The Communicative Construction of Reality

This volume advocates a shift from the social constructivism found in the work of Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, to a communicative constructivism that acknowledges communication as an embodied form of action in its own right, according to which social actors, in engaging in communicative action, construct a material social reality that guides, delimits, and enables actions. A study of the importance of understanding the role of communication in an age in which digitization and mediatization have extended the reach of communication to a global level and brought about the emergence of the communication society, The Communicative Construction of Reality shows how communication society does not merely replace modern society and its hierarchical institutions, but complements it in a manner that continually results in conflicts leading to the refiguration of society. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in the sociology of knowledge, communication, and social theory.

Hubert Knoblauch is Professor of Sociology at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Powerpoint, Communication, and the Knowledge Society; the co-author of Videography: Introduction to Interpretive Videoanalysis of Social Situations; and the co-editor of Culture, Communication, and Creativity: Reframing the Relations of Media, Knowledge, and Innovation in Society, and Social Constructivism as Paradigm: The Legacy of The Social Construction of Reality.