Anyone who has taken coursework or done reading in the field of sociology in recent years has likely encountered the term "social construction." Usually, it comes in the context of a specific topic--most often, "the social construction of gender" or "the social construction of race." Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, first published in 1966, was perhaps the central scholarly work that produced this major sociological concept. As a result, it is also one of the best places to begin to grasp what this quite radical concept means for the way we think about our lives and our society.

The Argument

The argument in favor of a social constructionist view of the world is a complex one, and one I think requires an extended amount of both logical argumentation and concrete evidence in order to convince anyone. It is my eternal frustration that many sociology instructors today seem to thrust the social construction of this or that at students new to the field and expect them to grasp it in one or two lessons. When I learned it, in contrast, my professor, teaching the social construction of race, spent a third of the semester on it. The argument needs so much elaboration and evidence because it is quite different from the way most people think in everyday life; as a result, if it is presented in a haphazard way, no minds will be changed.

Because I think the social constructionist argument is so powerful, so intriguing, and so provocative, and because I believe it is so hard to teach or explain, I will not seek to outline the argument of The Social Construction of Reality here beyond its basic premise. I hope that readers will see this as a pedagogical decision rather than a cop-out.

In its briefest form, the social constructionist argument is that there is no ultimate reality or truth out there for us to discover; instead, society and the world around us are what we make them. (Of course, different social constructionists take this observations to different extremes, some applying it to only a few aspects of society, others applying it to things many people consider to be inviolable scientific facts, such as gender and racial differences or the nature of the body.) This observation, if true, is important because it has major implications for our perception of what we can and cannot change about the world. As a basic example, if gender differences are biological, then we cannot change the relative places of women and men in the world, but if gender differences do not exist except in our minds and in the social structures (such as employment rules, government policies, and attitudes that affect how we interact with each other, what we teach girls versus boys, etc.) we create from our minds, then we can make these differences go away. At base, the social constructionist perspective says that society does not have to be the way it is, then asks how it got to be that way, why it was made that way, and how we can change the things we don't like about it.

Who Should Read Such a Crazy-Sounding Book?

I would recommend that anyone who is curious about why society works the way it does, and in particular anyone unhappy with some aspects of society, read about social constructionism. However, if you have no background in these ideas and want just one foray into the topic, this classic work is probably not the place to start unless you have a high tolerance for theoretical argument. Berger and Luckmann do use examples sometimes to illustrate their points, but the examples are generally in the form of hypotheticals (something like: person A is white and person B is African-American, and here's what they do). While the examples are useful in illustrating the particular points, they are not the sorts of detailed historical and cross-cultural examples that truly begin to change your thinking about whether there is some "reality" out there or not. For more concrete introductions, check out books like Who Is Black? on the social construction of race, or Paradoxes of Gender on the social construction of gender. (Neither of these are easy books either--we're not talking about beach reading here.)

For readers who do have some basic understanding of the social constructionist argument, reading Berger and Luckmann can provide some insights. As is my experience with reading many classics, I found some portions of the text insightful and far more lucid than much current writing on the subject; on the other hand, in order to find these portions I had to wade through other portions of text that seemed dated or irrelevant.

The text does provide several interesting chapters on the sub-field of the discipline called the sociology of knowledge, which the authors seek to redefine by proposing social constructionism as its central concern. So, for readers interested in topics like the history of ideas, these chapters should provide a nice (though brief) history of a related field (i.e., the sociology of knowledge) and a provocative plan for changing the focus of that field.

Most of the text, however, is arranged around two main sections. First, in “Society as Objective Reality,” Berger and Luckmann describe the concrete things we encounter in everyday life and why the experience of these things leads us to think that they are “real” (i.e., naturally existing, external to us and our control) rather than created by us. Then, in “Society as Subjective Reality,” they ask about the reality going on in people’s heads, and how the ideas we come up with become the objective reality we then forget that we created. Sounds a bit confusing, perhaps, but they’ve got a hundred and forty pages in those two sections to explain it to you. So, for readers only interested in intellectual history, this work is probably not a good choice since the balance of the text is focused elsewhere.

Who is the book appropriate for, then? I’d recommend The Social Construction of Reality to any educated reader with some social science background interested in a thoughtful (read: not purely for pleasure and relaxation) text that might challenge the way you think about the social world. And of course, for sociologists, this is an essential text, and is a classic I think is worth at least a look, and perhaps even a thorough read.

Recommended: Yes