What is phenomenology?

 Phenomenological sociology has largely developed out of the works of Alfred Schutz, who is best known for The Phenomenology of the Social World (1967). Schutz suggests that in the course of our action, we employ assumptions about society and how it works and we use verstehen in a crude way to predict the action of others. As a result, our acts are ‘meaningful’ not because we have a particular intention or motive, but because other actors interpret our action as having symbolic significance. It is said that the phenomenological perspective take the interpretive approach, initially developed by Max Weber and later on by other thinkers, to the extreme.

 

Phenomenological sociology is the study of the formal structures of concrete social existence as made available in and through the analytical description of acts of intentional consciousness. The object of such an analysis is the meaningful lived world of everyday life or ‘life-world’. Bilton et al., (1981: 739-40) suggest that, symbolic interactionists acknowledged shared definitions and stressed upon symbolic communication through language. Therefore, Schutz developed this perspective in order to basically suggest that, we individuals act successfully only when all share the same set of meanings. Thus, in many ways we can understand this approach as a departure from the conventional model of interpretive sociology.

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