ABSTRACT
The frequency with which social scientists employ a term is taken as an indicator of its pragmatic utility, and then social reality would seem to be a very useful concept indeed. It is invoked not only in describing social influence processes, but also in explaining a variety of other forms of social behavior. T. J. Scheff takes a more concrete approach; his social reality is shared, but in an explicit dyadic situation. In the psychiatrist-patient relationship, for example, the psychiatrist rejects many of his patient's statements about the sources of his problems and accepts others. P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann offers perhaps the best single treatise on social reality. They provide considerable insight into the ways in which social reality emerges from habituation and becomes institutionalized into the social structure. A social system approach to the definition of social reality holds out the promise of describing the distribution of perspectives throughout a social system.
