Social Construction of

Reality
 Social construction theory
• addresses the processes by which people jointly construct
their understandings of the world.
• A variety of terms has been used to identify this line of
thought (social construction of reality, social
constructionism, social constructionist, social
constructivism, social constructivist), but the current term of
choice is simply social construction,
• The term social construction was introduced in Peter Berger
and Thomas Luckmann’s book The Social Construction of
Reality.
• Berger and Luckmann combine certain assumptions of
sociology and philosophy, and the theory has since been
taken up by other disciplines as well, including particularly
education, psychology, and communication.
 The Social
• One of the implications of social construction theory is the
acknowledgment that social reality requires interaction
between people
• Each culture or social group develops its own understandings
of the world, creating its own meanings for behavior and how
this is to be understood. People, acting together, develop
traditions over time, and then begin to take them for granted.
• Status is a typical example: The fact that we treat presidents or
CEOs differently than janitors or waiters has little to do with
physically obvious differences, relying instead on socially
granted characteristics.
• What one culture expects of men, another expects of women.
The different ways groups create their own meanings
underscores the significance of the context relevant to
interpretation of a particular social construction.
 Construction
• Central to social construction is the verb to construct, which
implies building something, making something, or bringing
something into being that had no existence previously.
• The construction metaphor leads researchers to study how
people make things such as families or emotions, which do
not have material substance, appear to have substance and
definition.
• social construction is generally understood to incorporate
four stages: construction, maintenance, repair, and change
 Reality
• Social construction theory implies a distinction between the
physical and social realms.
• Many things have social reality without having prior physical
existence (including social roles, relationships, or religions).
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