Blackwell Reference Online

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Sociologists from several perspectives have critically addressed reification. In general, reification refers to the act (or its result) of attributing to analytic or abstract concepts a material reality – it is a misplaced concreteness. Through reification people regard human relations, actions, and ideas as independent of themselves, sometimes governing them. The abstraction “society” is frequently reified into something that has the power to act. Society does not act – people do. Reification is an error of attribution; it is corrected by eliminating the hypostatization of abstractions into things or agents. For phenomenologists, reification is a potential outcome of the social construction of reality. To enter the lifeworld, human expression and subjective intention are externalized through “objectivation” where they become part of a socially constructed reality. Language is the common vehicle, although objectivation occurs through various symbolic forms. Reification occurs when people understand objectivations as if they were non-human or supra-human things and act “as if they were something other than human products – such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will.” Reification indicates we have forgotten our “own authorship of the human world” ( Berger & Luckmann 1966 : 89). A reified world is a dehumanized one. Marxist sociologists conceptualize ... log in or subscribe to read full text