The Sociology Of Knowledge: Mannheim, And Berger-Luckmann

The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thoughts and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies. It is not a specialized area of sociology but instead deals with broad fundamental questions about the extent and limits of social influences on individual 's lives and the social-cultural basics of our knowledge about the world. (Weeks, n.d.)
In this essay, works of Karl Mannheim (primarily Ideology and Utopia), George Herbert Mead (primarily Mind, Self and Society), and Berger-Luckmann are analysed to find how Berger-Luckmann developed their work (The Social Construction of Reality) building upon the existing works of Mannheim and Mead.
Karl Mannheim was a

He is considered by many to be the father of the school of Symbolic Interactionism in sociology and social psychology. He is most notably known for his work : Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist.
Basically, Mead’s views enlighten us with the fact that people 's minds and their conceptions of themselves are shaped by their social experiences.
Mead in his work Mind, Self, and Society, explains that gestures are to be understood in terms of the behavioral responses of animals to stimuli from other organisms. (Mead & In Morris, 1934, p. xx)
For a gesture to have significance, it must call out in a second organism a response that is functionally identical to the response that the first organism anticipates. In other words, for a gesture to be significant it must “mean” the same thing to both organisms, and “meaning” involves the capacity to consciously anticipate how other organisms will respond to symbols or gestures. (Mitchell, 2012)
Also, one of Mead 's most significant contributions to social psychology is his distinction between the “I” and the “Me.” The self that arises in relationship to a specific generalized other is referred to as the “Me.” The “Me” is a cognitive object, which is only known retrospectively, that is, on reflection. (Mitchell,

Social constructionism focuses on the description of institutions and actions and not on analyzing cause and effect. Socially constructed reality is seen as an on-going dynamic process; reality is re-produced by people acting on their interpretations of what they perceive to be the world external to them. Berger and Luckmann argue that social construction describes both subjective and objective reality, that is that no reality exists outside what is produced and reproduced in social interactions. (Ryan,