Phenomenological Sociology

Abstract

Phenomenology is a twentieth century philosophical movement, which spawned a wide array of branches across the social sciences. Its application in sociology produced the field of phenomenological sociology, whose most prominent representative is Alfred Schütz. Schütz, a disciple of philosopher Edmund Husserl and a follower of sociologist Max Weber, expanded upon the notion of intersubjectivity to analyze phenomena such as how individuals know the minds of others and how reciprocal communications among people occur.

Overview

Phenomenological sociology studies the notion of "the common sense" and everyday life in the intersubjective experiences of the everyday world. For this it deploys the concept of verstehen, a term used by sociologist Max Weber to describe an empathic comprehension of human behavior. One of the fundamental topics studied in sociology is that of collective experiences. For instance, sociology seeks to identify how the experiences and actions of an individual are determined by the existence of and interactions with other individuals, as well as by their group membership. It also explores how individuals comprehend the experiences of other people, or in sociological terms, those seen as the Other.

These became, in time, some of the most fundamental questions of sociological theory. Within sociology, the current that has most focused on these is phenomenological sociology. The field is strongly based on the work of sociologist Alfred Schütz, at one time a disciple of philosopher Edmund Husserl. Schütz's work is often depicted as a continuation of Husserl's phenomenology, although this is subject to debate. Schütz, in fact, argued against core Husserlian concepts toward the end. He did share with Husserl an interest on the intersubjective plane, that is, the space in which individuals engage with each other's subjectivity or way of experiencing the world. Schütz was also deeply interested in the work of Max Weber. Among his most important contributions was to demonstrate that applying philosophy to the social sciences can bring productive results.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, as phenomenology was gaining international interest, phenomenologists were roughly divided in two camps. One of these was known as the Munich circle of phenomenologists, headed by philosopher Alexander Pfänder. These scholars focused on the understanding of the minds of others, concretely the concept of inauthentic feelings, that is, those which have been learned from the social environment. These learned emotions might include, for example, strong feelings of contempt against a specific ethnic group, which an individual may experience without ever having ever known anybody from that ethnic group. Such feelings are built and shaped by way of socialization. These interests of the Munich circle have survived within the social sciences into the twenty-first century.

After the formation of the Munich circle, other thinkers organized around the work of Edmund Husserl. These scholars were also interested in emotions, but focused on the different ways of understanding the experiences of others. The central issue of Husserlians pertained to the problem of how the self, which they saw in Cartesian terms, acquired knowledge of the world around it. People live in the natural world and that is what they perceive—what they take for granted. However, for Descartes—founder of Cartesian thought—as for Husserl, human beings cannot gain true knowledge of the world merely from their experiences in it, that is, from within their natural attitude.

Notwithstanding the concrete focus of phenomenological sociologists, there are some concepts that are generally shared within the discipline. For instance, the method known as eidetic reduction is important to the field of phenomenology; eidetic reduction compares one set of social phenomena with similar ones, with the purpose of finding their basic components or characteristics. Because phenomenology is a descriptive discipline, once these elements are identified, scholars may find types, form classifications or typologies, elaborate critical analysis, and engage in the study of the relationships between them. These must produce descriptive analyses of the studied phenomena.

Another is the concept of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity focuses on the collective experiences of people and studies feelings such as rapport, sympathy, empathy, and even their opposite, such as indifference. These are known as "affective phenomena", experiences of affect or emotion. The point of studying affective phenomena within phenomenological sociology is to identify in individuals the recognition of the emotions in others, that is, the recognition of the Other, who also experiences similar emotions. These reciprocal relations are considered necessary for the creation of communities and societies.

The world in which human beings live is the real world, also known as the lifeworld. It is a world that most take for granted and which they assume is perceived similarly by all others. It includes physical phenomena as well as emotions, values, assumptions, and beliefs. However, to gain true knowledge, individuals must put all these phenomena into question. While some scholars believe it is possible to set aside all these elements—values, beliefs, the lifeworld overall—in the pursuit of true knowledge, others hold more ambiguous views or outright deny the possibility. These became, in time, matters of great debate.

In 1932, Schütz published one of his most important books, The Phenomenology of the Social World, to develop a full "theory of action" taking after Max Weber's theory of the same name. In this work, he amalgamated Weber's theory with theories of meaning from phenomenology. For Weber, sociology should focus on actions oriented toward others; therefore, action is a social phenomenon, which must always consider the behavior of others. Yet "meaning," for Weber as for Husserl, is individually conceived—a mental act—and not necessarily social. Individuals become social beings, but are not inherently so. For Schütz and other thinkers, however, human beings are an intrinsic part of the world around them, of their social environment, and cannot "divorce" it, suspend their belief in it, nor engage in mental actions as if it were possible to part from the social. In other words, all production of knowledge by people must occur from the standpoint of the individual living among others in the lifeworld.

Moreover, for Schütz, phenomenological sociology is about understanding the structure of meanings people build in the everyday world. Although his work is strongly influenced by Husserlian thought, he parts ways from Husserl's concept of suspending the lifeworld in order to examine phenomena as a pure exercise of consciousness. Schütz argued that subjectivity is key to understanding social phenomena, a subjectivity that remits us to intersubjectivity, that is, the capacity not only of self-reflection, but of interpretation of the subjectivity of others. In this sense, it opposes a purely private or solipsistic subjectivity, positing it is not possible to understand social reality without engaging in intersubjective and shared interpretations.

In 1966, sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann followed Schütz work and published The Social Construction of Reality, which profoundly affected the social sciences. In fact, in their book they coined the term "social construction," that is, a socially-invented idea or artifact that exists because a group of people—a community, culture, or society—has agreed to act as if it is real. The concept of social construction became key to modern sociology, and it is used to study and comprehend the importance of meaning and of meaning-production through different lifeworlds. Among the different meaning-production systems and systems of belief, they point out examples such as religion and capitalism.

According to phenomenological sociology, then, the everyday world gives us a trove of knowledge formed by different "typifications," sets of catalogued generalized assumptions, reproduced by language and cultural artifacts, which we use pragmatically in our daily life. These enable us to build bridges across different fields of meaning, and to integrate them into a coherent sense of reality. However, although it may appear to people that the world is—or ought to be—uniform and homogenous, it really is a complex system with varied perspectives.

Schütz has provided a famous example for this: Two people engaged in a conversation have a reciprocal experience, which feels to them rich and intimate. To a distant spectator, however, the people conversing may appear as a flat and impersonal phenomenon. Therefore, while an Other may be meaningful to one person, the same Other may offer a distant, opaque, and impersonal experience to another. Finally, Schütz believed that individuals want to learn about others only as much (or as little) as necessary; therefore, all actions and interpretations are pragmatically determined, that is, limited to the extent that they are immediately useful.

Applications

Although the philosophy of phenomenology can stay at the empirical level, phenomenological sociology is used practically in a wide array of different fields, from film interpretation to psychology and education, from private industry to social work.

Phenomenological sociology provides a theoretical framework to understand worldviews and how these are shaped by communities, social experiences, shared perceptions, and language. These theoretical frameworks are in constant flux, just as societies are, because what is believed to be true at a given time and place change over time. Moreover, how individuals gain knowledge has also undergone significant change. These changes are called paradigm shifts and are embedded in cultural, historical, and societal contexts.

Phenomenological sociology, then, has evolved its methods and paradigms through time, although it continues to provide tools to understand and bridge different paradigms and their worldviews. It has also branched out into different theoretical fields within the social sciences, such as critical realism and constructivism. All these theories aim to clarify the space from which we perceive and experience the Other. As in all disciplines, however, there are some dominant trends and applications. In the twenty-first century, for example, phenomenological sociology has been increasingly applied to studying the behavior exhibited in social media interactions. In this sense, it views it as a species of shared spectacle that creates a virtual—yet immaterial—sense of a real social life and environment.

The field of phenomenological society has also found applications in the business world. Organizational experts found great use for its concepts of "tacit knowledge" –that is, the kind of knowledge that is taken for granted and transmitted in ways other than by verbalizing it or making it explicit. In the workplace, for example, it refers to a trove of knowledge gained from personal experience rather than from handbooks or instructions. Workplaces have and develop their own cultural patterns and in many places, genuine knowledge is transferred tacitly. These are just a couple of examples of the wide array of applications for phenomenological sociology.

On the other hand, because of its limitations, much academic debate has risen around the need to combine phenomenological sociology with other disciplinary approaches. Critics argue that phenomenology may serve to clarify the experiences of others, yet also risks eliding, diminishing, or misunderstanding other worldviews. Human experiences are multiple and complicated; given pragmatism and other constraints, individuals always run the risk of gaining only partial understanding of the values, beliefs, experiences, and emotions of others. Supplementing phenomenological approaches with other approaches can help avoid such shortcomings.

Some contemporary sociologists also argue that in postmodern society, people's personalities are no longer shaped by intense coexistence with others; that is, the adhesions or embeddedness in collectives and communities has steadily declined with the advance of modernization. Each new generation tends to reject any membership in communities that are not perceived as having been "freely chosen." This, critics argue, hinders the socialization of people into creating a self as a citizen, in the sense that enlightened liberalism visualized at the inception of modernity. It also makes it somewhat difficult to apply phenomenological theories based on intersubjectivity and reliance on preexisting traditions and knowledge.

In other words, Schütz, writing in the earlier twentieth century, argued that people are born and become rooted into a previously constituted social environment with preexisting values and meanings, which they receive unquestioningly and which help them interpret and manage the world around them. Later thinkers, such as Marcel Gauchet in the 1980s, argued that contemporary individuals would find it difficult to see themselves as "heirs" of preexisting traditions and forms of coexistence. Moreover, already in 1979, psychologist Christopher Lasch had famously analyzed contemporary society as having lost all sense of historicity and regard for traditions, a state that leads people toward extreme individualism, Narcissism, and a weakened sense of identification with others. Such an overall psychology, then, does not align well with the more empathetic sense of intersubjectivity described by conventional phenomenological sociology and has required theoretical adaptations.

Issues

One of the problems often raised in phenomenological sociology is in relation to its implementation as a method of scientific and empirical analysis. Husserl and other phenomenologists proposed that analyzing social reality in the fields of science entails becoming a "disinterested observer" and suspending or "turning off" elements of everyday life, such as experiencing others as fellow human beings with shared emotions. Through this disinterested observation, analysts can deal with unresolved problems using only data and theoretical knowledge, without being involved in the emotions and practical necessities of dealing with everyday life.

However, social sciences—as opposed to the natural sciences—operate from a standpoint of an everyday life endowed with meaning by people; in fact, even the natural sciences are interpreted according to meaningful perceptions of the real world and "common sense" social constructs, provided by preexisting knowledge. Moreover, to analyze the world, people must create second-hand constructs, that is, models for taking action. In other words, individuals acquire artificial constructions in which real people become "constructs," a species of puppets that can be manipulated in the mind. This leads to an easy elimination of real obstacles and makes complex human beings and social phenomena more understandable to the observer. Nevertheless, it presents a flattened and inaccurate view of the social.

Furthermore, according to traditional phenomenology, human beings are naturally "captured" in the "cobwebs" of everyday life, and this distraction hinders reflection and analysis. To be effective, the act of reflection needs that the individual be removed from involvement with others and practical social matters. This dynamic between the scientific observer and the everyday lifeworld seemed crucial to Schültz at the inception of his theoretical work. To be fair, such concepts about the objective position and mission of the scientist were commonplace at the time. In the twenty-first century, most sociologists operate under the assumption that social scientists do not need to leave the natural attitude of the everyday lifeworld to attain academic rigor; rather, the theoretical frameworks allow thinkers to select different perspectives from within the lifeworld.

Although Husserlian views of the disinterested observer as detached from the everyday lifeworld influenced Schütz's understanding of scientific inquiry, Schütz's concept of disinterestedness stops short of claiming that a scientist must suspend his or her natural attitude. That is, Schütz adopts Husserl's concept of the scientist's or observer's disinterested stance, but as a sociologist, he offers a notion of the scientist as able to change perspective rather than take a radical break from reality. In this sense, the scientific perspective is one among various perspectives, each of them characterized by its own sets of values, beliefs, and rules.

Although some critics remain unconvinced, supporters argue that Schütz attempted to conflate different views in his theoretical work, and that he recognized the need to eliminate the resulting contradiction. In fact, in late writings, Schütz criticized Husserl arguing that individuals cannot recognize the Other if they purposefully decide to regard others only as a phenomenon constituted in their mind.

Terms & Concepts

Construct: An idea, theory, concept, or ideology that is not based on empirical evidence, but is shaped and buttressed by socially produced assumptions and beliefs.

Eidetic Reduction: A method or technique that aims to study the basic elements in phenomenology to identify its components.

Natural Sciences: Also known as "the hard sciences," the natural sciences seek to understand how the physical world functions and include biology, medicine, physics, and chemistry.

Other: In the humanities and social sciences, a person or people different from the dominant culture. In general, somebody intrinsically different than the observer or the self.

Phenomena/Phenomenon: In the social sciences, events, behaviors, or facts that can be observed or described.

Phenomenology: A European philosophical movement that originated in the twentieth century, headed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, which relates to human consciousness and what is consciously experienced.

Social: In the social sciences, what pertains to social groups, communities, and collective behavior.

Social Sciences: A set of disciplines that study how people in groups behave. It includes a wide array of careers, such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, and political science.

Bibliography

Aspers, P. (2010). The second road to phenomenological sociology. Society, 47(3), 214–219. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=49260923&site=ehost-live

Belvedere, C. (2015). Durkheim as the founding father of phenomenological sociology. Human Studies, 38(3), 369–390. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=109556037&site=ehost-live

Doran, N. (2015). Beyond phenomenological anti-sociologies: Foucault's "care of his self" as standpoint sociology. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 40(2), 131–161. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=108278728&site=ehost-live

Duckham, B. C., & Schreiber, J. C. (2016). Bridging worldviews through phenomenology. Social Work & Christianity, 43(4), 55–67. Retrieved December 10 2017 from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=119547245&site=ehost-live

Ferencz-Flatz, C., & Hanich, J. (2016). Editors' introduction: What is film phenomenology? Studia Phaenomenologica, 16, 11–61.

Heiskala, R. (2011). The meaning of meaning in sociology: The achievements and shortcomings of Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 41(3), 23–24. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=65009554&site=ehost-live

Horrigan-Kelly, M., Millar, M., & Dowling, M. (2016). Understanding the key tenets of Heidegger's philosophy for interpretive phenomenological research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 15(1), 1–8.

Siu, R. (2016). Rethinking the body and space in Alfred Schutz's phenomenology of music. Human Studies, 39(4), 533–546. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=119755467&site=ehost-live

Yudin, G. (2016). Sociology as a naïve science: Alfred Schütz and the phenomenological theory of attitudes. Human Studies, 39(4), 547–568. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=119755465&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Elster, J. (2017). The temporal dimension of reflexivity: Linking reflexive orientations to the stock of knowledge. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 18(3), 274–293. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=126496941&site=ehost-live

Gunderson, R. (2017). Environmental knowledge, technology, and values: Reconstructing Max Scheler's phenomenological environmental sociology. Human Studies, 40(3), 401–419. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=124620058&site=ehost-live

Rossolatos, G. (2017). Carpool karaoke: Deconstructing the directly lived experience of hearing oneself singing. Social Semiotics, 27(5), 624–639. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=124637932&site=ehost-live