociology of knowledge and in sociological
theory in general. As ‘The Social Interpretation of Reality’, it is a work pertaining to the
Vera 7

sociology of knowledge, and its central proposition is that whatever is regarded (con-
ceived, interpreted, constructed) as reality is considered as such as a result of social
processes. In other words, what people ‘know’ (what they think is ‘real’) is socially vari-
able and the product of collective dynamics.
On the other hand, as ‘The Social Building of Reality’, it is a book on sociological
theory, which claims that social reality is humanly created. Society is built (fabricated,
manufactured, produced, constructed) by the meaningful actions of human beings – society,
in turn, retroacts upon human beings and creates them. ‘Construction’ implies that the
social world is built and maintained by the transformative activity of individuals who
construct society as their ‘second nature’. Here the concept of ‘action’ (informed by
Marx’s ideas of labor and praxis, and by Weberian sociology) is the ‘term expressing a
recognition of the constructedness of society’ (Berger, 1986: 222). Ultimately, Berger
and Luckmann persisted with the notion that ‘human history is self-made’, that institu-
tions are not the product of genetic programs, but that they are instead constructed in
social interaction (Luckmann, 2013: 43). Or as Berger and Pullberg put it:

Every human society can […] be understood as a world-building enterprise, that is, as world-
building human activity. The reality of such a world is given neither in itself nor once and for
all. It must be constructed and reconstructed over and over again. (1965: 201)

Evidently, their sociology of knowledge and their sociological theory are not isolated,
discrete notions. The mechanisms through which something is conceived as reality, and
the process through which the social world is built, are intimately intertwined. What
people consider to be real is the product of the society they inhabit; and the society in
which people live is constructed by their own activity. That is why Berger and Luckmann
insisted that the sociology of knowledge should be at the core of sociological theory
(1966: 16). They elaborated on this in their frequently quoted passage:

Knowledge […] is at the heart of the fundamental dialectic of society. It ‘programs’ the channels
in which externalization produces an objective world. It objectifies this world through language
and the cognitive apparatus based on language, that is, it orders it into objects to be apprehended
as reality. It is internalized again as objectively valid truth in the course of socialization.
Knowledge about society is thus a realization in the double sense of the word, in the sense of
apprehending the objectivated social reality, and in the sense of ongoingly producing this
reality (1966: 62).

Reality
What do Berger and Luckmann allude to by ‘reality’ when they talk about ‘the social
construction of reality’? What is socially constructed? In brief, the word ‘reality’ is
mainly a shorthand for ‘what is regarded as reality’, ‘what is socially viewed as reality’,
and ‘what is taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society’. The book
is thus an elucidation of the social process of fabricating what is socially defined as real-
ity. It is in this sense that Berger and Kellner assert that ‘the sociology of knowledge is
an enormous elaboration of Pascal’s insight into the social relativity of human notions of
8 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

truth. Put differently, the sociology of knowledge understands and studies the constructed
character of what human beings mean by “reality”’ (1981: 59, original emphasis).
There are two primary sources of inspiration from which Berger and Luckmann
derived their sociological concept of ‘reality’. The most easily recognizable is Schutz’s
work on ‘multiple realities’. Schutz seized the idea of a ‘theory of various orders of real-
ity’ from William James’s chapter on the perception of reality in the Principles of
Psychology; he was particularly intrigued by a question posed by James: ‘Under what
circumstances do we think things real?’ (Schutz, 1962: 207, 1964: 135). From there
Schutz developed the concept of ‘finite provinces of meaning’ upon which an individual
could confer an ‘accent of reality’ (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973: 23).
The other source of inspiration, which is as essential but not as widely recognized, is
W.I. Thomas’s maxim: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their conse-
quences’ (Thomas and Thomas, 1928: 572), which afterwards Robert Merton (1948:
193) famously labeled as the ‘Thomas theorem’. Prior to The Social Construction, Berger
insisted on the importance of Thomas’s concept regarding the ‘definition of the situation’
for sociological analysis. This concept, Berger said, implies that ‘a social situation is
what it is defined to be by its participants. [… F]or the sociologist’s purposes reality is a
matter of definition’ (1963: 84). Berger observed in the Thomas theorem an idea that
should be advanced:

Thomas’ well-known dictum on the ‘real consequences’ of social definition was presumably
intended, and has been generally understood as intending, to say that once ‘reality’ has been
defined, people will act as if it were indeed so. To this important proposition must be added an
understanding of the realizing (that is, reality-producing) potency of social definition. This
social-psychological import of Thomas’ ‘basic theorem’ was developed by Merton. The
sociology of knowledge […] would extend this notion of the social construction of ‘reality’
even further (1966a: 108, original emphasis)

It is not difficult to recognize that The Social Construction was precisely the materializa-
tion of that intention to propel Thomas’ insight on the reality-producing potency of social
definitions to its final consequences.

Achievements and Anonymous Triumphs

As notable as it was, the enticing title of the book was just a small part of its success;
innovative ideas and a well-crafted prose did the heavy lifting. In The Social Construction
Berger and Luckmann achieved some of the principal goals they had established. In their
clash against functionalism, for instance, they – alongside many other members of their
generation – ended up triumphant. Their theory of institutionalization, which covers half
of the central chapter of the book (1966: 45–85), has been profoundly influential in the
field of institutional research (Meyer, 2008). Furthermore, their call for a renewal of the
sociology of knowledge was a resounding success. They sought to broaden the subject
matter of that particular sub-discipline and it has indeed transcended being a sort of
social history of ideas or a mere theory of ideologies. Today the great importance of
studying everyday knowledge (non-theoretical or pre-theoretical thought), and not only
Vera 9

ideas (scientific, philosophical, or mythological theorizations), is unanimously accepted

in the social sciences.
Berger and Luckmann also have garnered praise for the elegance in their ‘integrative
intention’ to synthesize in a single theory a multitude of apparently opposing traditions
in the field of sociology. They connected, seemingly effortlessly, various separate theo-
retical strands. Fortunately for the readers, they forged this theoretical synthesis avoiding
the temptation – or the perceived obligation – to tackle the totality of the intellectual
history regarding the principles they borrowed from Durkheim, Weber, Mead, Marx,
Gehlen, phenomenology, etc.. Had their style of theoretical elucidation been similar to
those of, say, Parsons or Habermas, they would have written an 800-page book filled
with detailed analyses of theoretical and philosophical concepts, and ultimately their
actual contributions would have been reduced to a pair of excursuses or concluding chap-
ters. Luckily, they decided to focus on their own program and they wrote a brief and
dynamic book presented with great clarity. As Charles Lemert (1992: 10) remarked,
‘I cannot think of a single book that presents with such exquisite parsimony so many
different ideas so well’.
The idea of bringing together seemingly conflicting sociological models into a theory
that recognizes the importance of both subjectively meaningful human activity and the
objective facticity of society, became a staple of some of the most influential sociological
theorists of the last quarter of the 20th century. In this regard The Social Construction
was a forerunner to Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘genetic structuralism’ (or ‘structural constructiv-
ism’, as he also referred to it) and Giddens’ structuration theory. A few years after the
publication of The Social Construction, when Bourdieu started to outline his theory
of practice, he used a vocabulary with an unequivocal resemblance to Berger and
Luckmann’s dialectic of society and individual. He talked, for example, of ‘establishing
an experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the
externalization of internality’ (1977 [1972]: 72, original emphasis). Even in his later
works, Bourdieu openly utilized Berger and Luckmann’s key phrase while describing his
pivotal concept of habitus: ‘a specific mode of thought […], the principle of a specific
construction of reality, grounded in a prereflexive belief in the undisputed value of the
instruments of construction and of the objects thus constructed’ (2000 [1997]: 99–100,
emphasis added). On the other hand, Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration – which
aimed to relate concepts of action, meaning, and subjectivity to notions of structure and
constraint – and his conceptualization of the recursivity between human social activities
and the structural properties of social systems, could be read as an expansion of Berger
and Luckmann’s project of a sociological theory that seeks to elucidate how meaningful
human activity produces a world of objective facticities (1966: 17).
Considering these similarities it begs the question why Bourdieu, Giddens and multi-
ple others did not bother to directly address The Social Construction. One can only spec-
ulate about this exclusion. Was it an ungrateful omission? Was it a case of cryptomnesia
(a forgotten memory regarding what an author read or heard previously)? Maybe these
were simultaneous discoveries and all of these sociologists arrived independently at
analogous conclusions, presenting them with similar terminologies. Or perhaps the ideas
advanced in The Social Construction had already become a sort of sociological common
10 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

ground – a set of undisputed ‘truths’ that do not require individualized attribution – by

the time Bourdieu and Giddens wrote their own books.
A partial explanation of this is that Berger and Luckmann left orphaned the theoretical
outlook and the type of sociology of knowledge they championed in The Social
Consruction in the period after the book was published. First, this was due to the fact
they moved towards the sociology of religion (and in the case of Berger, remained there).
Second, and probably more importantly, Luckmann became somewhat of a peripheral
figure in English-speaking sociology after he moved to Germany in 1965, and his works
started to be published mostly in German, and several of his relevant books and papers
have yet to be translated into English. This has resulted in significant consequences for
the manner in which Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge has been ulti-
mately interpreted in the predominantly mono-lingual American academy, because it is
Luckmann who has spent more time attempting to fill in the blanks in their theory. He
has conducted, for instance, empirical and theoretical investigations into communicative
genres, communicative construction of reality, identity, social stocks of knowledge, and
collective memory (e.g. Luckmann, 1982, 1996, 2008, 2009, 2013).7

Shortfalls
In spite of these achievements – properly recognized or not – there were numerous
explicit goals in The Social Construction that did not come to fruition. Berger and
Luckmann sought to underpin a particular sociological style, what they referred to as
‘humanistic sociology’. They aimed for a form of sociology that would be in continuous
dialogue with history and philosophy, and which would have as its object of inquiry
society ‘as part of a human world, made by men, inhabited by men, and, in turn, making
men, in an ongoing historical process’ (1966: 173). They view this humanistic sociology
as an alternative to the ‘propagandists’ (those who utilize sociology as an instrument of
ideological agitation) and to the ‘quantifiers of minutiae’ (those who reduce sociology to
a collection of measurement techniques) (Berger, 1985, 1992: 2–3). Unfortunately, they
failed to prosper with this endeavor; ‘humanistic sociology’ is still a marginal style of
doing sociology in today’s academy.
Berger and Luckmann further attempted to underline the importance of thinking dia-
lectically (using a form of dialectic inspired by the young Marx and Sartre). They empha-
sized the necessity ‘to bring to bear a dialectical perspective upon the theoretical
orientation of the social sciences’. More specifically, they wanted to go from the general
notion of a ‘dialectic between social reality and individual existence in history’ to ‘a
specification of the dialectical processes in a conceptual framework that is congruent
with the great traditions of sociological thought’ (1966: 171). The most renowned
instance regarding this dialectical thinking in The Social Construction was the dialectic
of individual and society – ‘Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality.
Man is a social product’ (1966: 58) – which is divided into three distinct moments: exter-
nalization (ongoing human production), objectivation (the process by which the exter-
nalized products of human action gain objectivity), and internalization (when the
objectivated social world is retrojected into consciousness). However, throughout the
book Berger and Luckmann described a series of other forms of dialectical relationships:
Vera 11

between the social world and its creator, the human being (i.e. ‘between the structural
realities and the human enterprise of constructing reality’, [1966: 170]); between knowl-
edge and its social base (knowledge is a social product and also a factor of social change);
between identity and society (identity is formed by social processes, and, once crystal-
lized, it is maintained, modified, or even reshaped by social relations); between identity
and the individual’s biological substratum; between psychological reality and social
structure; between nature and society. Here again, regardless of how rewarding this
approach may have appeared, it failed to garner much attention.
Nonetheless, the most unfortunate shortcoming in the legacy of the book has been the
abovementioned misappropriation of the concept of ‘social construction’. While describ-
ing the ‘splendor and miseries’ of the metaphor of ‘the social construction of reality’,
Bernard Lahire (2007) lauded the fact that the metaphor has been useful to historicize
and denaturalize social relations and conventions that are habitually conceived as ‘natu-
ral’ or ‘universal’ phenomena. But he lamented that countless social scientists apply the
‘constructionist’ jargon, reducing it to a lifeless commonplace, and treat ‘social construc-
tions’ as mere symbolic and subjective entities. Unfortunately, this blunder has taken on
a life of its own.
For numerous social scientists ‘construction’ and ‘constructivism’ are synonyms for
the ‘subjectivist point of view’ that deals with the ‘subjective’ dimension of sociological
analysis (e.g. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 9–10). Those who attribute that meaning of
‘construction’ to the work of Berger and Luckmann overlook that the largest chapter in
The Social Construction (which represents nearly half of the book) was devoted to soci-
ety as objective reality, and that Berger and Luckmann adhere repeatedly to Durkheim’s
position that society possesses objective facticity (Berger and Zijderveld, 2009: 66).8
More attentive critics of The Social Construction accuse its authors of granting excessive
emphasis to social structure, to the detriment of individual activity and creativity
(Abercrombie, 1986: 30).
Correspondingly Berger and Luckmann rejected the supposition that ‘social construc-
tion’ implies relativism or nihilism from the beginning. In the final paragraph of The
Social Construction they emphasized that their conception concerning the sociology of
knowledge ‘does not imply that sociology is not a science, that its methods should be
other than empirical, or that it cannot be “value-free”’ (1966: 173). Or as Berger unam-
biguously declared: their intention was not ‘to propose a “sociologistic” view of reality
as nothing but a social construction’ (Berger, 1966a: 112, original emphasis).
Subsequently, they returned to the point, insisting that reality is always interpreted, but
that this does not mean that all interpretations are equal (Berger, 1992: 2, 2011: 94–95).
Georg Simmel once declared that he would die without ‘spiritual’ inheritors, and that
his intellectual inheritance would be like ‘cash distributed among many heirs’ and would
not be recognized as emanating from his estate (Frisby, 2002: 137). In the case of The
Social Construction, one has to wonder if the legacy of the book has survived, in part, not
as cash but as counterfeit currency, a falsification of what it was intended to be. Berger
and Luckmann are seen by many as the forefathers of so-called ‘social constructivism’.
But the ideas most commonly attached to that epithet are alien to the explicit purposes
stated in The Social Construction – as both Berger and Luckmann clarify in the inter-
views published in this special issue.
12 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

The Contributions
This special issue is the outcome of an event commemorating the publication of The
Social Construction of Reality, held at the New School for Social Research in October
2014. The site was significant for several reasons. Primarily, because Berger and
Luckmann were New School graduates in the 1950s, and both returned there as full mem-
bers of the Graduate Faculty in the 1960s. It was during their years as sociology profes-
sors that they conceived and wrote their celebrated Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.
Moreover, the book is linked to the New School in other meaningful ways. The initial
plan of the text, outlined in 1963, involved the participation of another sociologist and
two philosophers who likewise studied (or were studying) at the New School: Hansfried
Kellner, Maurice Natanson, and Stanley Pullberg. Included in this group were Benita
Luckmann and Brigitte Berger (Thomas and Peter’s wives) who at the time were pursu-
ing their graduate degrees at the New School.9 The Social Construction – which meticu-
lously followed that original outline – was ultimately written only by Peter Berger and
Thomas Luckmann, but the fingerprints of their immediate collaborators and institu-
tional milieu are all over the book. The initial motivation behind the book was to engage
in a project ‘to reformulate the sociology of knowledge’, pursuing an idea stated briefly
by Schutz: that the sociology of knowledge should deal with ‘everything that passes for
knowledge in everyday life’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 14–15; see also Berger, 2011:
81). Berger and Luckmann openly acknowledged their debt to Schutz, and to two other
mentors from the New School, Carl Mayer and Albert Salomon, who molded their under-
standing of Weberian and Durkheimian theories. In a sense, this was a New School book;
nonetheless, Berger and Luckmann were the ones who put everything together and the
ones who deserve the credit and the recognition.
But recognition is a capricious creature. Hebert Spencer – who in 1882 was described
by the president of Columbia College as ‘the most capacious and most powerful intellect
of all time’ (Youmans, 1883: 87) – had the misfortune to outlive his fame and to behold, by
the end of his life, a rapid decline in the influence of his ideas. Another long-lived sociolo-
gist, Norbert Elias, had the fortune to witness how his opus magnum, On the Process of
Civilization, was finally appreciated almost 40 years after its initial publication. For their
part, Berger and Luckmann have been fortunate enough to see how their signature work
has received prompt and enduring recognition – but also unfortunate enough to undergo the
misinterpretations that accompany the popularization of a written text.
The privilege to live alongside their own book for half a century has given to Berger
and Luckmann the opportunity to reflect, at divergent stages in their careers, upon the
significance of The Social Construction. In the interviews in this issue (both conducted
in the fall of 2014) they comment on the mental process that guided their writing process,
they further distance themselves from how the book has been ultimately appropriated by
other social scientists, and they shed some light on the intellectual and social contexts
that surrounded the making of the book. Their present assessments can be fruitfully
compared, for example, to their opinions on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the
appearance of the book (Berger, 1992; Luckmann, 1992).
The remainder of the special issue is comprised of six articles. Two of them (by Alan
Sica and Jochen Dreher) advance new interpretations of The Social Construction, its
Vera 13

significance and its reception. The rest build upon crucial ideas from the book in light
of contemporary sociological discussions on cognition, the senses, and science and
technology.
In his contribution, Sica declares a severe judgment on The Social Construction as
well as on the readers of the book – show me a book without detractors and I will show
you an irrelevant book. Sica echoes the suggestion that the book is frequently cited but
it is rarely studied, a view shared by other commentators (Eberle, 1992: 493) and by
Luckmann himself, as previously mentioned. Ultimately, this argument appears sound.
Generally speaking, students and scholars who discuss ‘social construction’ in general,
and in reference to Berger and Luckmann’s book in particular, do not seem actually to
bother to read it (or they do so superficially).10
Similar to other critics of Berger and Luckmann’s text (e.g. Abercrombie, 1986: 30),
Sica labels it as ‘conservative’. First, he asserts that, compared with the traditional soci-
ology of knowledge, The Social Construction is deficient with regards to ‘political-eco-
nomic insight’. On the other hand, he laments the transition from ‘the macro-political to
the micro-sociological’. Sica – who focused the majority of his commentaries on Berger
in particular – fails to consider the fact that much of Berger’s work since the 1970s has
been concentrated on the relationship between faith and development, that he was con-
cerned with the political and economic problems in the ‘Third World’, that Berger has
insisted on the importance of the ‘big question’, and that his research agenda moved in a
macro-sociological direction (Berger, 1992: 2).
Dreher’s article offers an intriguing counterpoint to Sica’s. Dreher contends that –
contrary to popular opinion – there are multiple elements in The Social Construction that
can be applied to the sociological theory of power. He quotes a striking phrase from the
book that summarizes the main idea: ‘He who has the bigger stick has the better chance
of imposing his definitions of reality’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 101). Even though
Berger and Luckmann desired to separate themselves from the traditional themes of the
German sociology of knowledge, they still recovered and adapted a series of venerable
topics from the sub-discipline, such as ‘ideology’ (arguably the most essential concept in
the sociology of knowledge during its initial decades of existence). Moreover, they
refashioned the concept, matching it to their own theoretical outlook, claiming that – as
Dreher notes – ‘ideology’ is a particular definition of reality that is attached to a concrete
power interest (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 113). Dreher also gives attention to the
problem of the ‘social monopoly of knowledge’ in The Social Construction (which
Berger and Luckmann referred to as monopoly over ‘ultimate definitions of reality’
[1966: 111]), which is an under-rated but crucial problem for the sociology of knowledge
that was explored by Mannheim and some of his successors, like Norbert Elias.
It is apparent that Sica and Dreher not only differ in their interpretation of the book
along with its political potential, but additionally in their opinion of its overall value.
Their contrasting views on The Social Construction actually reflect a wider chorus of
voices that hold contrasting opinions on the fruitfulness of the book. Some commentators
have argued that its contribution to the future sociology of knowledge was ‘sterile’
(Zammito, 2007: 800), while others have said that it represents the ‘most prominent con-
temporary argument in the sociology of knowledge’ (McCarthy, 2013: 1123). Sica and
Dreher agree, nevertheless, in declaring that the book has been consistently misread.
14 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

‘Reification’ was yet another vital concept derived from the old German tradition
in the sociology of knowledge (as was ‘ideology’) that Berger and Luckmann reinter-
preted. Prior to the publication of the book, Berger and Pullberg (1965) published a
dense theoretical paper on reification and the critique of consciousness. There they
linked the problems of ‘alienation’ and ‘reification’. They defined the former as the
‘process by which man forgets that the world he lives in has been produced by him-
self’, and the latter as a ‘moment on the process of alienation in which the character-
istic of thing-hood becomes the standard of objective reality’ (1965: 200). In The
Social Construction Berger and Luckmann coined a more straightforward definition
of reification: ‘the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is,
in non-human or possibly supra-human terms. [… It] is the apprehension of the prod-
ucts of human activity as if they were something other than human products’ (1966:
82, original emphasis).
In considering this conceptualization and building upon his earlier work, Eviatar
Zerubavel explores reification through some of its most common manifestations (the
pillars of essentialism, as he calls them): religion, science, reason, universalism, and
eternalism. Here Zerubavel is returning to one of his old interests. In his examination on
the seven-day week, Zerubavel had already delved into the difference between ‘natural
inevitability and social conventionality’ (1985: 141) that is at the heart of the problem of
reification. There he showed how the socio-temporal rhythm marked by the seven-day
week (a purely conventional unit of measurement) has been regularly reified as a mani-
festation of a ‘divine’ scheme or as a ‘natural’ tempo regulated by the lunar cycles. In
both cases, the historical institution is comprehended in supra-human terms.
In her paper, Asia Friedman brings to the fore one of the decisive questions raised in
The Social Construction: How does the social construction process work? A common
ritual in the teaching of sociology is to ask students to consider ‘what’ things are socially
constructed (race, time, age, etc.). But the ‘how’ question has been largely overlooked,
as Friedman points out. She thus employs the sociology of the senses to uncover some of
the ‘underlying mechanisms of the social construction process’.
Berger and Luckmann did not ignore the ‘how’ question. Luckmann, in particular, has
spent considerable effort to record and examine a number of the actual micro-processes
of social construction, principally through the study of communication and conversation
– hence his interest in sequential analysis and related qualitative techniques. He has
intended to analyze, in detail, the forms of communication that produce, transmit, and
reproduce knowledge and meaning, and to create a framework in social theory that sees
communication as the constitutive element of social life (Luckmann, 1996: 164). This
emphasis, however, may seem at times rather logocentric. By commencing a dialogue
between Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge and the sociology of the
senses, Friedman looks to capture some of those construction processes in spheres that
lie outside verbal communication.
The intuition of the importance of the body did not escape Berger and Luckmann.
They said that social reality determines ‘organismic functioning’, and that the internali-
zation of the world not only imposes upon consciousness a psychological and cognitive
structure, but also ‘extends into the area of physiological processes’. They acknowledged
the ‘intriguing possibilities’ of sociosomatics and the sociology of the body (1966: 166,
Vera 15

192; Berger, 1966a: 112); but they did not pursue those ideas further. Those intriguing
possibilities awaited years to be fulfilled within the theoretical framework set in The
Social Construction; now Friedman has finally fleshed them out.
In a similar vein to Friedman, who takes Berger and Luckmann to the realm of the
corporeal, Silke Steets takes them to the ‘realm of materiality’, and more precisely to the
dominion of architecture and the built environment. In the writings of Berger and
Luckmann there are an abundance of architectonic metaphors. In Invitation to Sociology,
for instance, Berger compares society to an immense prison in which groups of prisoners
labor actively to keep the walls intact (1963: 120). Luckmann has characterized tradi-
tions and institutions saying that ‘they may appear less tangible than buildings and
artifacts, but they are equally real’ (2013: 43). In the interview with him included in
this special issue, he relates social constructivism with the ‘building’ of a house (i.e. ‘of
a human world by human actors’), and compares the elements of that construction (the
human body, evolutionary givens, etc.) with bricks. However, the texts of both Berger
and Luckmann are virtually empty of thoughts on actual buildings and artifacts.11
Taking metaphors literally can produce interesting effects. Steets takes the meta-
phor of ‘social construction’ in a non-figurative manner, and explores how that could
enhance our sociological understandings of the humanly-created material world. She
follows the three analytical steps into which the dialectic of individual and society is
divided by Berger and Luckmann (externalization, objectivation, and internalization),
to show how human-made objects, through their materiality and symbolism, are part
of the social world.
Finally, Steve Hoffmann places once again to the forefront the problem of ‘multiple
realities’. Schutz (1964: 135–158) and Berger (1970) were attracted to that topic. Inter-
estingly, however, they opted to exemplify their theoretical concepts only with literary
vignettes – the former employing Cervantes’s Don Quixote and the latter using Robert
Musil’s The Man without Qualities. Hoffmann, instead, elects to substantiate his argu-
ment around what he calls ‘other realities’ with more convincing evidence originating
from empirical studies on the diverse applications of technology. These uses of ‘other
realities’, as analyzed by Hoffman, afford an alluring case in which finite provinces of
meaning exist as islands within the paramount reality of everyday life, but they do not
pose a threat to the problem of ‘reality control’. These applications of other realities
(training, simulation, education) are coherently embedded in the ‘official’ reality main-
tained and legitimated by the institutional order (and this is contrary to what happens
with crime, war, and sexual and aesthetic experiences) (Berger, 1970: 220–221).
It seems appropriate that social scientists should revert to the issue of multiple/other
realities, as it has gained momentum in broader fields. The question ‘what is real?’ has
become prominent in popular culture as well as in academic discussions. Blockbuster
movies like The Matrix (directed by the Wachowski Brothers) and Inception (directed
by Christopher Nolan) depict situations in which the intersections between the realities
of computer simulations, dreaming, and everyday life are either blurred or indistinguish-
able. Those films put considerable emphasis on the moments of switching from one
reality to another, the shock of the transition, and the process to settle the consciousness
in a new reality. In semiotics and postmodern philosophy, concepts like ‘hyperreality’
(that refers to conditions in which the distinction between reality and the simulation of
16 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

reality is difficult or impossible to ascertain) have acquired notoriety, but they are devoid
of sociological components. Hoffman’s paper brings a much needed sociological insight
into those issues.
Berger and Luckmann insisted that there is a close connection between the sociology
of knowledge and the sociologies of religion and language (1966: 169). Zerubavel,
Friedman, Hoffman, and Steets show that a fruitful way to read The Social Construction
today is to link the sociology of knowledge with cognitive sociology, the sociology of
the body, and social studies of science and technology. Overall, the articles in this issue
demonstrate that the heuristic potency of The Social Construction (beyond the general
idea and terminology contained in the title) remains a source of innovative ideas.

Acknowledgements
I want to thank the input and support received from the Instituto de Investigaciones Sobre la
Universidad y la Educación (UNAM), Claudia Tania Rivera Mendoza, Robin Wagner-Pacifici,
Jeff Goldfarb, Camila González Paz Paredes, and Gabriel Abend.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
  1. Counting citation is an imperfect – and dubious – practice, but it can shed some light on
the always elusive measurement of the ‘impact’ of a book. In Google Scholar the different
editions of the The Social Construction account for about 39 thousand cites. As points of
reference this number could be compared with the citations of other books that appeared in
the same period and that are regularly considered – alongside Berger and Luckmann’s book
– as landmarks of a period of significant transformation in sociology: Erving Goffman’s The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, from 1956, has around 38 thousand cites, and Harold
Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology, from 1967, has approximately three thousand cites.
It can also be compared with two books on the sociology of knowledge that appeared in
France in 1966, the same year as The Social Construction (considering in both cases the
citations of the original French edition and the English translation): Georges Gurvitch’s
The Social Frameworks of Knowledge has no more than 300 cites; and Michel Foucault’s The
Order of Things has 24 thousand.
  2. In an opinion survey to identify the most influential books for sociologists conducted in 1998
among members of the International Sociological Association, The Social Construction was
among the five most voted-for books.
  3. Berger returned to the phrase in similar contexts in subsequent years, prior to The Social
Construction. Thus, in a review of a book on the sociology of religion, Berger specified that
the ‘sociology of knowledge will have to be a comprehensive theory of the social construction
of reality’ (1964: 292), in contrast to being a simple tool for the history of ideas. In an article
co-authored with Hansfried Kellner on ‘Marriage and the Construction of Reality’ – an early
contribution to the ‘microsociology of knowledge’ – he affirmed that ‘marriage functions as
an instrumentality for the social construction of reality’ (1964: 10). And a couple of years
later, in an article on ‘Identity as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge’, Berger asserted
that ‘language is both the foundation and the instrumentality of the social construction of real-
ity’ (1966a: 108).
Vera 17

  4. Even though Piaget is mentioned several times in the footnotes of The Social Construction,
there are no specific bibliographical references to his work. Nevertheless, Berger acknowl-
edged somewhere else (1966b: 279) the pertinence of Piaget’s work for the sociology of
knowledge. And Berger and Kellner (1964: 5) quoted Piaget’s work on the construction of
reality in the child while they described the formation and enlargement of the ‘nomic appara-
tus’ throughout the individual’s biography.
  5. In a different, but noteworthy, direction, Eberle (1992: 498) noted that the term ‘construction’
in Berger and Luckmann has a static aspect (reality-as-it-is) and a dynamic aspect (the process
of reality-construction).
  6. Schutz’s book was translated into English as The Phenomenology of the Social World (1967);
but a literal translation of the title would have been something similar to ‘The meaningful
construction of the social world’ or ‘The meaningful building of the social world’.
  7. The oeuvre of Peter Berger is well known and there are several comprehensive accounts of his
sociological contributions (e.g. Hunter and Ainlay, 1986; Pfadenhauer, 2013; Turner, 2001;
Wuthnow et al., 1984). Panoramic views written in English on Luckmann’s work are more
scarce, but see Estruch (2008) and Luckmann (2013).
  8. It is worth mentioning how little systematic attention the influence of Durkheim on Berger and
Luckmann’s theory has received (compared, for example, with how much has been written on
Schutz’s influence on his former pupils). This despite their explicit acknowledgement of the
contributions of the Durkheimian school. See for instance a paper on the ‘Phenomenological
Influence on the Sociology of Knowledge in America’, presented by Berger at the Sixth World
Congress of Sociology, in 1966, where he underlined the importance of the Durkheimian con-
cept of ‘representations’ for his sociology of knowledge: ‘The crucial theoretical question
then becomes how it is possible that subjective meanings become embodied in the thing-like
facticities of the institutional order, in other words, the question of objectivation. Insofar as
both subjective meanings and social facticities are, in the final analysis, nothing but “repre-
sentations” (to use the Durkheimian term), the question of objectivation becomes the obvi-
ously crucial question for any sociology of knowledge. In our theory of society as objective
reality we have been influenced by Durkheim as well as by other figures of the Durkheim
school’ (quoted in Wolff, 1974: 620, original emphasis).
  9. A study aiming to reconstruct in detail this chapter in the history of sociology would need
to dig into the New School archives to unearth and analyze the five doctoral dissertations
made by the members of this group: Natanson (1953) on George H. Mead; Berger (1954) on
the Baha’i movement; Luckmann (1956) on Protestant parishes in Germany; Brigitte Berger
(1964) on Vilfredo Pareto’s contributions to the sociology of knowledge; and Kellner (1966)
on the dimensions of the conception of reality in marriage. Regarding the other two members
of the ‘clique’ – as Peter Berger called it – they did not obtain their degrees from the New
School; Benita Luckmann finished her studies in 1962 at the University of Freiburg, while
Stanley Pullberg went to France to study with French Marxists (Berger, 2011: 84).
10. This is not something unusual – misinterpretation loves company. The fate of The Social
Construction is similar in this regard to the legacy of Dennis Wrong’s article on ‘The
Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology’ (1961) – to mention an example
of another important work in American sociology from the 1960s. Wendy Harrod (2009) has
shown how, despite being one of the most cited articles published in American Sociological
Review, the article did not achieve high conceptual impact. Wrong himself believed that his
paper was popular because it was frequently misunderstood. Harrod supports that supposi-
tion, based on a content analysis of texts that cite Wrong’s paper. She found out that most
citing papers ignore the Freudian aspect at the core of Wrong’s argument, and instead pre-
sume – incorrectly – that the term ‘oversocialized’ meant something like ‘underemphasis on
18 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

agency’. It would not be surprising if a study along these lines on the idea of ‘social construc-
tion of reality’ would arrive at similar conclusions.
11. A rare exception is their article on ‘Social Mobility and Personal Identity’, where they talked
about the ‘sacramentalism of consumption’, which is ‘necessitated structurally by high geo-
graphical mobility, as result of which conspicuous patterns of consumption take the place of
continuous interpersonal contacts within an individual’s biography. That is, material objects
rather than human beings must be called upon to testify to the individual’s worth’ (Luckmann
and Berger, 1964: 339–340, emphasis added).

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Author biography
Hector Vera is Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones sobre la Universidad y la Educación,
at Mexico’s National University (UNAM). He received a PhD in Sociology and Historical Studies
from the New School for Social Research. His research interests include social theory, sociology
of knowledge, and sociology of education. Among his recent publications are ‘Decimal Time:
Misadventures of a Revolutionary Idea, 1793–2008,’ in KronoScope: Journal for the Study of
Time (2009); ‘Norbert Elias and Emile Durkheim: Seeds of a Historical Sociology of Knowledge,’
in Depelteau, F. and Landini, T. (eds.) Norbert Elias and Social Theory (Palgrave, 2013); and ‘The
Social Construction of Units of Measurement: Institutionalization, Legitimation and Maintenance
in Metrology,’ in Huber, L. and Schlaudt, O. (eds.) Standardization in Measurement: Philosophical
and Sociological Issues (Pickering and Chatto, 2015).