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At the end of the 19th century, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Mead, and many others established a completely new way of thinking about reality. Rather than explaining social realities in terms of contracts between people, they talked about contracts between people in terms of social reality and thus saw it as a historically evolved reality structuring present-day interaction. What that means – and what implications it has for our conception of reality - has been the subject of intense scrutiny within the works of the great late 20-century thinkers on social reality, such as Goffman, Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, Alexander, Bhaskar, Harré, Searle and many others.

The sociologically oriented thinkers have created their contributions largely by combining the insights of the classic sociologists, or by generating new kinds of empirical approaches; contrary the language and discourse-oriented thinkers have established competing approaches based on the idea that social reality is knowable through the study of language, and language in fact constitutive of social reality.

The questions, which the different thinkers ask however all concern how the symbolic aspects of social interaction should be understood, how it emerges from interaction, and forms our perception of reality. How do realities such as the self and society emerge from the interaction? How do the categories of gender and notions of identity and nation emerge? And, how do they preserve themselves in shared action, and thus become reproduced by new generations?