Can We Build It: Yes, We Can

Finished “The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann yesterday as I waited to go through the jury selection process (talk about a socially constructed reality, the justice system is definitely a “reality” outside the norms I inhabit: but that is for later on in this post, or for another day). I read the book because it and the phrase “Social construction of reality” are tossed about quite a bit in the books I’ve been reading and in the doctoral program I was participating in, sort of on the same level as Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development.” And like Vygotsky, actually reading the text from which the phrase originates(?), was enlightening and I discovered more to it than is often discussed. The book was published in 1966 and was a discussion of the origins and shaping of “knowledges” in sociology. It takes the view, like James Gee, that everyone is functioning from an ideology, either tacit or implicit, that determines how that person views the world. Furthermore, these ideologies are created and constantly recreated and modified by the people in these social groups, affinity groups Gee would call them. The belief systems are laid down and created by a society, and are inculcated into children by their primary socializers (parents, significant others), and then further modified by secondary groups. Everyone is involved in an overlapping and nested series of groupings which lead toward the individuals identity inside of all of the groups combined, the identity being slightly different depending upon which group is formost at any given time. As I read the book, I saw connections to Shirley Brice Heath’s “Ways with Language,” Gee, as I already mentioned, and in his use of discourses (both big and little D’s), much of what I can glean from my post-modernist readings, as well as in, “Communities of Practice” by Etienne Wenger, Och’s “Living Narrative,” and Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:” three of the other books I have been plowing through lately.