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Writing a book is always an adventure—and what an adventure it must have been writing The Social Construction of Reality published 50 years ago (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Several times Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann have recalled the context in which the essay was written in the early 1960s: the outline, the discussions on each chapter, the anecdotes, but also the hard work behind the writing and the numerous texts revisions (for example Berger 1992, 2016; Luckmann 1992, 2016). Nevertheless, the adventures of what appears to be one of the most cited work in sociology did not stop after its publication in 1966. On the contrary, it is a book that changed, to a certain extent, the image of sociology, and opened fascinating sociological horizons for multiple interpretations, applications, and developments. The diagnosis of Ian Hacking on the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions holds true for Berger’s and Luckmann’s classic as well: “it is a great book, it can be read in endless ways and put to many uses” (Hacking 2012: viii).

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-016-9398-0

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