The phenomenological sociology and social science of Alfred Schutz is significant for its contribution to a phenomenology of social action, the lifeworld, the notion of multiple realities, the idea of taken-for-grantedness of everyday life practices, and so forth. His work was the inspiration for entire new waves in North American social science and the spread of phenomenological philosophy. In the late 1960s, when the counter-culture and the New Left were forming and making an impact on North American and European campuses, there was an emergent sense of the failure of traditional forms of social inquiry. This failure was diagnosed by such authors as Alvin Gouldner, Erwin Goffman, Jack Douglas, and C. Wright Mills as a paradigm crisis in the social sciences. Some sociologists, such as Peter Berger and Jack Douglas, adopted an existentialist approach to the study of social phenomena focusing on notions like love, intimacy, deviance, and other everyday life topics. Others looked toward symbolic interactionism, ethnography, and ethnomethodology for models of inquiry that would be concerned, not with behaviors, but with social psychological, cultural, and social meanings and meaning structures. The work of Schutz provided the impetus for these developments.
Selected Readings:
Schutz, A. (1970). On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schutz, A. (1972). The Phenomenology of the Social World. London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Schutz, A. (1970; 1973; 1974). Collected Papers. 3 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, A. (1973). The Structures of the Life-World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.