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)

Modern phenomenology, with its roots in Husserlian philosophy, has been taken up and utilised in a myriad of ways within different disciplines, but until recently has remained relatively underused within sports studies. A corpus of sociological-phenomenological work is now beginning to develop in this domain, alongside a longer-standing literature in feminist phenomenology. These specific social-phenomenological forms explore the situatedness of lived-body experience within a particular social structure. After providing a brief overview of key strands of phenomenology, this article considers some (...) of the ways in which sociological, and particularly feminist, phenomenology might be used to analyse female sporting embodiment. For illustrative purposes, data from an autophenomenographic project on female distance running are also included, in order briefly to demonstrate the application of phenomenology within sociology, as both theoretical framework and methodological approach. (shrink)

The amount of time that people spend on watching television is a matter of social concern. In the past, several approaches have been developed explaining why people expose themselves to television, most notably the Uses and Gratifications approach. Building on an action theoretical framework, it is argued that the influence of routinization and situational context of television viewing should receive more attention. This approach is then applied to media use in households, with an emphasis on how adolescents and parents influence (...) each other's television viewing. Event history on data from 55 Dutch households show that the influence of parents and their adolescent children is reciprocal, that is, not only do parents influence their children, but children also influence their parents. This influence does, however, not increase during the teenage years, nor does parental influence diminish during those years. (shrink)

Schutz’s references to literature and arts in his theoretical works are manifold. But literature and theory are both a certain kind of a finite province of meaning, that means they are not easily accessible from the paramount reality of everyday life. Now there is another kind of referring to literature: metaphorizing it. Using it, as may be said with Lakoff and Johnson, to understand and to experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Literally metapherein means “to carry over”. (...) Metaphorizing in this view is then a specific kind of border-crossing between different provinces of meaning. That poses two questions: 1. What means finiteness of those provinces of meaning, what kind of border crossings are possible? What is the ground for metaphorizing meaning? 2. Could this concept used for founding a theory of the constitution of the societal and of society, that overcomes the dichotomy of structure/agency? These questions will be answered with one example in view: Schutz’ report to Kaufmann of his first visit of Husserl describing his experience as feeling like Wilhelm Meister at the Society of the Tower. In a first step this metaphor is presented together with some crumbs of metaphor theory. In a second step these crumbs will be connected to Husserl’s concept of experience. After developing a short overview over Schutz’ “finite provinces of meaning,” the relation of experience, metaphors to the intersubjectivity of these provinces in their dependence from writing and printing is discussed. (shrink)

This paper addresses the notion of communicative action on the basis of Alfred Schutz’ writings. In Schutz’ work, communication is of particular significance and its importance is often neglected by phenomenologists. Communication plays a crucial role in his first major work, the Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt from 1932, yet communication is also a major feature in his unfinished works which were later completed posthumously by Thomas Luckmann: The Structures of the Life World (1973, 1989). In these texts, Schutz (...) sometimes refers to “communicative action,” and he comes to ascribe a crucial role to communication within the domain of the life world he calls everyday life. Based on Schutz’ texts, I shall first attempt to critically reconstruct the defining features of his notion of communication and communicative action. As a result, it emerges that Schutz’ notion of communication, particularly in its early incarnation, seems to be, at first glance, characterized by a dichotomy between virtual communication, that is communicative action in a narrow sense, and non-virtual communication. As I want to show with respect to the seemingly established dichotomous distinction between “mediated” and “immediate social action,” Schutz himself started to overcome this dichotomy. Based on this thesis, I will try to sketch a basic outline of a theory of communicative action, a theory less formulated by Schutz’ than built on Schutz’ writings. As the idea of communicative action, and particularly the transgression of the distinction between mediated and immediate action, affects the very structures of the life-world described by Schutz and Luckmann, I will ultimately demonstrate that any mundane phenomenology of the life-world requires a triangulatory method. (shrink)

Games Studies reveals the performative nature of playing a character in a virtual-game-world (Nitsche 2008, p.205; Pearce 2006, p.1; Taylor 2002, p.48). Tbe Player/Character relationship is typically understood in terms of the player’s in-game “presence” (Boellstorff 2008, p.89; Schroeder 2002, p.6). This gives the appearance that living-into a game-world is an all-or- nothing affair: either the player is “present” in the game-world, or they are not. I argue that, in fact, a constitutive phenomenology reveals the Player/Character relationship to be a (...) multi-dimensional matter of empathy. I advance a broadly Schutzian framework, drawing on his 1932 discussions of “face-to-face encounters” and ”historical predecessors,” showing how at- tention to empathy reveals a variety of “presences” that different kinds of Player/Character relationships afford. The central determinants of empathetic affordances which I focus on here are (i) how much players know about a character (especially the character’s past) and (ii) how players learn this information.The purpose of this discussion will be to show that a phenomenological analysis reveals that the relationship between a player and their character is complex, highly variable, and inherently social. Furthermore, it will add to the growing body of scholarship that demonstrates that video games are rich social objects deserving of study. (shrink)

Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of “the magic circle”. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced “presence”. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both with (...) themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field. (shrink)

This article argues that phenomenological sociology has great potential to provide a strong theoretical support to the Sociocognitive Approach in Critical Discourse Studies. SCA is interested in the interconnections between knowledge, discourse and society while placing subjectivity in the centre of its framework. It looks into the correlative relationship between personal- and socially shared knowledge, and the significance of these correlations to discourse production and interpretation. Analogously, phenomenological sociology explores the interrelated structures of subjectivity, knowledge and the social world. It (...) systematically analyses the conditions and forms of intersubjective understanding and the mutually constitutive relationship between subjective- and objective knowledge. Given the considerable overlap between the subject matter of phenomenological sociology and that of SCA, the purpose of the article is to draw the attention of critical discourse analysts to a neglected but extremely resourceful field. Following a brief introduction to SCA, the article will address some of SCA’s key concepts in conjunction with the phenomenological-sociological insight. (shrink)

The 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanche on Mount Everest generated one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters in modern times, bringing to media attention the physical-cultural world of high-altitude climbing. Contributing to the current sociological concern with embodiment, here we investigate the lived experience and social ‘production’ of endurance in this sociologically under-researched physical-cultural world. Via a phenomenological-sociological framework, we analyse endurance as cognitively, corporeally and interactionally lived and communicated, in the form of ‘endurance work’. Data emanate from in-depth interviews with (...) 18 high-altitude mountaineers, ten of whom experienced the 2015 avalanche. The article responds to Shilling’s (2016) call to address an important lacuna identified in sociological work: the need to investigate the embodied importance of cognition in the incorporation of culture. The concept of endurance work provides a powerful exemplar of this cognitive-corporeal nexus at work as a physical-culturally shaped, embodied practice and mode-of-thinking in the social world of high-altitude climbing. (shrink)