ABSTRACT
Peter Berger’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966e), coauthored with Thomas Luckmann, was one of the most influential sociological books of the 1960s. At that time, British sociological tastes (particularly those of students) were being influenced by American studies of deviant behavior which were, in turn, formed by Mead’s symbolic interactionism. It was not only that these - largely ethnographic - studies were lively, intriguing, and promising as pieces of empirical research. They also aroused interest in a theory, or philosophy, of social research, radically opposed to the then prevailing orthodoxies. Most orthodox British sociological theory was organized around ‘structural’ conceptions which gave primacy to social determinations rather than individual agency. In turn, these conceptions derived either from the structural-functionalism of British anthropology or from a particular reading of classical sociological theory, particularly that of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Thus a typical debate of the period was that between consensus and conflict schools. Parsons was taken as a representative of the first, emphasizing the coherence of societies through commonly held values, while various Marxist positions exemplified the second in arguing that societies were in fact riven with conflict. Whatever the disagreements, this debate like others was pitched at the level of social structure and tended to ignore the level of individual agency. Of course, various commentators tried to rescue the hidden individual dimension by, for example, emphasizing Parsons’s action theory or rediscovering Marx’s early writings. None the less, the prevailing tone was structural.
