This volume advocates a shift from the social constructivism of Luckmann and Berger to a communicative constructivism that acknowledges communication as a form of action in its own right, which constructs a social reality that guides, delimits and enables actions.

Hubert Knoblauch is Professor of Sociology at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Powerpoint, Communication, and the Knowledge Society; the co-author of Videography: Introduction to Interpretive Videoanalysis of Social Situations; and the co-editor of Culture, Communication, and Creativity: Reframing the Relations of Media, Knowledge, and Innovation in Society, and Social Constructivism as Paradigm: The Legacy of The Social Construction of Reality.

I Introduction

1. Science and Theory

2. Scientific Language and Discourse

3. Theory

1. Social Action, Intersubjectivity and Communicative Lifeworld* Excursus on Phenomenology

2. From Language to Empirical Communication Research

3. "The Social Construction of Reality" and Its Critiques

1. Communicative Action

2. Reciprocity, Relationality and Positionality

3. Body, Sensuality and Affectivity

4. Working, Performance and Performativity

5. Objectivations, Objectifications and Signs

6. Signs and Communication

7. Social Reality, Communicative Lifeworld and Subjectivation

(A) Time and Sequentiality

1. Sequences of Communictative Action

2. Genres, Institutions and Communicative Forms

3. Social Structures

4. Discourse

5. Legitimations

6. The Other, Censorship and Social Power

(B) Space and Media

1. Space

2. Presence, Situation und Mediation

1. From Discursivation to the Communication Society

2. Communicatization

3. Infrastructuring

4. Translocalization

5. Storage, De-Structuration and New Boundaries of Knowledge

6. Double Subjectivation

1. Beyond Modernity and Postmodernity

2. Figuration and Refiguration

3. Refigured Modernity