Rebuilding a Classic: The Social Construction of Reality at 50

An Eventful Legacy

In the world of academic social sciences, one that is overpopulated, utterly competitive, permanently eager for novelties – no matter how superficial – and shaped by the endless cycle of rising and declining fads, it is rare for a publication to receive far-reaching and perennial acknowledgement. The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, is one of those extraordinary volumes.

First published in 1966, while its authors were still in their 30s, The Social Construction had an immediate, unforeseen, and enduring success according to all the conventional indicators including readership, sales, translations, commentary, and citations. ¹ Thus far, it has been translated into 18 languages and has never gone out of print. The vocabulary utilized and a number of the central themes of the book are seen as precursors to the theoretical outlook of what today are defined as the ‘new sociologies’ (Corcuff, 2011). It is a fixture within the catalogs of ‘major works of sociology’ (e.g. Kaesler and Vogt, 2000: 39–44). Ultimately, professional sociologists classify The Social Construction among the most relevant books of the previous century. ²

Despite the aforementioned achievements, the publication has had a complex trajectory. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of The Social Construction, Luckmann (1992: 4) wrote a brief piece that opened with the Latin phrase ‘habent sua fata libelli’, an aphorism usually understood as ‘books have their own destinies’. Moreover, it is the concluding section of the expression ‘Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli’, which means ‘According to the capacity of the reader, books have their destiny’. It is not clear to which of those two meanings Luckmann was referring, but he suggested that a measure of the success of The Social Construction was due to inattentive readings, and that among the people who frequently refer to the book, a few probably only read the title (and do not understand it).

Nomen est Omen – Name is Destiny

‘A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them’, said Umberto Eco (1984: 3) when referring to his novel The Name of the Rose. It is difficult to envision that such was Berger and Luckmann’s intention when they chose the title of their book, but it certainly complicated the understanding for numerous readers. The formula of ‘social construction’ contained in the title remains one of the most apparent legacies of the book, but also perhaps the most perfunctory. Comparable to other distinguished concepts in the social sciences and humanities, such as ‘paradigm’ and ‘deconstruction’, the formula of ‘social construction’ has been appropriated and used – or misused – in extensive and diverse social circles.

The trajectory of the maxim ‘social construction of …’ and the exhausting effect of its overuse has been documented elsewhere (Abbott, 2000; Hacking, 1999). It is a phrase so suggestive and catchy that it became a fertile source of inspiration for pastiches; for example, it is commonplace to encounter titles such as ‘The Social Destruction of Reality’, ‘The Reality of Social Construction’, ‘The Construction of Social Reality’, etc. Additionally, academics repeatedly apply the phrase to name their works, and the connotation of ‘social construction’ has become notably obscured.

Furthermore, the concept of ‘social construction’ is frequently professed behind academic walls. It regularly appears in the mass media associated with topics such as race or gender. Even the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) currently includes questions in which the prospective medical students who take the standardized exam have to define ‘social constructionism’ (Dembosky, 2015). But despite the prevalent application of the expression – or maybe because of it – its connection with the substance of Berger and Luckmann’s book has often been lost completely.

For many, suggesting that something is ‘socially constructed’, simply purports that it is not ‘natural’, that it is an entity that exists in the human realm. That is what people usually convey when they proclaim that age or family structures are merely ‘social constructions’ – unlike asteroids, trilobites, Mount Everest, or photosynthesis. However, this is not the most accurate employment of the concept. In Berger and Luckmann’s work there is a more precise meaning that makes the idea of ‘social construction’ more helpful. In this narrower, primitive sense, ‘social construction’ draws attention to what people conceive to be real and what is taken for granted while conducting everyday life. Those definitions of what is real have to be sustained by institutions, explained by legitimations, and maintained by social and symbolic mechanisms. Moreover, the social construction of reality is an element of the continuing human activity in the world, and one of the essential dynamics in the production and reproduction of social life (Vera, 2015: 173–175).

The misconceptions surrounding The Social Construction are a fascinating case of what Anthony Giddens (1984: 284) called the ‘double hermeneutic’, the process in which scientific terminology is appropriated by non-experts, involving the constant slippage and intersection between the metalanguages invented by social scientists and the understandings of lay actors, or as Berger referred to it, the ‘unintended consequences of publishing one’s ideas’ (2011: 93). Ironically, it is one of the fundamental teachings of The Social Construction that the products of human activity, when they become objectivated, can act back upon their creators and look as something completely alien to them.

In considering the aforementioned issues, it seems appropriate to reconstruct the meaning and the making of the concept as initially developed by Berger and Luckmann.

Forging a Memorable Title

Berger and Luckmann’s first joint collaboration was the article ‘Sociology of Religion and Sociology of Knowledge’ (1963). In that text, they presented, in nascent form, a few of the essential ideas that comprise The Social Construction; however, the phrase ‘social construction of reality’ was not present. Before it became the title of the book, the phrase was used particularly by Berger to synthetize his vision of what the sociology of knowledge should be.

Three years prior to The Social Construction, in his Invitation to Sociology, Berger (1963) stated one of the basic principles in the sociology of knowledge: society supplies individuals with the values, logics and stocks of information that constitute their knowledge. However, he added a particular element that emanated from the phenomenological tradition: the majority of individuals do not feel the need to reevaluate the worldview that they inherited, which appears to them as self-evident and self-validating. He summarized this position by proclaiming that ‘to put this perspective of the sociology of knowledge into one succinct statement: Reality is socially constructed’ (1963: 117–118). Further down, Berger described the relevance of reference-group theory to the sociology of knowledge, signaling that the social affiliation of a person carries with it particular cognitive commitments – i.e. groups are vantage points on the world. In this context, Berger asserted that if ‘the sociology of knowledge gives us a broad view of the social construction of reality, reference-group theory shows us the many little workshops in which cliques of universe builders hammer out their models of the cosmos’ (1963: 119–120, emphasis added). To my knowledge, this was the first time that the phrase ‘social construction of reality’ appeared in a printed text. ³

The Social Construction of Reality is a title containing three prevailing words, each carrying a heavy load of semantic associations and theoretical traditions. Analyzing each of those individual words can reveal much concerning the intentions behind the book.

Achievements and Anonymous Triumphs

As notable as it was, the enticing title of the book was just a small part of its success; innovative ideas and a well-crafted prose did the heavy lifting. In The Social Construction Berger and Luckmann achieved some of the principal goals they had established. In their clash against functionalism, for instance, they – alongside many other members of their generation – ended up triumphant. Their theory of institutionalization, which covers half of the central chapter of the book (1966: 45–85), has been profoundly influential in the field of institutional research (Meyer, 2008). Furthermore, their call for a renewal of the sociology of knowledge was a resounding success. They sought to broaden the subject matter of that particular sub-discipline and it has indeed transcended being a sort of social history of ideas or a mere theory of ideologies. Today the great importance of studying everyday knowledge (non-theoretical or pre-theoretical thought), and not only ideas (scientific, philosophical, or mythological theorizations), is unanimously accepted in the social sciences.

Berger and Luckmann also have garnered praise for the elegance in their ‘integrative intention’ to synthesize in a single theory a multitude of apparently opposing traditions in the field of sociology. They connected, seemingly effortlessly, various separate theoretical strands. Fortunately for the readers, they forged this theoretical synthesis avoiding the temptation – or the perceived obligation – to tackle the totality of the intellectual history regarding the principles they borrowed from Durkheim, Weber, Mead, Marx, Gehlen, phenomenology, etc.. Had their style of theoretical elucidation been similar to those of, say, Parsons or Habermas, they would have written an 800-page book filled with detailed analyses of theoretical and philosophical concepts, and ultimately their actual contributions would have been reduced to a pair of excursuses or concluding chapters. Luckily, they decided to focus on their own program and they wrote a brief and dynamic book presented with great clarity. As Charles Lemert (1992: 10) remarked, ‘I cannot think of a single book that presents with such exquisite parsimony so many different ideas so well’.

The idea of bringing together seemingly conflicting sociological models into a theory that recognizes the importance of both subjectively meaningful human activity and the objective facticity of society, became a staple of some of the most influential sociological theorists of the last quarter of the 20th century. In this regard The Social Construction was a forerunner to Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘genetic structuralism’ (or ‘structural constructivism’, as he also referred to it) and Giddens’ structuration theory. A few years after the publication of The Social Construction, when Bourdieu started to outline his theory of practice, he used a vocabulary with an unequivocal resemblance to Berger and Luckmann’s dialectic of society and individual. He talked, for example, of ‘establishing an experimental science of the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality’ (1977 [1972]: 72, original emphasis). Even in his later works, Bourdieu openly utilized Berger and Luckmann’s key phrase while describing his pivotal concept of habitus: ‘a specific mode of thought […], the principle of a specific construction of reality, grounded in a prereflexive belief in the undisputed value of the instruments of construction and of the objects thus constructed’ (2000 [1997]: 99–100, emphasis added). On the other hand, Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration – which aimed to relate concepts of action, meaning, and subjectivity to notions of structure and constraint – and his conceptualization of the recursivity between human social activities and the structural properties of social systems, could be read as an expansion of Berger and Luckmann’s project of a sociological theory that seeks to elucidate how meaningful human activity produces a world of objective facticities (1966: 17).

Considering these similarities it begs the question why Bourdieu, Giddens and multiple others did not bother to directly address The Social Construction. One can only speculate about this exclusion. Was it an ungrateful omission? Was it a case of cryptomnesia (a forgotten memory regarding what an author read or heard previously)? Maybe these were simultaneous discoveries and all of these sociologists arrived independently at analogous conclusions, presenting them with similar terminologies. Or perhaps the ideas advanced in The Social Construction had already become a sort of sociological common ground – a set of undisputed ‘truths’ that do not require individualized attribution – by the time Bourdieu and Giddens wrote their own books.

A partial explanation of this is that Berger and Luckmann left orphaned the theoretical outlook and the type of sociology of knowledge they championed in The Social Consruction in the period after the book was published. First, this was due to the fact they moved towards the sociology of religion (and in the case of Berger, remained there). Second, and probably more importantly, Luckmann became somewhat of a peripheral figure in English-speaking sociology after he moved to Germany in 1965, and his works started to be published mostly in German, and several of his relevant books and papers have yet to be translated into English. This has resulted in significant consequences for the manner in which Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge has been ultimately interpreted in the predominantly mono-lingual American academy, because it is Luckmann who has spent more time attempting to fill in the blanks in their theory. He has conducted, for instance, empirical and theoretical investigations into communicative genres, communicative construction of reality, identity, social stocks of knowledge, and collective memory (e.g. Luckmann, 1982, 1996, 2008, 2009, 2013). ⁷

Shortfalls

In spite of these achievements – properly recognized or not – there were numerous explicit goals in The Social Construction that did not come to fruition. Berger and Luckmann sought to underpin a particular sociological style, what they referred to as ‘humanistic sociology’. They aimed for a form of sociology that would be in continuous dialogue with history and philosophy, and which would have as its object of inquiry society ‘as part of a human world, made by men, inhabited by men, and, in turn, making men, in an ongoing historical process’ (1966: 173). They view this humanistic sociology as an alternative to the ‘propagandists’ (those who utilize sociology as an instrument of ideological agitation) and to the ‘quantifiers of minutiae’ (those who reduce sociology to a collection of measurement techniques) (Berger, 1985, 1992: 2–3). Unfortunately, they failed to prosper with this endeavor; ‘humanistic sociology’ is still a marginal style of doing sociology in today’s academy.

Berger and Luckmann further attempted to underline the importance of thinking dialectically (using a form of dialectic inspired by the young Marx and Sartre). They emphasized the necessity ‘to bring to bear a dialectical perspective upon the theoretical orientation of the social sciences’. More specifically, they wanted to go from the general notion of a ‘dialectic between social reality and individual existence in history’ to ‘a specification of the dialectical processes in a conceptual framework that is congruent with the great traditions of sociological thought’ (1966: 171). The most renowned instance regarding this dialectical thinking in The Social Construction was the dialectic of individual and society – ‘Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product’ (1966: 58) – which is divided into three distinct moments: externalization (ongoing human production), objectivation (the process by which the externalized products of human action gain objectivity), and internalization (when the objectivated social world is retrojected into consciousness). However, throughout the book Berger and Luckmann described a series of other forms of dialectical relationships: between the social world and its creator, the human being (i.e. ‘between the structural realities and the human enterprise of constructing reality’, [1966: 170]); between knowledge and its social base (knowledge is a social product and also a factor of social change); between identity and society (identity is formed by social processes, and, once crystallized, it is maintained, modified, or even reshaped by social relations); between identity and the individual’s biological substratum; between psychological reality and social structure; between nature and society. Here again, regardless of how rewarding this approach may have appeared, it failed to garner much attention.

Nonetheless, the most unfortunate shortcoming in the legacy of the book has been the abovementioned misappropriation of the concept of ‘social construction’. While describing the ‘splendor and miseries’ of the metaphor of ‘the social construction of reality’, Bernard Lahire (2007) lauded the fact that the metaphor has been useful to historicize and denaturalize social relations and conventions that are habitually conceived as ‘natural’ or ‘universal’ phenomena. But he lamented that countless social scientists apply the ‘constructionist’ jargon, reducing it to a lifeless commonplace, and treat ‘social constructions’ as mere symbolic and subjective entities. Unfortunately, this blunder has taken on a life of its own.

For numerous social scientists ‘construction’ and ‘constructivism’ are synonyms for the ‘subjectivist point of view’ that deals with the ‘subjective’ dimension of sociological analysis (e.g. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 9–10). Those who attribute that meaning of ‘construction’ to the work of Berger and Luckmann overlook that the largest chapter in The Social Construction (which represents nearly half of the book) was devoted to society as objective reality, and that Berger and Luckmann adhere repeatedly to Durkheim’s position that society possesses objective facticity (Berger and Zijderveld, 2009: 66). ⁸ More attentive critics of The Social Construction accuse its authors of granting excessive emphasis to social structure, to the detriment of individual activity and creativity (Abercrombie, 1986: 30).

Correspondingly Berger and Luckmann rejected the supposition that ‘social construction’ implies relativism or nihilism from the beginning. In the final paragraph of The Social Construction they emphasized that their conception concerning the sociology of knowledge ‘does not imply that sociology is not a science, that its methods should be other than empirical, or that it cannot be “value-free”’ (1966: 173). Or as Berger unambiguously declared: their intention was not ‘to propose a “sociologistic” view of reality as nothing but a social construction’ (Berger, 1966a: 112, original emphasis). Subsequently, they returned to the point, insisting that reality is always interpreted, but that this does not mean that all interpretations are equal (Berger, 1992: 2, 2011: 94–95).

Georg Simmel once declared that he would die without ‘spiritual’ inheritors, and that his intellectual inheritance would be like ‘cash distributed among many heirs’ and would not be recognized as emanating from his estate (Frisby, 2002: 137). In the case of The Social Construction, one has to wonder if the legacy of the book has survived, in part, not as cash but as counterfeit currency, a falsification of what it was intended to be. Berger and Luckmann are seen by many as the forefathers of so-called ‘social constructivism’. But the ideas most commonly attached to that epithet are alien to the explicit purposes stated in The Social Construction – as both Berger and Luckmann clarify in the interviews published in this special issue.

The Contributions

This special issue is the outcome of an event commemorating the publication of The Social Construction of Reality, held at the New School for Social Research in October 2014. The site was significant for several reasons. Primarily, because Berger and Luckmann were New School graduates in the 1950s, and both returned there as full members of the Graduate Faculty in the 1960s. It was during their years as sociology professors that they conceived and wrote their celebrated Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.

Moreover, the book is linked to the New School in other meaningful ways. The initial plan of the text, outlined in 1963, involved the participation of another sociologist and two philosophers who likewise studied (or were studying) at the New School: Hansfried Kellner, Maurice Natanson, and Stanley Pullberg. Included in this group were Benita Luckmann and Brigitte Berger (Thomas and Peter’s wives) who at the time were pursuing their graduate degrees at the New School. ⁹ The Social Construction – which meticulously followed that original outline – was ultimately written only by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, but the fingerprints of their immediate collaborators and institutional milieu are all over the book. The initial motivation behind the book was to engage in a project ‘to reformulate the sociology of knowledge’, pursuing an idea stated briefly by Schutz: that the sociology of knowledge should deal with ‘everything that passes for knowledge in everyday life’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 14–15; see also Berger, 2011: 81). Berger and Luckmann openly acknowledged their debt to Schutz, and to two other mentors from the New School, Carl Mayer and Albert Salomon, who molded their understanding of Weberian and Durkheimian theories. In a sense, this was a New School book; nonetheless, Berger and Luckmann were the ones who put everything together and the ones who deserve the credit and the recognition.

But recognition is a capricious creature. Hebert Spencer – who in 1882 was described by the president of Columbia College as ‘the most capacious and most powerful intellect of all time’ (Youmans, 1883: 87) – had the misfortune to outlive his fame and to behold, by the end of his life, a rapid decline in the influence of his ideas. Another long-lived sociologist, Norbert Elias, had the fortune to witness how his opus magnum, On the Process of Civilization, was finally appreciated almost 40 years after its initial publication. For their part, Berger and Luckmann have been fortunate enough to see how their signature work has received prompt and enduring recognition – but also unfortunate enough to undergo the misinterpretations that accompany the popularization of a written text.

The privilege to live alongside their own book for half a century has given to Berger and Luckmann the opportunity to reflect, at divergent stages in their careers, upon the significance of The Social Construction. In the interviews in this issue (both conducted in the fall of 2014) they comment on the mental process that guided their writing process, they further distance themselves from how the book has been ultimately appropriated by other social scientists, and they shed some light on the intellectual and social contexts that surrounded the making of the book. Their present assessments can be fruitfully compared, for example, to their opinions on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the appearance of the book (Berger, 1992; Luckmann, 1992).

The remainder of the special issue is comprised of six articles. Two of them (by Alan Sica and Jochen Dreher) advance new interpretations of The Social Construction, its significance and its reception. The rest build upon crucial ideas from the book in light of contemporary sociological discussions on cognition, the senses, and science and technology.

In his contribution, Sica declares a severe judgment on The Social Construction as well as on the readers of the book – show me a book without detractors and I will show you an irrelevant book. Sica echoes the suggestion that the book is frequently cited but it is rarely studied, a view shared by other commentators (Eberle, 1992: 493) and by Luckmann himself, as previously mentioned. Ultimately, this argument appears sound. Generally speaking, students and scholars who discuss ‘social construction’ in general, and in reference to Berger and Luckmann’s book in particular, do not seem actually to bother to read it (or they do so superficially). ¹⁰

Similar to other critics of Berger and Luckmann’s text (e.g. Abercrombie, 1986: 30), Sica labels it as ‘conservative’. First, he asserts that, compared with the traditional sociology of knowledge, The Social Construction is deficient with regards to ‘political-economic insight’. On the other hand, he laments the transition from ‘the macro-political to the micro-sociological’. Sica – who focused the majority of his commentaries on Berger in particular – fails to consider the fact that much of Berger’s work since the 1970s has been concentrated on the relationship between faith and development, that he was concerned with the political and economic problems in the ‘Third World’, that Berger has insisted on the importance of the ‘big question’, and that his research agenda moved in a macro-sociological direction (Berger, 1992: 2).

Dreher’s article offers an intriguing counterpoint to Sica’s. Dreher contends that – contrary to popular opinion – there are multiple elements in The Social Construction that can be applied to the sociological theory of power. He quotes a striking phrase from the book that summarizes the main idea: ‘He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 101). Even though Berger and Luckmann desired to separate themselves from the traditional themes of the German sociology of knowledge, they still recovered and adapted a series of venerable topics from the sub-discipline, such as ‘ideology’ (arguably the most essential concept in the sociology of knowledge during its initial decades of existence). Moreover, they refashioned the concept, matching it to their own theoretical outlook, claiming that – as Dreher notes – ‘ideology’ is a particular definition of reality that is attached to a concrete power interest (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 113). Dreher also gives attention to the problem of the ‘social monopoly of knowledge’ in The Social Construction (which Berger and Luckmann referred to as monopoly over ‘ultimate definitions of reality’ [1966: 111]), which is an under-rated but crucial problem for the sociology of knowledge that was explored by Mannheim and some of his successors, like Norbert Elias.

It is apparent that Sica and Dreher not only differ in their interpretation of the book along with its political potential, but additionally in their opinion of its overall value. Their contrasting views on The Social Construction actually reflect a wider chorus of voices that hold contrasting opinions on the fruitfulness of the book. Some commentators have argued that its contribution to the future sociology of knowledge was ‘sterile’ (Zammito, 2007: 800), while others have said that it represents the ‘most prominent contemporary argument in the sociology of knowledge’ (McCarthy, 2013: 1123). Sica and Dreher agree, nevertheless, in declaring that the book has been consistently misread.

‘Reification’ was yet another vital concept derived from the old German tradition in the sociology of knowledge (as was ‘ideology’) that Berger and Luckmann reinterpreted. Prior to the publication of the book, Berger and Pullberg (1965) published a dense theoretical paper on reification and the critique of consciousness. There they linked the problems of ‘alienation’ and ‘reification’. They defined the former as the ‘process by which man forgets that the world he lives in has been produced by himself’, and the latter as a ‘moment on the process of alienation in which the characteristic of thing-hood becomes the standard of objective reality’ (1965: 200). In The Social Construction Berger and Luckmann coined a more straightforward definition of reification: ‘the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms. [… It] is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something other than human products’ (1966: 82, original emphasis).

In considering this conceptualization and building upon his earlier work, Eviatar Zerubavel explores reification through some of its most common manifestations (the pillars of essentialism, as he calls them): religion, science, reason, universalism, and eternalism. Here Zerubavel is returning to one of his old interests. In his examination on the seven-day week, Zerubavel had already delved into the difference between ‘natural inevitability and social conventionality’ (1985: 141) that is at the heart of the problem of reification. There he showed how the socio-temporal rhythm marked by the seven-day week (a purely conventional unit of measurement) has been regularly reified as a manifestation of a ‘divine’ scheme or as a ‘natural’ tempo regulated by the lunar cycles. In both cases, the historical institution is comprehended in supra-human terms.

In her paper, Asia Friedman brings to the fore one of the decisive questions raised in The Social Construction: How does the social construction process work? A common ritual in the teaching of sociology is to ask students to consider ‘what’ things are socially constructed (race, time, age, etc.). But the ‘how’ question has been largely overlooked, as Friedman points out. She thus employs the sociology of the senses to uncover some of the ‘underlying mechanisms of the social construction process’.

Berger and Luckmann did not ignore the ‘how’ question. Luckmann, in particular, has spent considerable effort to record and examine a number of the actual micro-processes of social construction, principally through the study of communication and conversation – hence his interest in sequential analysis and related qualitative techniques. He has intended to analyze, in detail, the forms of communication that produce, transmit, and reproduce knowledge and meaning, and to create a framework in social theory that sees communication as the constitutive element of social life (Luckmann, 1996: 164). This emphasis, however, may seem at times rather logocentric. By commencing a dialogue between Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge and the sociology of the senses, Friedman looks to capture some of those construction processes in spheres that lie outside verbal communication.

The intuition of the importance of the body did not escape Berger and Luckmann. They said that social reality determines ‘organismic functioning’, and that the internalization of the world not only imposes upon consciousness a psychological and cognitive structure, but also ‘extends into the area of physiological processes’. They acknowledged the ‘intriguing possibilities’ of sociosomatics and the sociology of the body (1966: 166, 192; Berger, 1966a: 112); but they did not pursue those ideas further. Those intriguing possibilities awaited years to be fulfilled within the theoretical framework set in The Social Construction; now Friedman has finally fleshed them out.

In a similar vein to Friedman, who takes Berger and Luckmann to the realm of the corporeal, Silke Steets takes them to the ‘realm of materiality’, and more precisely to the dominion of architecture and the built environment. In the writings of Berger and Luckmann there are an abundance of architectonic metaphors. In Invitation to Sociology, for instance, Berger compares society to an immense prison in which groups of prisoners labor actively to keep the walls intact (1963: 120). Luckmann has characterized traditions and institutions saying that ‘they may appear less tangible than buildings and artifacts, but they are equally real’ (2013: 43). In the interview with him included in this special issue, he relates social constructivism with the ‘building’ of a house (i.e. ‘of a human world by human actors’), and compares the elements of that construction (the human body, evolutionary givens, etc.) with bricks. However, the texts of both Berger and Luckmann are virtually empty of thoughts on actual buildings and artifacts. ¹¹

Taking metaphors literally can produce interesting effects. Steets takes the metaphor of ‘social construction’ in a non-figurative manner, and explores how that could enhance our sociological understandings of the humanly-created material world. She follows the three analytical steps into which the dialectic of individual and society is divided by Berger and Luckmann (externalization, objectivation, and internalization), to show how human-made objects, through their materiality and symbolism, are part of the social world.

Finally, Steve Hoffmann places once again to the forefront the problem of ‘multiple realities’. Schutz (1964: 135–158) and Berger (1970) were attracted to that topic. Inter-estingly, however, they opted to exemplify their theoretical concepts only with literary vignettes – the former employing Cervantes’s Don Quixote and the latter using Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. Hoffmann, instead, elects to substantiate his argument around what he calls ‘other realities’ with more convincing evidence originating from empirical studies on the diverse applications of technology. These uses of ‘other realities’, as analyzed by Hoffman, afford an alluring case in which finite provinces of meaning exist as islands within the paramount reality of everyday life, but they do not pose a threat to the problem of ‘reality control’. These applications of other realities (training, simulation, education) are coherently embedded in the ‘official’ reality maintained and legitimated by the institutional order (and this is contrary to what happens with crime, war, and sexual and aesthetic experiences) (Berger, 1970: 220–221).

It seems appropriate that social scientists should revert to the issue of multiple/other realities, as it has gained momentum in broader fields. The question ‘what is real?’ has become prominent in popular culture as well as in academic discussions. Blockbuster movies like The Matrix (directed by the Wachowski Brothers) and Inception (directed by Christopher Nolan) depict situations in which the intersections between the realities of computer simulations, dreaming, and everyday life are either blurred or indistinguishable. Those films put considerable emphasis on the moments of switching from one reality to another, the shock of the transition, and the process to settle the consciousness in a new reality. In semiotics and postmodern philosophy, concepts like ‘hyperreality’ (that refers to conditions in which the distinction between reality and the simulation of reality is difficult or impossible to ascertain) have acquired notoriety, but they are devoid of sociological components. Hoffman’s paper brings a much needed sociological insight into those issues.

Berger and Luckmann insisted that there is a close connection between the sociology of knowledge and the sociologies of religion and language (1966: 169). Zerubavel, Friedman, Hoffman, and Steets show that a fruitful way to read The Social Construction today is to link the sociology of knowledge with cognitive sociology, the sociology of the body, and social studies of science and technology. Overall, the articles in this issue demonstrate that the heuristic potency of The Social Construction (beyond the general idea and terminology contained in the title) remains a source of innovative ideas.