Manuscript Version of Knoblauch/ Wilke, The Common Denominator Human Studies 39(1) (2016), 51-69. The common denominator The reception and impact of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality Hubert Knoblauch and René Wilke Introduction This paper addresses the reception and impact of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (SCR) as a book and a basic concept. Although there are many names and forms of constructivism in the social sciences, there are few doubts that Berger and Luckmann’s book, published in 1966, had a hand in its beginnings. In contrast to the psychological and cognitive orientation of constructivism, SCR stressed the ideas of the sociality of reality and the social processes of its construction. It is in this sense, that the book was a beginning of the paradigm of social construction. The book has been widely read, and despite the fact that it also seems to have coined the notion of social construction, there is quite some disagreement as to its impact and its status as the basic reference for and origin of the concept. We argue that the reason for this ambivalence lies, first, in the unexplained relation of the authors to their book and its major thesis. Both Berger and Luckmann left the book and its major concept, the social construction of reality, open for discussion. For this reason, the book’s thesis, secondly, became subject to various interpretations, some of which have since turned into academic movements. Third, the thesis diffused into a broad range of other disciplines and theories in the social sciences and humanities, which poses the question as to its paradigmatic status. By way of this diffusion, the thesis was subject to adaptations, translations and modifications. Instead of being plainly chaotic, the kind of reference to the book is dependent on the disciplinary proximity to sociology and sociological theory. Strong modifications outside this field led to the misreceptions and even the confusion of the social construction with other constructivist theses. As even the “postconstructivists” critique still shares some of its basic concepts, SCR still provides the most common denominator for the thesis of social construction. The article will, first, address Berger and Luckmann themselves and their approach to the book (see section 1). In the next part, we will sketch the diffusion of the basic concept of the book (see section 2a). Then we want to show that the reception exhibits a particular open form, which allowed it to disperse into extremely different disciplines not only of the social sciences and the humanities (see section 2b). It is the disciplinary distance in particular that detaches the diffusion of the thesis from reference to the book (see section 3). In the next part, we can see that this detachment leads to the variation of approaches to social construction (see section 4). Particularly, it is the misidentification with constructivism (see section 5) that leads to misunderstandings, which will then be clarified in contrast to our reconsideration of the basic