Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann (1966), Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday (203 pp.; LCCN 66014925; OCLC 2360263) — https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/2360263
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the works filling out the record’s coverage of social ontology under the topic ADR-017 added, whose blurb names social construction.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read and no
NOTE is filed. What follows is only what the catalogue records show.
Contents (1966 edition, from the Open Library record; page numbers as given there):
- Preface
- Introduction: The Problem of the Sociology of Knowledge (1)
- I. The Foundations of Knowledge in Everyday Life (19)
- The Reality of Everyday Life (19); Social Interaction in Everyday Life (27); Language and Knowledge in Everyday Life (33)
- II. Society as Objective Reality (45)
- Institutionalization (45): Organism and Activity; Origins of Institutionalization (50); Sedimentation and Tradition (63); Roles (67); Scope and Modes of Institutionalization (74)
- Legitimation (85): Origins of Symbolic Universes; Conceptual Machineries of Universe-Maintenance (96); Social Organization for Universe-Maintenance (107)
- III. Society as Subjective Reality (119)
- Internalization of Reality (119): Primary Socialization; Secondary Socialization (127); Maintenance and Transformation of Subjective Reality (135)
- Internalization and Social Structure (150); Theories about Identity (159); Organism and Identity (165)
- Conclusion: The Sociology of Knowledge and Sociological Theory (169)
- Notes, subject index, name index (175–203)
Where it would sit. The contents put institutions on the objective side and socialization and identity on the subjective side. That is the same ground as Durkheim’s chapter (LIT-484), where institutions exist outside individuals and education imposes them, and the same ground as the social categories Haslanger (LIT-480) and Ásta (LIT-491) analyse. Whether the book engages Durkheim, and what it means by “construction”, a reading has to establish; neither is recorded here. Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? (LIT-475), also filed unread, asks what such claims are about; whether it discusses this book was not checked.
Topic. social-ontology is primary, as a theory of how institutions and
roles come to be objective. social-science holds it as a work of sociology,
and epistemology holds the sociology of knowledge, its stated subject.
No instruction for machine-learning practice appears in what was seen, so nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.
What a reading should check.
- What “social construction of reality” claims: that institutions exist only through habitualised and legitimated activity, or something about reality in general.
- How “Sedimentation and Tradition” and “Roles” relate to Durkheim’s consolidated ways of doing and to Ritchie’s nodes and roles (LIT-486).
- Whether institutions are treated as having anything like agency, which would connect it to the group-agency strand (LIT-401).