Berger and Luckmann provide the classical sociological machinery for understanding identity as an achievement of socialisation rather than an autonomous psychological possession. Their account of subjective reality rests on internalisation: institutional worlds become plausible and durable when they are incorporated through primary and secondary socialisation and continuously reaffirmed in interaction. Identity is therefore inseparable from broader theories of reality. The striking methodological gesture is their insistence that every psychology presupposes a cosmology: categories that appear clinically or scientifically self-evident are coherent only within historically and socially organised worlds. This makes identity relational at two levels, because it depends both on significant others and on legitimating systems that define what counts as normal, real and possible. The work bridges sociology of knowledge with social psychology and institutional theory. Its importance for identity studies lies in showing that subjectivity is not the opposite of social structure; it is one of the principal sites through which structure becomes lived, maintained and occasionally transformed.
