Phenomenological Sociology

Phenomenological sociology, also called social phenomenology, studies social reality as a product of intersubjectivity: the shared meanings people build in everyday life, which it calls the Lebenswelt or lifeworld. It applies the philosophy of Edmund Husserl to the social world in order to explain how institutions, organizations and classes take shape out of lived experience, a process of typification in which people sort what they meet into familiar types. Social phenomenologists see social order as something produced in everyday interaction, and they often examine conversations to find the methods people use to keep social relations going. The leading exponent was Alfred Schutz, who sought to give Max Weber's interpretive sociology a philosophical foundation drawn from Husserl. Schutz worked on a mundane phenomenology of the social world, while Husserl had pursued a transcendental phenomenology of consciousness, so the two projects differ in level of analysis and method yet are meant to be complementary.