Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains the symposium of the same name hosted in Vienna by the editors in April 2016 to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Social Construction of Reality. It explores the origins of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s theories in the intellectual climate of interwar Vienna and the original impetuses for the interpretive paradigm. The book analyses the integrative perspective of social constructivism, which rests on a threefold paradigm that links the socially channeled processes of communicating, interpreting and legitimating, and acting. It demonstrates that the fruitfulness of a sociology of knowledge perspective on architecture and the world of objects. The book argues that The Social Construction of Reality offers a complex analysis of the reciprocal and simultaneously independent processes of intra- and interindividual coordination and cooperation.