The purpose of the paper is to analyze two excerpts from C. Wright Mill’s The Sociological Imagination and Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. To do this, the concepts found in the readings will be identified and described. Moreover, the connections between the concepts will be drawn and they will be compared to each other.
Berger and Luckmann’s chapter is focused on the reality of everyday life. The researchers state that everyday life is one of the most real realities because it is formed by spatial and temporal factors and does not require verification. It is self-evident, dominant, and has a strong presence in a person’s mind. However, sometimes, it can be disrupted or interrupted by a problem or distraction that shifts focus onto some other reality. Nevertheless, according to the authors, everyday life still prevails by integrating the problem or “reorienting” a person back to reality with the help of language, time, or space. Moreover, it is the only reality that puts a person in connection with other people and allows our perceptions of reality to interact with each other.
A chapter from C. Wright Mills’ book deals with quite similar concepts and also focuses on the perception of everyday life by an individual. Peoples’ lives, according to the scholar, are determined by their jobs, familial ties, and neighbors. However, these factors are limiting and lead to the absence of awareness that everyday lives are connected to larger processes happening in the outside world. Moreover, without this understanding, it creates situations when the personal problems of individuals become overwhelming. In this connection, the author introduces his main concept of sociological imagination, a capacity to put personal perspective into a bigger context of world history and societal processes. This sociological imagination is deemed to be the most necessary quality for people as it frees them from feeling trapped and allows individuals to connect their troubles with social issues.
Both readings deal with the perceptions of everyday life. However, for Berger and Luckmann, the reality is ordered, structured, and meaningful while it is quite opposite for Mills. It is more problematic and does not offer an individual any coherence if perceived in isolation. For Mills, the most obvious effort that any person can do is to achieve the state of the sociological imagination and connect with others in the larger historical context. For Berger and Luckmann, the connection among people is existent as well but rather as an intersubjectivity, a partial sharing of world perspectives. It is interesting how for different researchers the reality has various degrees of objectivity. For Mills, history and social processes are the most real phenomena that affect people’s everyday lives. For two other scholars, it is the everyday life and an individual’s perceptions that constitute the most objective but not only real.
This paper presented a very brief overview of the two conceptions of reality developed in the two books. For all the authors, the concept of everyday life and the ways it is perceived by individuals are very important. However, they have different views on the concept’s place: for Berger and Luckmann, it is the focal point of an individual’s existence, while for Mills, everyday life should be a part of the objective social environment.