Baylis, Tomlinson, and Hoffmaster each raise a number of critiques in response to Bliton's manuscript. In response, we focus on three themes we believe run through each of their critiques. The first is the ambiguity between the role of ethics consultation within an institution and the role of the actual ethics consultant in a particular situation, as well as the resulting confusion when these roles are conflated. We explore this theme by revisiting the question of What's going on? in clinical (...) ethics consultations. Moving from those issues associated with the role of the ethics consultant to those associated with the role of inquiry within the practice of ethics consultation, we then take up the serious challenge that Bliton seems shackled by the assumptions and institutional dispositions embedded in the medical culture in which he is working. This reveals the second theme, namely that there is a risk of co-optation when acting in a role that derives its legitimacy from institutional sources. Finally, we focus on an even more problematic implication stemming from the first two, namely that the focus on institutional power as the crucial factor for determining ethical significance has the effect of distorting, and perhaps obscuring, other forms of relational, interpersonal, and moral meaning. (shrink)

Overt racism and discrimination have been on the decline in the United States for at least two generations. Yet many American institutions continue to produce racial disparities. Sociologists and social critics have predominantly explained continuing disparities as results of continuing racism and discrimination, albeit in increasingly covert, anonymous forms; these critics suggest racism and discrimination have to be understood as historical, systemic problems operating at the level of institutions, culture, and society, even if overt forms are now rare. With increasing (...) reliance upon a proliferation of notions including “institutional racism,” “institutionalized discrimination,” and “glass ceilings,” however, scholars and critics alike have grown increasingly dependent upon statistical data on inequalities and institutional outcomes as grounds for theoretical and political inferences concerning collective motives or prejudices. In this crucial respect, insights from beyond studies of race and inequality, drawing especially on Wittgensteinian and Schutzian contributions to social thought, stand to illuminate the pragmatic, moral reasoning at work in the institutional racism argument and similar approaches. Such reflexive attention to a central conceptual resource of contemporary social criticism stands to bring attention back to the basic empirical and critical questions of how to study and engage with continuing inequalities in the post-civil rights era. These questions can certainly be addressed through theoretical stipulation and political claims-making, but a more viable conceptual and empiricalfoundation for both theory and criticism can be gained by attending more respectfully to foundational issues of meaning and interpretation in the human sciences and human relations. (shrink)

This article discusses two central methodological postulates (adequacy and subjective meaning) pertaining to the social sciences brought forward by Alfred Schütz, and as presented by Lester Embree’s ‘Economics in the Context of Alfred Schütz’s Theory of Science’. The relationship between the postulates and the actual practice of economics is discussed. The author shows how Schütz’s writings describe a spectrum of methods that ranges from low abstraction and an attempt to understand individual plans and purposes on the one hand to highly (...) abstract and aggregate modeling on the other. It is argued that the distribution of economic contributions is heavily skewed toward the latter. The second part of the article presents recent work by economists who have resisted this trend, and who have begun to expand our understanding of economic processes by taking seriously the notion of economics as a social science. (shrink)

This paper explores how Schutz’s ideas enrich and extend the ethic of care promulgated by feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, and Eva Feder Kittay. Using Schutz’s ideas about the I-Thou relationship, systems of relevances, and growing old together, the author lays a foundation for continuing dialogue between feminist theorists of care and Schutzian phenomenologists.

This paper explores how Schutz’s ideas enrich and extend the ethic of care promulgated by feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, and Eva Feder Kittay. Using Schutz’s ideas about the I-Thou relationship, systems of relevances, and growing old together, the author lays a foundation for continuing dialogue between feminist theorists of care and Schutzian phenomenologists.

Phenomenological discussions of sociality have long been concerned with the relations between the I, the You, and the We. Recently, dialogue between phenomenology and analytic philosophical work on collective intentionality has given rise to a corpus of literature oriented around the first-person plural 'we'. In this paper, I demonstrate how these dominant accounts of the 'we' are not exhaustive of first-person plural experiences as such. I achieve these aims by arguing for a phenomenological distinction between an experience of being part (...) of a 'we' compared to an experience of being part of an 'us'. To have a 'we-experience' there must be a plurality of (unified) subjects sharing in an experience together such that the experience has the phenomenal character of being ours. An 'us-experience', on the other hand, requires the experiential salience of an external 'Third' in a way which is constitutively significant. Drawing on Sartrean social ontology, I argue that the 'us' is distinct from the 'we' on three levels, all of which pertain to the constitutive and unifying role of the Third. I then outline two forms of us-experiences: (1) the experience of being grouped and (2) the experience of apprehending one's seriality. (shrink)

This paper examines Alfred Schutz’s insights on types and typification. Beginning with a brief overview of the history and meaning of typification in interpretive sociology, the paper further addresses both the ubiquity and the necessity of typification in social life and scientific method. Schutz’s contribution itself is lacking in empirical application and grounding, but examples are provided of ongoing empirical research which advances the understanding of types and typification. As is suggested by illustrations from scholarship in the social studies of (...) social science, studies of social identity associated with membership categorization analysis, and constructionist social problems theory, typification can be found to be central to social research whether it is taken up as a largely unacknowledged resource or whether it is addressed by different names. The overview and illustrations suggest the continuing, widespread, and indeed foundational relevance of Schutz’s insights into types and typification. (shrink)

This paper examines Alfred Schutz’s insights on types and typification. Beginning with a brief overview of the history and meaning of typification in interpretive sociology, the paper further addresses both the ubiquity and the necessity of typification in social life and scientific method. Schutz’s contribution itself is lacking in empirical application and grounding, but examples are provided of ongoing empirical research which advances the understanding of types and typification. As is suggested by illustrations from scholarship in the social studies of (...) social science, studies of social identity associated with membership categorization analysis, and constructionist social problems theory, typification can be found to be central to social research whether it is taken up as a largely unacknowledged resource or whether it is addressed by different names. The overview and illustrations suggest the continuing, widespread, and indeed foundational relevance of Schutz’s insights into types and typification. (shrink)

This article discusses the [development and] use of a video life-world schema to explore alternative orientations to the shared health consultation. It is anticipated that this schema can be used by practitioners and consumers alike to understand the dynamics of videoed health consultations, the role of the participants within it and the potential to consciously alter the outcome by altering behaviour during the process of interaction. The study examines health consultation participation and develops an interpretative method of analysis that includes (...) image elicitation (via videos), phenomenology (to identify the components of the analytic framework), narrative (to depict the stories of interactions) and a reflexive mode (to develop shared meaning through a conceptual framework for analysis). The analytic framework is derived from a life-world conception of human mutual shared interaction which is presented here as a novel approach to understanding patient-centred care. The video materials used in this study were derived from consultations in a Walk-in Centre (WiC) in East London. The conceptual framework produced through the process of video analysis is comprised of different combinations of movement, knowledge and emotional conversations that are used to classify objective or engaged WiC health care interactions. The videoed interactions organise along an active or passive, facilitative or directive typical situation continuum illustrating different kinds of textual approaches to practice that are in tension or harmony. The schema demonstrates how practitioners and consumers interact to produce these outcomes and indicates the potential for both consumers and practitioners to be educated to develop practice dynamics that support patient-centred care and impact on health outcomes. (shrink)

This paper will discuss the correlation between the world of everyday life, finite provinces of meaning, and religion. To this end, the paper will start out by explaining Schutz’ considerations on “paramount reality” of the world of everyday life as well as the theory of “multiple realities” and “finite provinces of meaning”. Schutz’ considerations will then be elaborated upon and taken a step further in a discussion of the various ‘realnesses’ of the multiple realities. Special attention will be paid to (...) a finite province of meaning only mentioned in passing by Schutz: religion. The paper will first analyze the special features of religion as a finite province of meaning and highlight the correlation it enters with the world of everyday life. Subsequently, hereafter and paradise conceptions will be described as “ultimate provinces of meaning,” and it will be shown how their realnesses connect to the world of everyday life. Finally, the “fundamental anxiety” will be studied as the motor of the relevance structures of the world of everyday life, the finite provinces of meaning as well as the hereafter conceptions. (shrink)

In traditional ethnographies, it is customarily assumed that the field researcher is an outsider who seeks to acquire an insider’s understanding of the social world being investigated. While conducting field research projects on education and tourism in Trinidad (West Indies) we found that the standard distinction between insider and outsider became problematic for us. Our experiences can be understood in terms of two competing conceptions of fieldwork. One, rooted in classical ethnography, views fieldwork as a process whereby the researcher learns (...) to translate the cultural practices of a little-known or misunderstood group into terms understandable to the ethnographic audience. The other, growing out of the institutional ethnography approach pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, views fieldwork as a process of mapping the relations that govern an institutional complex. In the latter approach, local experiences provide the point of departure for exploring a wider set of social arrangements. In this article, we treat our own fieldwork experiences as points of departure for a reflexive examination of this alternative ethnographic strategy. (shrink)

Drawing upon feminist, queer, and crip phenomenology, this essay argues that the distinct temporality of the lived, stuttering body disturbs the normalized “choreography” of communication and thereby threatens the disabled speaker's recognition as a speaking subject. Examined through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz, the disabled speaking body is temporally “out of step” with the normalized bodily rhythms and pace of communicative practices in relation to both lived and objective time. Disciplined for his incalculable and therefore irrational bodily (...) choreography, the disabled speaker is foregrounded against an objective, instrumentally ordered world constituted by a disembodied and hegemonic “straight-masculine” time. Although dominant communicative choreographies may often be unlivable for disabled speakers, cripping communicative time rejects the cardinal value of futurity and invites interlocutors to gather in a noninstrumentalized and nonproductive present. This reshaping of communicative space enacts new modes of relationality and opens up an array of communicative futures suppressed or cut off by straight-masculine time. (shrink)

This paper introduces the philosophical foundation and practical application of empirical phenomenology in social research. The approach of empirical phenomenology builds upon the phenomenology of the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and the sociologist Alfred Schütz, but considers how their more philosophical and theoretical insights can be used in empirical research. It aims at being practically useful for anyone doing qualitative studies and concerned about safeguarding the perspective of those studied. The main idea of empirical phenomenology is that scientific (...) explanation must be grounded in the first-order construction of the actors; that is, in their own meanings. These constructions are then related to the second-order constructions of the scientist. In this paper, empirical phenomenology is considered in the light of phenomenological philosophy. The paper includes an explication of the approach, which is summarized in seven steps through which the researcher is guided, and considers its implications for qualitative methods such as interviewing and participant observation. (shrink)

Social thinkers often use the concept of intersubjectivity to mark out a problem of theoretical sociology: If people are unable to look into each others' minds, why do they often understand each other nonetheless? This issue has been debated extensively by philosophers and sociologists in three largely disconnected discourses. The article investigates the three discourses for isolable ideas that can be fitted into a sociological answer to the problem of intersubjectivity. An interactional solution, fully coherent with key insights from the (...) discourses, is offered at the end of the article. Its main point is to identify coordinative interactional mechanisms that compel participants to "make themselves understandable" vis-à-vis their interaction partners. (shrink)

The field of educational leadership is multi-site, in which those who study and practice leadership are located within networks which connect across institutions and sectors. Charting the growth of this dynamic field is the central purpose of this paper and six interconnected typologies of knowledge production are presented: Producers, Positions, Provinces, Practices, Processes and Perspectives. We argue that these typologies enable those involved to generate descriptions and understandings of the interplay between researching, theorising and practising in educational settings. This focus (...) on knowledge production enables us to be mappers, to undertake mapping and to produce maps. These, we would stress, are all political processes through which we challenge what is said to be known and make our own claims to know. As such our agency to make choices within our practice as researchers, theorists, and practitioners is exercised within a complex setting of organisational, cultural and social structures. (shrink)

Alfred Schutz's (Vienna 1899 — New York 1959) research into the philosophy of music certainly cannot be regarded as the most notable aspect of this writer, born and educated in Vienna, later a naturalized American citizen. Nor can it legitimately be maintained that Schutz's writings on the subject form a systematic corpus in his work. Schutz was above all a social scientist, strongly attracted, as were many writers of the first half of this century, to the project of aphilosophical foundation (...) within his field of expertise. In this project, where phenomenology is encountered, the question ofintersubjectivity together with that ofcommunication among individuals, plays a crucial role. It is, therefore, undoubtedly correct to consider Schutz's theoretical interests in music within this framework; thus music tends to assume a paradigmatic value, in the sense that the musical piece in its concrete temporal development, in the presence of performers and listeners, demonstrates in a truly exemplary manner, how the process of social relationship actually functions.Although mindful of this frame of reference, nontheless we feel it can be asserted that the works of Schutz which we are about to examine are in themselves interesting stimuli, independently of any organic connection with the author's general project. These stimuli have furthermore proveked a theoretical debate that is still going on in the USA. (shrink)

As a practicing physician (psychiatrist), scientist (neurologist) and philosopher, Erwin Straus developed a body of writing which, falling within the phenomenological tradition, is highly original and insightful. His unusual combination of work from these three areas constitutes one of the most important attempts to provide what has been called a new Paideia. Regarding this unique blend of perspectives and concerns as quite natural, he conceived his work variously as a medical anthropologyrdquo; or phenomenological psychology. In the end, he was both (...) a pioneer and a rebel: starting from psychiatry, he proceeded boldly straight into phenomenological philosophy, illuminating significant aspects of human life: if we would understand the norm, we must begin with the disruptions, as failures of existential projects; that is, as forms of human life - which was ultimately at the heart of his life-long epistemic and therapeutic concerns. (shrink)

As part of a series of Ethnomethodological Studies of Work, this paper focusses upon a short stretch of a final concert performance of the Saint-Saens Septet by a set of amateur musicians in which timing errors occur but in response to which various manoeuvres successfully restore synchrony. I set out to demonstrate that these afford a strategic access for ethnomethodologists to sets of musicians' practices whereby musical synchrony is ongoingly accomplished. The central curiosity of this study is the set of (...) distinctive practices whereby a musical text set out in a spatial, linear sequence of markings is realized in a collective performance that unfolds not only in precise time values but also in synchrony.This paper analyzes three errors in a short passage and the ways in which they are corrected either by the errant musician himself or by the other musician in response. In these cases, the restoration of synchrony and the routine performance of the piece thereafter are accomplished successfully in the sense that those listening to the tape of it generally fail to notice any problem! This contrasts to my detection of problems during both my participation in the performance and repeated listening of the resulting audio-tape, I argue that it is this systematic difference in possible hearings that musicians are oriented to when attempting to fake it. Thus, the essential interest is in members' methods for maintaining as well as restoring synchrony. (shrink)

The problem of the other was one of the central problems for the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. He investigated the other as the alter ego intensively in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, in which he introduced the conceptions of “analogical apperception'' and “pairing'' as fundamental forms of “passive synthesis.'' Although it is no doubt Husserl who investigated the other most seriously and intensively, there is anaporiain his theory of the other. If the other is an object of ego's intentional consciousness, (...) the other turns out to be no more than a modification of the ego. In the face of such anaporia, some phenomenologists embarked upon inquiry into the other. This paper focuses primarily on Alfred Schutz's discussion of the “other'' in general and about the “stranger'' in particular. (shrink)

This paper thematizes the operative kinaesthetic style of world-experiencing life by turning to the ongoing how of our habitual bodily comportment: to our deeply sedimented way(s) of making a body; to schematic inner vectors or tendencies toward movement that persist as bodily ghost gestures even if one is not making the larger, visible gestures they imply; and to inadvertent isometrics, i.e., persisting patterns of trying, bracing, freezing, etc. All such micromovements witness to our sociality insofar as they are not only (...) socially shaped, but perpetuate certain styles of intercorporeal interaction and sustain certain modes of responsivity. Reactivating the sediment -- retrieving the tacit choreography of everyday life from its anonymity and sensing our ongoing ways of living out the legacy of our communal body -- not only allows one''s individual bodily style to shift, but can open new possibilities for healthy interkinaesthetic comportment. Such work can thus contribute to an embodied ethics in both theory and practice. (shrink)

This article uses the writings of Alfred Schutz as catalysts to analyze three distinctive modes of transcendences operative in human experience. Particular attention is given to the role symbolic awareness plays in the formation and embodiment of moral value. I argue that Schutz''s theory of symbols is helpful in illuminating the way shared horizons of value meaning and collective moral purpose can occur in relation to cultural and geographical anonymity. I then draw upon the moral theory of H. Richard Niebuhr (...) to highlight the positive role that symbolic value horizons play in preventing ethnocentric world-views and in promoting common centers of discourse and visions of wholeness. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch's critique of Schutz's essay The Stranger is the starting point for this consideration of Schutz's relationship with phenomenology. This relationship is based on Schutz's emphasis on the value of the average as a phenomenological structure. In opposing sociology to philosophy, Gurwitsch takes this value as inferior in comparison with what he sees as cardinal issues of transcendental phenomenology. What Gurwitsch finds incompatible with phenomenological inquiry – the idea and practice of the natural attitude within the social sphere – (...) Schutz turns into the core of his philosophy. The phenomenology of the natural attitude is as essentially philosophical as any reflectively practiced human science. The problem of how everydayness is constituted requires a phenomenological insight that leads the explorer – through reconstructing the meaning in terms of the mundane – straight to the origin. (shrink)

The problem of the other was one of the central problems for the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. He investigated the other as the alter ego intensively in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, in which he introduced the conceptions of “analogical apperception'' and “pairing'' as fundamental forms of “passive synthesis.'' Although it is no doubt Husserl who investigated the other most seriously and intensively, there is anaporiain his theory of the other. If the other is an object of ego's intentional consciousness, (...) the other turns out to be no more than a modification of the ego. In the face of such anaporia, some phenomenologists embarked upon inquiry into the other. This paper focuses primarily on Alfred Schutz's discussion of the “other'' in general and about the “stranger'' in particular. (shrink)

This paper is a comparative study of Alfred Schutz and Jose Ortega y Gasset, with special attention to their respective characterization of social reality. For this purpose, the author draws on the explicit references Schutz and Ortega directed towards one another and develops a critical comparison of their theoretical systems. In addition to the reciprocal references which appear in their published works, valuable documentary evidence is provided by Schutz's letters and, first and foremost, by his marginal notes preserved in his (...) own copy of Ortega y Gasset's Man and People. As far as the critical comparison of Schutz's and Ortega's theories is concerned, the weight of the discussion falls on Ortega's Man and People. A careful reading of this essay allows us to successively invoke the key components of Schutz's phenomenological characterization of the structures of the life-world. According to this strategy, and after some preliminary sections devoted to contextual, biographical, and sociocultural matters, the following topics are comparatively discussed: (1) the philosophical foundations of sociology, with particular attention to Ortega's doctrine of the Other as potential danger; (2) the taken-for-granted dimensions of the social world; (3) the multiple spheres of reality, and their structuration around the fundamental core of the radical reality of the I (for Ortega) or the paramount reality of everyday life, as the intersubjective world of culture (for Schutz); (4) the influence of pragmatism on their theoretical systems; (5) their strikingly similar characterization of the perspectivist stratification of the social world; (6) the inexhaustible complexity of the problem of intersubjectivity. Obviously, the common influence of Husserl, Weber, Scheler, and Bergson casts light upon the comparative consideration of any of these issues. (shrink)

In the first part of this essay it is contended that Schutz''s project is best called the philosophical theory of the cultural sciences; in the last parts it is shown that he offers satisfactory rudiments of a theory of the historical sciences except where the differentia specifica of those sciences is concerned. The central part is devoted to women''s liberation as a case of contemporary history in relation to which Schutz''s thought about the historical sciences needs correction.

In his writings Alfred Schutz identifies an artificiality in the concept of life-world produced by Edmund Husserl's method of reduction. As an alternative, he proposes to assume intersubjectivity as a given of everyday life. This eradicates Husserl's distinction between life-world and natural attitude. The subsequent phenomenological project appears to center upon sociological descriptions of the structures of the life-world rather than on a search for apodictic truth. Schutz, however, actually retains Husserl's emphasis on the subject. A tension then arises between (...) the assumption of intersubjectivity and individual experience. Rather than clarifying the concept of intersubjectivity, this further problematizes it. Drawing upon Max Weber's work, Schutz responds by developing a rigorous methodology for studying the social world. But having rejected Husserl's reduction and conflated life-world and natural attitude, Schutz's analysis moves at the level of daily life itself. Consequently, the explanatory categories he proposes appear as abstractions rather than as a way of describing lived experience. Schutz, it is concluded, initiates a scientistic sociology in which the commonsense structures of the natural attitude of everyday life are subverted and replaced by the more rigorous knowledge of the scientific attitude. Schutz's version of phenomenology is ultimately untrue to the spirit of Husserl's original project; and deploying his work as a clear-cut alternative to scientistic tendencies within sociology is not as straightforward as it might at first seem. (shrink)

This paper offers an ethnomethodological clarification of Husserl's concepts of Galilean physics and regressive inquiry. It employs the reader's textual-practical operationalization of these concepts. With the use of a simple optical prism as a perspicuous case of a scientific instrument, the reader will be asked and instructed to make a self-reflexive inquiry into the practical contingencies of the prismatic field of reflection. The reader will discover that the geometric structures of the reflective field of the prism is an achievement and (...) formalization of the reader's own operatlonalizations. I named these discoverable discovering operationspraxioms or practical axioms — the pre-scientific contingencies of the geometric structures of prismatic reflection. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a self-reflective account of the building of Galileo's pendulum in order to discover what were the practical contingencies of building and using the pendulum for demonstrating the law of isochronism. In doing this, the unique Lebenswelt structures of Galilean physics are explicated through the ethnomethodological concepts developed by Harold Garfinkel. The presupposition is that the practical logic of Galilean physics is embedded in the instruments themselves. In building the pendulum and recovering its (...) original use, Galilean physics becomes for ethnomethodologists a first-hand practical discovery. This is not a reconstruction of the mind of the historical Galileo but, rather, an explication of Galileo's practical perspective on the instrument as an intersubjective and interchangeable standpoint available for ethnomethodological analysis. This enables us to study historical facts from the standpoint of the practical logic of the original practice with a pedagogical eye for the instructive reproducibility of science. (shrink)

This paper is a reflection on the boundaries of academic discourse as I came to be acutely aware of them while attempting to teach a graduate seminar in qualitative research methods. The purpose of the readings in Husserl and Schutz and the writing exercises was to assist students trained in quantitative methods and steeped in positivistic assumptions about research to write phenomenological descriptions of lived experience. Paul could not write the assigned papers due to a diagnosed writing disability but he (...) did submit fictional stories and sketches which beautifully illustrated the concepts of Husserl and Schutz. Paul's disability presented a natural bracketing experiment which brought the positivistic assumptions surrounding academic research and writing to the forefront. I engaged in verbal dialogues with Paul, in which he discussed the philosophical ideas. My work with Paul highlighted the extent to which the academic lifeworld marginalizes those who seek to write from the heart, disguising even the work of those philosophers who wish to uncover direct experiences.The crisis of the sciences is the loss of meaning for life. (Husserl, 1970: 5). (shrink)