The purpose of this research is to examine the book The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context of sociological theory in which the text was written and then to discuss its major ideas, as well as evaluate its contribution to the body of sociological knowledge.
One of the most striking features of SC is that it makes a claim for perceptions and understanding of what is real of the kind that sociologists usually made for behavior and institutional processes. At the same time, the authors incorporate highly traditional sociological theory into their text, notably the theories of Emil Durkheim and Max Weber, who were part of the founding generation of modern sociology as a discipline, as well as the symbolic-interactionist theory of George Herbert Mead. From Durkheim they take the idea that a kind of macroconsciousness informs and in part determines the development of individual consciousness and that there is constant interplay between individual perceptions and ideas on one hand and the perceptions and ideas that are shared by members of a society in common on the other. From Weber they take the concept that subjective experience shapes common experience. From Mead's theory of symbolic interactionism they use the idea that the social realities emerge out of the interaction between social actors. What they arrive at by combining these ideas is what they take to be the "central question" for sociology: "How is it possible that human activity (Handeln) should produce a world of things (choses)?" (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p. 18). What makes this book interesting, then, is the way in which the authors combine previous social theories to set up a narrative that explores the role of subjective experience, including psychological experience, as a primary element contributing to the understanding of social structure and subsidiary realities that reside in...