Social Construction Of Reality Analysis

Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann deals with knowledge of everyday which is a kind of knowledge that enables us to know basic things like where we are, what we are doing, who we are and so on. It accounts to the knowledge of everythingthat concerns a person, people around him/her and his/her relationships within the society. Throughtheir work, Berger and
Luckmann come up witha theory which would explain how a certain body of knowledge comes to be identified as “reality”. The term “reality” here refers to something which is external to an observer and the term “knowledge” is a form ofinterpretation of reality. They start building their work where the object of their analyses is the “reality

Berger and Luckmann appear to go further than Mannheim and suggest that all knowledge is socially constructed. What Berger and Luckmann appear to mean is that reality is interpreted differently by different social groups. The major difference between Berger and Luckmann and
Mannheim, however, is that for Berger and Luckmann, knowledge as a whole is regarded as being socially constructed that is, involves 'common sense reality '(Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Berger and Luckmann claim thatknowledge should not be reduced such that theydeal with only by a small group of people but instead, any common member of society should take part in it. Their major contribution is that theysuggest that sociology of knowledge must beginwith the common­sense view of reality as the traditional sociology of knowledge has been mostly focussing on ideologies and theoretical knowledge, thus only capturing a small part of what is being passed as knowledge in a society.(Berger and Luckmann, 1966) So, they propose instead that the sociology of

Theseconcepts of ‘I’ and the 'me ' make up the self (Ritzer, 2011).
Mead came up with a theory called ‘Symbolic interactionism’ in which hestates that the crucial features that separates human beings fromothers animals is the way of interaction(Ritzer ,
2011). Like many other thinkers he settles on language and ‘significant symbols’, as ways of differentiating human interaction from that assigned to animals. While animals do have the capacity to communicatewith one another, they cannot do so on a symbolic level. Because human interactions involve symbols (language, objects, signifiers, gestures) interaction is much more complex. The humans can not only respond to others but, because they can perceive their own communications and respond to themselves too (Ritzer, 2011).
Berger and Luckmann borrowed the concept of ‘symbolic interactionism’ from Mead and explained that language is the most important sign system of human society during the course