PHENOMENOLOGY

1. Alfred Schutz – bridged phenomenology (a branch of philosophy) to sociology

Experience, Meaning, and Social Action

 Phenomenological sociology and 20th Century philosophy (Husserl, a philosopher)
o Husserl: the consciousness of human beings is intentional
o Schutz: the world of everyday life is the scene and also the object of our actions
and interactions
 Natural attitude: the individual’s orientation toward his social environment, a reality
which seems natural because it is the everyday reality which he knows
 SI vs. Phenomenology?
o SI focuses on the socially structured nature of interaction, meaning, and role
performance, and not the individual’s experience of his or her role behavior

Here-And-Now, Everyday Reality

 Wide-awakeness: the practical consciousness and attentiveness required in attending to
the “here-and-now” tasks and realities of everyday life
 The reality to which individuals are most wide awake is their here-and-now, everyday
reality (a reality that is highly pragmatic)

Shared, Intersubjective Reality

 Despite the uniqueness of subjective experiences, it is the intersubjectivity of human life
that demarcates human consciousness and human society
 Our reality is always social, always shared with others
 Lifeworld: a world shared with other selves

Everyday Reality as the Social Reality

 We experience and know everyday social reality as a natural reality whose common-
series knowledge we take for granted
 Taken-for-granted reality

2. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann – popularized Schutz’s ideas

Ordered Reality
 Social order is a human product, or more precisely, an ongoing human production
 Social Construction of Reality
 Objective Reality – social reality into which individuals are socialized, i.e. enrolling in UP
and getting to know UP life
 Externalization – individuals maintain social reality, whereby they act on and in regard
to the already existing objective reality
 Internalization – individuals create social reality such that, in experiencing an external,
objective reality, they translate (internalize) it into their own particular, subjectively
experienced reality
  Subjective Reality – individual’s subjective experience and interpretation of the external,
objective reality

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

1. Harold Garfinkel

Ethnomethodology
 The methods people use to create an ordered reality (Greek word ethos = people)
 Concerned with sociological theory’s general tendency to take social order and social
process for granted
 Ethnomethodologists are concerned with documenting in detail how individuals in
society work at creating an ordered or organized social reality
 Individuals accomplish order as they go about their everyday business, recognizing and
making sense of their experiences in ways that fit with the shared norms of order and
reasonableness in society
 Usual organized practices
 Accounts: how individuals categorize events, experiences, and everyday reality such that
their accounts produce an ordered, sequential reality that makes sense and is credible in
a given societal context

Breaching Experiments
 Designed to disrupt the routines that comprise particular social realities so as to
demonstrate the fragility that underlies everyday social order

Conversation Analysis
 Detailed analysis of the specific, pragmatic steps in how language and speech are used
in everyday conversation to create order