The sociology of knowledge
In the late 1970s, an acquaintance to whom I am forever grateful (Peter Gruen) recommended two books: Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia: An introduction to the sociology of knowledge and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge.
The sociology of knowledge – the idea that our ability to know the world is influenced by the social and cultural context in which we have conceptualized the world – was very appealing to me. I was already open to the idea that reality was not something I should take for granted. The sociology of knowledge provided me with another clue as to the nature of reality.
Social construction, at least as presented by Berger and Luckmann, is the application of the sociology of knowledge to everyday life, including how we come to have a sense of our selves. To say that something is socially constructed simply means that it’s not set in stone for eternity, but depends on shared social attitudes that prevail at a particular location in time and space. To say that normality or marriage, for example, are socially constructed means that being normal or placing a certain value on marriage is subject to change and thus open to question. Read more
