Sure. More than ever!

There could be number of theories since then, but still this is valid. Although, the society has changed during last 50 or more years, human behaviours are largely depend on the societal context which they live. So the "Social Construction of Reality" provide us very useful framework to understand it.

The society hasn't changed so much. We continue to explore the the same opportunities opened by the neolitic revolution.

The Social Construction of Reality, by Berger and Luckmann, is just as relevant today as the day it was published. Elaborating on the wonderful work of their mentor, Alfred Schutz, they offer profound, enduring, and, I would argue, universal insight into the relationship between self and society. It is certainly part of the foundation for my own research.

The question about "other theories" implies that Berger and Luckmann presented a theory. Is that true? We should reserve the word "theory" for a construct that generates testable (falsifiable) propositions. I don't necessarily mean that in the narrow sense of statistical tests, although they are valuable when available. More intuitive tests might be adequate. If there are competing ideas about the social construction of knowledge (eg., structural-functional vs. hegemonic) and there are ways of judging their relative adequacy, then it would be appropriate to call them theories. The mere fact that sociologists have been socialized to respect certain authors and repeat their ideas to their students does not make those ideas true. Weber's "Protestant ethic" thesis has been taught and debated for a century, but the verdict is still out on what social facts it can account for. By contrast, the French tradition of empirical sociology, starting with Quetelet in the 1830s and ending with Durkheim, provides a firmer ground for choosing among alternative hypotheses. Someone once told me that German sociology became prominent and the French school lost ground because all of Durkheim's students died during World War I. Whatever the reason, German sociology remains more influential in the world today. But just because we have grown accustomed to it does not make it more adequate than other options.

now this is getting interesting. thanks for the alternate insight Prof Clifford. aren't we all testing the 'theory' time and again whenever we use it in our research as a theoretical framework?

also i feel its not just German sociology which is more influential today but all of european/western theories (bourdieu, mead, goffman, giddens, featherstone, lash and robertson). asian perspective seems to have been neglected/ lost/ buried under the influx of western (european language) research since the last couple of centuries.

but this is a job still in progress

Mayukh Dewan, I agree that social sciences generally are limited by the restrictions of thought imposed by Western philosophy. Unfortunately, the intellectual leaders (or at least the academic leaders) in most countries of the world have been taught in Western universities or by professors who have studied in them. Articles are rare in any field that introduce concepts that arise from the cosmology of cultures in which social relations are not predicated on Greek ideas of logos and nomos. The dominant forms of Western philosophy since Descartes begin with the assumption that reality consists of separate objects, and the puzzle is how they work together. (That's the way I describe methodological individualism.) But that ontology is only taken for granted in Western philosophy. Most Asian and African cosmologies start from different premises. The only way to get out of the many dead ends that afflict Western thought in our time is to look to other traditions and their premises as new starting points, as disconcerting as that might be to those trained in the former. There are hundreds of obstacles to change, but they are not insurmountable.

I’m mostly with Clifford Cobb. Berger and Luckmann are full of abstractions, short on examples and have no testable theory—like Weber. Weber’s famous book makes a fundamental mistake in seeing only the individualism in Protestantism. Calvin was actually more egalitarian than individualist—nearer the hippy colony or Jonestown than commerce or the stock exchange. Weber thought sects were individualist--which is a huge mistake. I think that, like his pal Pareto, he suspected Marxism of being a form of individualist trickery. He just didn’t recognise the political left. Marx himself, though he distinguished left egalitarianism, had no clear concept of it.

So social science, except for economics, has failed to build a body of theory. Sociology in particular, seemed to grind to a halt a generation ago.

“reality consists of separate objects, and the puzzle is how they work together. (That's the way I describe methodological individualism.)” Well put. But it is not just Western philosophy; it is also the method of natural science—the science that has transformed human existence over recent centuries. This, surely, is grounds for the social sciences to mimic it. But they mostly don't.

The natural sciences (the kind of sciences that work) minimally include:

- a theory interrelating two or more concepts, where

- the concepts are idealised extremes (as Weber talked about),

- the relationship is insensitive to definitions of the concepts,

- the relationship predicts an effect to be sought in reality.

In addition, it is almost always the case that in the natural sciences:

- the relationship is of quantities or intensities, not counts of frequencies or incidences.

If these are normal practices then social science should respect them if it hopes to be as effective as natural science. Economics pretty much does and it rules the world. The rest of social science should give it a try. Psychology, which is always trying to be hypothetico-deductive, fails to free itself of definitions (so theories are not testable) and ignores real relationships in favour of statistically relating counts of defined objects. In political science there are hints of progress, for example:

“Democracies never war against each other.”

“Parliamentary countries work better than presidential ones.”

“Proportional representation works better than single member electorates.” (Arendt Lijphart.)

“The number of politicians is the cube root of the population.” (Taagepera and Shugart.)

“Democracy and improvements to democracy only occur when polarised elites have fought themselves to a stalemate.” (Dankwart Rustow.)

I don’t know that finding such testable relationships is why political science is not as deep in the doldrums as sociology. I suspect it is international relations (as far from reason and science as you can get) which keeps political science bubbling along.

There are a great many Western sociologists who have sympathetically studied Asian and African cultures—the anthropologists. I don’t think they have come up with much. The Asian and African cosmologies may have their qualities but they don’t have the track record of natural science (which is not Western but universal) so there seems to be nothing to indicate they could lead from the current dead end.

Yes. Probably all the more so with Ian Hacking's re-thinking in "The social construction of what?" (1999).

Yes

We observe behavior. Why do we want to explain it? Because we want to predict it. If we can predict it, we have explained it, and can control it. This must all happen in a group of observers who can critique each others work. This is the essence of social construction. It goes on constantly all around us. Nothing absolute about it. These structures evolve over time, sometimes even implode!

thanks for your insights Dr L Kurt Engelhart

An interesting perspective on the Social Construction of Reality:

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/deepak-chopra-consciousness-10-questions-1-answer-120056275.html

thanks for the article Dr Kurt