Berger & Luckmann

The Social Construction of Reality

The Main Idea

Broadly this work can be conceived of as yet another attempt to integrate the two seemingly inimical strands of social theory- those of Durkheimian analysis with its focus on the integrative aspects of social structure and the methodological individualism tradition epitomized by Weber that focuses on the individual actions as being the basis of social actions and structure. For this reason, Berger and Luckmann's vision of society can be well represented by one word that they repeatedly use throughout this piece, that of the "dialectic". Humans are seen to be engaged in the perpetual cycle of the dialectic of creating the objective reality socially and, in turn, internalizing these very created realities as their own subjectively. As they call their approaches that of the "sociology of knowledge", so particular attention is paid to the role of knowledge in constructing these objective and subjective realities. It is important to stress that the nature of the "knowledge" these authors are talking about is "pretheoretical", that is, knowledge is not be narrowly defined as the ideology, scientific knowledge, or any other sort of well-formulated "theoretical" knowledge, but rather more broadly as everything about everyday life that humans can potentially come to "know" about. With this view of what knowledge is, then, authors then perceive of the knowledge as the basis and the tool for social construction of realities, without which no meaningful creation of objective or subjective realities would be possible. Ultimately, where they end up is at the conclusion quite close to that of modern theorists also concerned with the integration of "structure-based analysis" and "individual-based analysis" - i.e., Giddens or Bourdieu, etc. - that is, all realities are socially constructed as results of distinctive social actions individuals perform. With this conclusion kept in mind, then, it appears that one of the main intention the authors had in writing this work was their argument against the tendency of many segments of the social science to "reify" structures as existing apart from the social actions of individuals. To the authors, such formulation tends to run into the problem of obscuring where in the world any of the social "realities" we see and live with everyday come from in the first place. So this is the basic question asked in this book, where do these "realities" come from, or in another word, how do humans create these realities socially - with particular emphasis on the role of "knowledge". To answer this question the book is broken down into the sections for: (1) establishing the foundations of knowledge in everyday life, (2) explicating on how objective social reality is constructed (that is, how social realities are rendered meaningful above and beyond the perception of any one single individual), (3) explicating on how these objective social realities are in turn internalized by individuals as their own subjective realities (obviously, this does not mean individuals are then dupes, for they have been engaging in the creation of objective realities in the first place).

Section (1): The Foundations of Knowledge in Everyday Life

1. The first starting point is the phenomenological doctrine (Do not worry if you do not know what phenomenology is, I don't really know either, such finer details are not important for the purpose of the prelim) that we cannot merely be "conscious", but must be conscious of something. So, consciousness is seen to be always directed at something, it is always intentional. Further, it is also important to keep in mind that the authors accept the human capacity to "know" the empirical reality around them as if it is taken for granted, i.e., they do not engage in epistemological or ontological search for the nature of this knowledge itself. The world is seen to be consisting of multiple realities, with individuals capable of directing consciousness to different spheres of those realities.

2. The reality of everyday life is the intersubjective world - with language as a vehicle needed to objectify meanings so they can be shared by more than one person. The other realities, then, appear as enclaves detached from this everyday world of intersubjectivity.

3. The most rudimentary form of experience of others in this everyday life is the face to face contact. However, this alone is not enough to create the social structure. Rather, structure is about typification - categorization of many different people under the generalized, anonymous concept based on the characteristics believed to represent that category well.

4. Then, humans are fundamentally capable of "objectification" and "detaching" of realities from the immediate perception and expression of subjective concerns. Again, language is the tool that enables people to do this.

Section (2): Society as Objective Reality

How the objective reality is socially constructed - focusing on the mechanism of institutionalization, and the subsequent legitimation as a necessary corollary of that institutionalization.

Institutionalization

1. Because the nature of the relationship between humans and nature is not predetermined biologically, it follows that human need to create the realities socially is seen as arising from the biological characteristics. In another word, because humans are what they are genetically, they have to create realities socially (Notice that this conception of human nature is derived from Marx).

2. Human actions have innate tendency to habitualize. When this tendency for actions to habitualize is applied to actions involving social relationships, then, we have the origin of institutions. The character of now "objectified" institutions is fully manifest when these institutions are transmitted to the generation who did not invent them initially, for then these institutions appear as a fully objective reality. Yet, still, this process of institutionalization is a dialectic process. So, institutions are the human product, at the same time humans are products of their own creations.

3. All institutionalized conduct involve roles - typification of actions based on one's position within any particular institution. The authors assert that the analysis of roles is a particularly important concern for sociologists, for different roles represent differential distribution of socially constructed stock of knowledge to different people. Thus, by looking at roles, it would be possible to tell what sort of realities are relevant to any particular individual among all realities created and existing in the society.

4. With increased level of the division of labor, the modern society has much more segmented and complex set of different institutions - leading to the creation of "sub universes". In this context, institutions have tendency to reify, that is, people can no longer perceive of institutions as products of their own actions but perceive of them as merely being "there".

Legitimation

1. The purpose of legitimation is to explain and validate the existing institutions, so that their presence is seen by individuals as subjectively plausible and acceptable. This process can be regarded as the "second-order" objectivation, with the first-order objectivation being those meanings attached to the institutional processes themselves. But now, further "legitimation" is needed.

2. Legitimation not only has normative but cognitive functions as well. That is, legitimation tells you not only how things should be done but also what things are in the first place. In this sense, legitimation is a combination of knowledge and values. Following this, there are 4 analytical levels of legitimation. The first level is the incipient legitimation that goes along with the objectivation of human experiences. The second level contains the theoretical proposition in a rudimentary form. The third level contains explicit theories. The fourth level is the "symbolic universe", those all-encompassing features of the society as religion and the state with the aim of encompassing all institutions in a symbolic totality.

3. A further trick of legitimation, according to the authors, is that this "symbolic universe", itself a device for legitimation, in turn needs its own form of legitimation to make itself acceptable for society's individuals. This need for the legitimation mechanism for the symbolic universe becomes most acute when the symbolic universe becomes the "problem" visibly. Such situation may take place with the emergence of dissidents inside the society, or with the contact with previously unknown foreigners who arrive with the different world views. In order to cope with these problems, human societies have devised up number of different "conceptual machineries" for the purpose of symbolic universe maintenance. Mythology, theology, philosophy, and science are such. The authors note of two more applications of this conceptual machinery for the maintenance of symbolic universe. The first is the therapy, a method which attempts to stop people from emigrating to other universes by dealing with individual cases, using appropriate legitimating apparatus. The second is the nihilation, which tries to liquidate all those concepts outside of the symbolic universe. This may be in the form of merely negating or downplaying those deviant phenomena by assigning negative ontological status, or it may involve attempting to account for deviance by explaining them in terms of the concepts already in the symbolic universe.

4. Finally, the authors attempt to bring in the element of power, by looking not just at what these universe maintenance mechanism is but also who does this universe maintenance. In another word, this is an analysis of the social organization of the society focusing on its correspondence to the particular type of maintenance devices it uses. Briefly, as the division of labor progresses, certain elite segment of the society tends to have monopoly over this symbol defining function. The first consequence of this development is the rise of "pure theory". A second consequence is the tendency toward inertia, the institutions tend to stay unless they become seriously problematic. The emergence of a full-time personnel for universe maintenance also tends to be the source of social conflict.

Section (3): Society as Subjective Reality

The focus of this section is how objective realities socially constructed are in turn internalized by individuals as their own subjective realities. This section is heavily influenced by writings of the social psychology, particularly that of George H. Mead. Consequently, many of the central ideas in this section, such as the authors' characterization of primary and secondary socialization processes, do not sound so new but share number of commonalities with psychology.

1. Primary socialization is a type of socialization during the childhood through which people first become a member of a society. It ends when the concept of "generalized other" - abstraction of roles and attitudes from concretely visible significant others - has been firmly entrenched in the consciousness of a child. When this generalized other has been crystallized within the consciousness, the objective and subjective realities become "symmetrical" within the mind of the child. What is presented as objectively real in the outside world in turn becomes the subjective reality in the mind of the child, too.

2. After this primary socialization has taken place, secondary socialization follows. This is the process of internalizing institutional or institution-based "subworlds", acquiring of role-specific behaviors and knowledge. This process of secondary socialization is characterized by formality and anonymity. That is, while in the primary socialization it was not possible to be socialized without emotionally charged identification with significant others, in the secondary socialization the process is characterized by more of a sense of detachment - detachment from the ones teaching socialization, and internalizing only those anonymous aspects associated with the generalized role. The important result of this process is that individuals are now able to detach a part of the self as relevant only to certain role-specific behaviors. They are now able to say that, whatever they do it is only a part of their identity and different from the total self.

3. Since socialization is never complete and there is always an inherent threat that subjective realities may be endangered, societies have number of procedures to safeguard the reasonable congruence between objective and subjective realities. The authors divide these procedures between those for routine times and those for crises periods. For the former, it is that the reality of everyday life is maintained by being embodied in routines - a hallmark of institutionalization. Again, language and conversation is the most important vehicle of this process of subjective reality-maintenance. The authors further note of the particularly important role significant others play in safeguarding subjective realities, while not forgetting to mention of innegligible roles played by not-so significant others. Mechanisms for the crises times, while not being fundamentally different in nature, must provide for much more explicit and intensive confirmation of realities (Swidler delves into this topic with more details). For this reason, specific ritual techniques are frequently employed. Finally, the authors discuss of "alternations", in which near total transformation of the world view takes place as a result of radical re-socialization after reaching adulthood.

4. It is important to keep in mind that socialization always takes place within the context of specific social structure. That is, it is not possible to speak of the pattern of socialization without the consideration of macro structural factors and their influence on the process of socialization. More specifically, the authors note that more primitive societies are usually capable of attaining high degree of congruence between objective and subjective realities. Socially defined identities appear as massively real in these primordial societies, and the question of "Who am I" usually never arises. Not so in our society, which is characterized by much more complex pattern of division of labor and crisscrossing of multiple realities. In this type of society, unsuccessful socialization, in the sense that there is a high degree of incongruence between subjective and objective realities, is much more likely. The individuals are given so many choices of competing realities, and they will now be plagued by the question of "Who am I?".

Critique and Relevance

Once again, this is basically an attempt at bridging the gap of structure-based sociology and methodological individualism. Recall that Prof. Riesebrodt, who taught the theory class we took and is likely to be the grader of the culture section, is generally unimpressed with most of the modern attempts at the same endeavor - i.e., works as Habermas, Bourdieu and Giddens. He claims that these tend to "theorize on others' theories" and are so abstract so that it is no longer possible to formulate any meaningful empirical researches out of them. He also thinks that while these attempts are complex in the sense that they try to combine the elements from various classical authors, they do not actually add anything totally new to the theory on society. I agree with him on most of these points, I also do not really accept the usefulness of most of these works in the sense that they do not give me any strong sense of connection to concrete empirical research. However, in this regard my overall judgment is that this work by Berger and Luckmann is probably most acceptable among the works attempting to integrate structure-based sociology and methodological individualism. This is because, whereas other authors have tended to mix up the processes of "objectivation" and "internalization of realities by individuals" under one concept, i.e., "habitus" for Bourdieu and "structuration theory" for Giddens - with the result that there is no one straightforward interpretation of these concepts useful for a research - in this work these two processes are kept as two separate entities. Consequently, one could ask quite meaningful questions on both "objective" and "subjective" sides of reality construction. For the former, for instance, how did certain institutions develop historically in a certain society? How does the processes like "therapy" and "nihilation"work really? Is the nature of "symbolic universe" tend to differ systematically according to the political structure of a society?; on the subjective side, you might ask: How can we classify different consequences of the incongruence of primary and secondary socialization processes? Is it true that the more complex structure of the modern world is the cause of the failure to internalize "objective" realities of the society? or whatever the questions you are interested in. Anyway, the point is that this work seems to stay at the proper level of abstraction so to be useful for some concrete research, and my guess is that Prof. Riesebrodt also has a pretty good estimation of this work. Anyhow, whatever his own judgment may be, this has been a heavily cited work and as such, is a good starting point for the sociology of culture.