The Social Construction of Knowledge

In this chapter, I trace the resurfacing of sociology of knowledge in the 1960s and 1970s. Given the dominant concern with the social construction of knowledge, one can speak of a constructivist turn here. With the interest for “construction”, the praxis (and practices) of knowledge creation becomes central. This happens first in the programme of social constructivism formulated by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their book The Social Construction of Reality. In France Pierre Bourdieu sketches his social theory of practice and proposes with his concept of habitus a sociological analysis of embodied knowledge structures and social structures. He sometimes calls his theory structural constructivism. Third, sociology of knowledge experiences a renewal with the research programme of empirical constructivism, that is the ethnomethodologically-informed and ethnographically-oriented laboratory studies within the framework of social studies of science.