ABSTRACT
Social construction is real and undeniable. Social construction rests in all of these and more: the physical environment, the biosphere, perceptual and informational systems, resource availability, disciplines of inquiry, political habits, belief systems. The decisive difference offered by the founders of sociology is to locate these processes in forms of solidarity. The primacy of social construction (though the name used is the more limited concept of ideology) coincides with the emergence of large-scale industrial production. 'Modernisms' tend to emphasise the freedom of social reconstruction this (might) make(s) possible. The multiple complexity of social difference is clearly observed by 'critical' theory, that is, as a persistent outcome of social dynamics. Durkheim's offer is double-edged: the concept of sui generic social phenomena founds the very possibility of sociology, but at the price of the isolation of social construction from other phenomena, notably psychological and biological phenomena.
