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Playing Chamber Music at a Rock Festival? The Social Construction of Reality in US Sociology

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Abstract

Starting from the metaphor of “playing chamber music at a rock festival” used by Peter L. Berger in 1992 to describe the impact of The Social Construction of Reality on US sociology, this article works out how the book’s somewhat puzzling legacy as a bestseller and a classic with remarkably rare direct follow-ups in the US discourse can indeed be conceived. I argue that one needs to take into account the theoretical-historical context in which Berger and Luckmann developed their ideas, including the specific forms of knowledge production in US sociology at the time, the institutional background of the book’s emergence at the New School for Social Research and the author’s biographical trajectories. On this basis, on can explain why Berger and Luckmann’s reformulation of the sociology of knowledge both perfectly met the 1960s Zeitgeist (which made it a bestseller) and at the same time remained theoretically marginal.

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Notes

  1. I do not have exact numbers of how all editions and translations have sold so far, but since Doubleday, the publisher of the original edition that also handled other early books by Berger, in the mid-1980s reported that Berger’s books “have sold in excess of a million and a half copies” (Hunter and Ainlay 1986: 2), we may speak of huge numbers.

  2. According to Vera (2016: 16), in Google Scholar the different editions of Social Construction account for about 39 thousand cites. As a comparison, Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) has around 38 thousand cites, Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) around three thousand, and Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) around 24 thousand.

  3. Those interested in getting an impression of the admiration Berger received through Social Construction and other books should read the first part of Katz Rothman (2012) (the second part deals with some sort of disappointment with her ‘hero’). A recently published critical, or I should rather say—spiteful—reflection on the book’s legacy can be found in Sica (2016).

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  1. Institute of Sociology, TU Darmstadt, Dolivostraße 15, 64293, Darmstadt, Germany

    Silke Steets

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Steets, S. Playing Chamber Music at a Rock Festival? The Social Construction of Reality in US Sociology. Hum Stud 39, 71–91 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-016-9396-2

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