it.
The basis on which this book can be considered important is that it seems to have been influential in bringing up a whole new school of social science: social constructionism. As the term implies, that is the name given to a theory of how the experience of reality, or what people in society know to be a fact, is created out of the very unfolding of new experience. Berger and Luckmann use the phrase "reality sui generis" to describe that process. That is how they arrive at an explanation of the subtitle of the book, which uses the phrase "sociology of knowledge." The book is also important for what is implicit in an examination of processes of knowledge creation: that the creation of knowledge as social reality is linked to social power, which is linked to the ability or authority to establish meaning. Clarifying how we know what we know about our social experience, where the knowledge comes from, and an evaluation of its validity are therefore bound to become fundamental features of sociological study.
Having established the theoretical basis on which they argue that reality is socially constructed, the authors proceed to examine the basis on which knowledge about reality is structured. Explaining that reality is very much a matter of taking note of the structured, almost modular, aspect of everyday experience, even though the immediacy of experience has the effect of enabling individuals to take it for granted. The sociological function is to attempt to identify the constituents of the structure. Berger and Luckmann argue that o
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