social phenomenology

social phenomenology

a sociological approach, especially associated with the Austrian-American social philosopher and sociologist Alfred SCHUTZ, which investigates the taken-for-granted assumptions of and the processes involved in the constitution of social knowledge and social life (see also PHENOMENOLOGY). While a number of sociologists, notably BERGER and Luckmann (1967), have developed Schutz's ideas as a distinctive approach to the SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, these ideas have been especially influential in the development of ETHNOMETHODOLOGY, in which social phenomenology's concerns with the constitution of everyday life have received elaboration as a relatively self-contained theoretical approach or paradigm which is highly critical of’orthodox sociology’. see also PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOCIOLOGY.