Alfred Schutz

Theory 1

• Phenomenology

• Phenomenology studies the structures of lived experience and how the world appears as meaningful to consciousness.

• Social reality:

• Social reality is the intersubjective world of relationships, practices, and institutions that people experience and interpret through shared meanings.

• Bracketing — Einklammerung

• Bracketing temporarily suspends judgments about the world’s independent existence to examine how it appears in experience.

• Natural attitude:

• The natural attitude is the everyday stance in which people take the world and other people’s existence for granted.

• Intersubjectivity:

• Intersubjectivity is the sharing and mutual interpretation of a social world among people with distinct experiences and perspectives.

• Typifications:

• Typifications are familiar categories of people, objects, and actions that allow us to recognise and navigate situations without examining every detail anew.

• Everyday knowledge:

• Everyday knowledge is the practical common-sense understanding people use to interpret situations and organise their actions.

• Stock of knowledge:

• The stock of knowledge is the accumulated personal experience and socially inherited understanding available to a person for interpreting the world.

• Relevance structures:

• Relevance structures organise what a person notices and considers important according to their situation, biography, and current purposes.

• Reciprocity of perspectives

• Reciprocity of perspectives is the practical assumption that exchanging standpoints and overlooking irrelevant differences would make our understandings sufficiently similar.

• “In-order-to” motives

• In-order-to motives are the future states or goals an actor intends to bring about through an action.

• “Because” motives:

• Because motives are past experiences and circumstances that explain why an actor formed a particular project of action.

• First-order constructs:

• First-order constructs are the common-sense interpretations and categories people use to understand and act within everyday life.

• Second-order constructs:

• Second-order constructs are social scientists’ systematic models built upon the first-order interpretations of the people they study.

• Interpretation in natural and social sciences:

• Social science interprets a world already interpreted by its actors, whereas natural science studies objects that do not themselves assign meaning to their circumstances.

• Social origin of knowledge:

• : Much everyday knowledge originates in other people and is transmitted through socialisation, teaching, tradition, and language.

• Social distribution of knowledge:

• Knowledge is socially distributed because people possess different kinds and levels of understanding according to their biographies, roles, and expertise.