Constructions of social reality

A person interprets the social situations he (or she) encounters in his own way, influenced by his upbringing, education and experience and by his own intellectual efforts, and he acts in the light of such interpretations. He reacts to any class or status situation as he perceives it within the constraints of the circumstances. It is because he perceives a given situation in certain ways, and because he accepts (or to varying degrees does not accept) the class structure and forms of stratification as he sees them, that he reacts as he does. Awareness, percepts, images, interpretations, social meanings and so on, concerned with social structural phenomena and issues, certainly reflect objective reality to some extent, and contain many notions with emotional colouring. In turn these subjective factors are externalized, the resulting products appearing to have the quality of objectivity, of existing independently of their producer, of confronting their producer with an external reality.

Class (philosophy) · Quality (philosophy) · Social class · Social reality · Social relation · Social stratification · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Critical Realism in Sociology · Social Representations and Identity