The Communicational Construction of Knowledge

This chapter discusses the unfolding of the traditions of the sociology of knowledge since the mid-1970s. It can be conceptualized, with Thomas Luckmann and Hubert Knoblauch, as a shift from the social to the communicational construction of reality and knowledge. In the context of a cultural or even a praxeological turn of sociology that is inspired by the sociology of knowledge, the analysis of knowledge now focuses increasingly on the language use and the communication processes in and through which knowledge circulates in society. In his radical-constructivist programme of a system theory grounded in communication theory, Niklas Luhmann presents his own perspective on the sociology of knowledge. Thomas Luckmann, Jörg Bergmann, and Hubert Knoblauch propose the concept of communicational (or ‘communicative’) genres to study the linguistic organization patterns, through which the social circulation of knowledge in language use is accomplished. Furthermore, somewhere between social constructivist sociology of knowledge and symbolic interactionism emerge studies of public discourses, which aim at the social processes of negotiating definitions of problems and solution options—the only perspective of discourse research that can be genuinely allocated to sociology.