“Objectivation” is key to the sociohistorical process of The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966). In the architecture of Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s theory of the sociology of knowledge, objectivation is the link between action and culture. Action is what people knowingly try to bring forward; culture is the long-lasting and often unintended effect of people’s actions, for example, institutions. Objectivation is at the center of the “dialectical” process that turns subjective meaning into social facts and social facts into subjective meaning. The former, called externalization, is informed by Durkheim and his postulate of social facts; the latter, internalization, is dedicated to Max Weber and his ideal of subjective meaning. Berger and Luckmann label these processes “dialectical” since they consider them to be permanent and continuing, in the sense that they run “simultaneously” both for the individual and for society as a whole (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1966, 149).

The designation of this process as dialectical is not intended to place the subjective outside the social, as it were (Knoblauch 2020, 40). Instead, from a pre-social subject, social theory needs to proceed from subjects who are set in relation to others from the very beginning of their lives. Neither subjective meaning nor consciousness but relationality is therefore the starting point of social theory, which—similar to what is described in interactionism as the “looking-glass effect”—results in reflexivity and subjectivity.

Husserl’s phenomenology, referring back to Kant and Descartes, is the classical source of subjectivity as a theoretical stance. It was Alfred Schütz who, informed by Bergson’s time phenomenology and Dewey’s pragmatism, transferred subjectivity into the empirical fact of intersubjectivity (cf. Schütz 1970). Anthropologically, actors must not be seen as entities already endowed with subjectivity but with the “capacity of subjectivation” (Steets 2019, 136). According to Silke Steets, “subjectivation is never just a one-way street from society to the subject. It is this interplay between one’s own reference to others and external reference from others that subjectifies” (Steets 2019, 136). Meaning is the way in which subjects relate to one another. And objectivations are crucial in these continuing action processes because they mediate the way in which subjects are able to refer to each other.