Relations, discourses and subjectivities: The social construction of reality and beyond

Abstract

The Sociology of Knowledge and the Interpretive Paradigm of Sociology, as it was outlined in Berger’s and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality is often misunderstood as a cognitivist approach that essentializes subjects as powerful sources of meaning. In contrast, this article argues that this interpretive approach is grounded in the perspective of the decentered subject and that it takes the materiality of meaning making processes into account. Therefore, three modifications of Berger’s and Luckmann’s interpretive sociology are outlined in this paper: first, the theoretical transition from a interactionist to a relational perspective; second, the specification of symbolic orders as universes of discourses and, thirdly, the conceptualization of identity as ongoing self-positioning processes. The article aims to show that these developments broaden the perspective the Social Construction by clarifying the methodological standpoint in order to enrich empirical research in the fields of discourse and subjectivation studies as well as in the classical research fields of the interpretive sociology that focus on interactions in the life-world.