The Social Construction of Reality

The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

Cover of the first edition
Authors	Peter L. Berger Thomas Luckmann
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Sociology of knowledge
Publisher	Anchor Books
Publication date	1966
Media type	Print (hardcover · paperback)
Pages	240
ISBN	978-0-385-05898-8
Dewey Decimal	306.4/2 20
LC Class	BD175 .B4 1990

The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, proposes that social groups and individual persons who interact with each other, within a system of social classes, over time create concepts (mental representations) of the actions of each other, and that people become habituated to those concepts, and thus assume reciprocal social roles. When those social roles are available for other members of society to assume and portray, their reciprocal, social interactions are said to be institutionalized behaviours. In that process of the social construction of reality, the meaning of the social role is embedded to society as cultural knowledge.

As a work about the sociology of knowledge, influenced by the work of Alfred Schütz, The Social Construction of Reality introduced the term social construction and influenced the establishment of the field of social constructionism.^[1] In 1998, the International Sociological Association listed The Social Construction of Reality as the fifth most-important book of 20th-century sociology.^[2]