The Social Construction of Reality

The Social Construction of Reality is a 1966 book about the sociology of knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann.

The work introduced the term social construction into the social sciences and was strongly influenced by the work of Alfred Schütz. The central concept of Social Construction of Reality is that persons and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized. In the process of this institutionalization, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people's conception (and belief) of what reality is becomes embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Reality is therefore said to be socially constructed.