The basic thesis of the book is that ‘reality’ is socially constructed, but what’s more important for us is that the book deals with

Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality

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2024-11-25 17:30:12

The basic thesis of the book is that ‘reality’ is socially constructed, but what’s more important for us is that the book deals with the concept of institutions. The book is a classic from 1966 and some of the issues raised below will not be fair to the authors, because they did not know about all the discussions that followed. However, a key problem lies in their treatment of institutions. There is nothing wrong with their arguments, but with what they did not discuss and that is the relationship between institutions and other social formations (organizations for example). The same problem as we saw in Scott.

“It will be enough, for our purposes, to define ‘reality’ as a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot ‘wish them away’), and to define ‘knowledge’ as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics.”

The problems start with the definition. There seems to be no problems here and as this is the beginning of the book, we raise no objections. However, entwining the social and the material, right at the beginning will cause a lot of trouble later on.

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