Social Constructivism As Paradigm?: The Legacy of the Social Construction of Reality

Social constructivism is one of the most prominent theoretical approaches in the social sciences. This volume celebrates the 50th anniversary of its first formulation in Peter Berger and Luckmann’s classic foundational text, The Social Construction of Reality. Addressing the work’s contribution to establishing social constructivism as a paradigm and discussing its potential for current questions in social theory, the contributing authors indicate the various cultural understandings and theoretical formulations that exist of social construction, its different fields of research and the promising new directions for future research that it presents in its most recent developments. A study of the importance of a work that established a paradigm in the international sociology of knowledge, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in social theory, the history of the social sciences and the significance of social constructivism.

Michaela Pfadenhauer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Vienna, Austria. She is the author of Invitation to the New Sociology of Knowledge and the co-editor of Epistemic and Learning Cultures.

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.