Blog 10

"Society is a human product.  Society is an objective reality.  Man is a social product."

-Peter Berger

The Social Construction of Reality, Berger's best-known work, takes a deeper look into why a society functions in the way that it does.  Berger's concept explains that groups of people will create different concepts, or assign meanings and representations to things, over time.  These will then eventually become habitual; we won't have to think about them, we simply know.  After that is when institutionalization occurs. This is when people enter into these roles almost systematically.  Once these created thoughts and concepts become institutionalized, our reality becomes socially constructed.

This was an interesting topic to discuss, because it really makes you question the validity of the world around you.  I think one way in which I agree with this concept is that society is not the same all over the world.  If these "roles" that we play were the same all over the world, then maybe I would argue that somehow these societal roles were inbred in us.  But, you can see that there are roles that are seen as normal in our society, that when you travel to other societies you see that those are not even in existence. What is an acceptable role in society in the United States would be different than that of a societal role in a third world country. We socially construct these roles and ideas, and we, in a way construct the society around us.

Here is a video of Peter Berger talking about his sociological views, and his book The Social Construction of Reality