Schutzian Research

As a consequence of the explosion of enrollments, higher education institutions have been confronted by new categories of students the last forty years. In this paper, cultural and political dimensions of the integration of students into educational institutions will be explored. The focus will be on the experience of what I called “newleavers,” namely, people who are leaving their environment of origin without knowing if they will return. The contradictory commitments and challenges faced by newleavers will be studied with a sociological approach based on intercultural, phenomenological and praxiological research. To sketch an analysis of the experience of newleavers in general, I will explore strangeness and uprooting in an educational setting; the research is based on the experience of Huarpes students at the University of Cuyo, in Argentina. I claim that newleavers who keep ties with their environment of origin develop an “ethnographic stance,” namely, a moral posture and a cognitive perspective allowing them to critically identify rules, norms, and values, by comparing environments and groups.

In his “Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt” (1932; engl. tr. 1967) Alfred Schutz refers frequently and mostly positively to the author Fritz Sander. In contrast to other members of the Viennese social science milieus in interwar Vienna, Sander has been neglected in the abundant literature on Schutz. Following Henrich’s (1991) Konstellationsforschung approach, Schutz and Sander are placed in the setting of interwar Viennese social science. Explicit references to Sander made by Schutz will be described, similarities and differences in their treatments of Max Weber’s concepts of social action and subjective meaning will be examined, and their respective views of a phenomenological grounding of social science will be discussed.

Assuming the importance of Alfred Schutz’s “protosociology” in social theory as a given, the paper tries to explore its philosophical core, treating Schutz’s sociophenomenology as an answer to the most fundamental questions of phenomenology, such as evidence and phenomenological reduction. It analyses Schutz’s point of departure – the problematization of Max Weber’s concept of the meaning of social action and its deepening by means of Henri Bergson’s and Edmund Husserl’s notion of time – and tries to unravel the double structure of consciousness (first in Brentano and Husserl, then in Schutz), revealing increasingly its complex temporal character. Brentano’s and Husserl’s double intentionality, seeming to offer a kind of “decent realism” in modern philosophical context, in Schutz turns out to be marked by the profound pastness of reflexive consciousness, reaching the primary stream experience only by means of primary and secondary acts of remembrance, re-effectuated intersubjectively in acts of phantasying about future (modo futuri exacti), thus constituting the very core of meaning, with its reference to external objects. It appears that only analysing this mode of phantasying in reference to its motives that we can solve the conundrum of realism in its modern shape.

The first part of this paper aims to highlight the analogies between Schutz’s vision of the natural attitude and Wittgenstein’s vision of a phenomenon that concerns the same problematic field, i.e. certainty, the belief of common sense that is free of all doubt, that the world “out there” is as it appears, absolutely real. These certainties form the basis, the foundation of language games and therefore of knowledge in general and in its entirety. This foundation is unfounded and yet indispensable. The second part of the paper examines an important topic analysed by Wittgenstein, related to the aforementioned problem: the language transposition of pre-predicative, pre-reflective and non-propositional certainties, the cornerstones of which are “hinge propositions”, whose hybrid nature can be identified in the shift from empirical propositions to grammatical rules.

The aim of this paper is to show that we are entitled to see in Schütz’s article “Equality and the Social Meaning Structure” the proposal for a formal analysis of group membership understood as a kind of We-experience irreducible to pure We-relationships (Wirbeziehung). First I argue that such an account defines the experience of group membership as a “situation definition process”. Then I show the relevance of this approach for the description of membership experiences and current debates on Collective Intentionality. Finally, I point to its unclarified conceptual presuppositions—such as the at­tribution of situations to groups—, and propose an interpretative solution by drawing on the notions of “social situation” and community of relevances from The Structures of the Life-World.

Today’s fast-moving, (new) media lifeworld embodies many of the metaphors of its analog predecessors – including those of warfare and conflict. The metaphor of warfare is used to describe everything from corporate marketing strategies to political campaigns, often with harmful consequences. In one way of exploring the front lines of the resulting war on truth, we describe some lessons learned from the experience of military veterans who have actually endured the liminality of combat, and who emerge with what is increasingly termed moral injuries. We use their experience as an analogy for competing (ante)narratives in cyberspace, where objective standards of truth and facticity are apparent casualties, and where fake news is emerging as victorious. We then apply models of social construction, specifically the practical theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), and the metaphor of jazz improvisation in the context of Schutz’s lifeworld phenomenology as possibly useful, helpful, and hopeful ways of acting into the complexity of truth together.

There is no question that nowadays the phenomenon of prices is central to the media and political agenda and is the object of heated debates in the Argentine public arena. However, it is striking that these discussions forget to mention the social conditions in which market actors significantly set and shape prices. Debates focus on price increase and the spontaneous movements of the supply and demand curves supported by the neoclassical economic perspective, while the market agents that specifically cause such increase fade into the background and the subjective aspects of the phenomenon of price formation are underestimated as a mere manifestation of states of mind or individual preferences. This article argues that it is possible to criticize the neoclassical paradigm presuppositions based on the work of Alfred Schutz. His phenomenologically oriented sociology takes a critical stand facing the approaches that only consider the movements of the supply and demand curves in price formation, and that put aside the subjective values of the actors in the market. It is held that in line with the sociology of valuation, Schutz’s perspective resumes the inquiry around the intersubjective structures of meaning showing the importance of his thought to help us think about present-day problems.

In his essay, “Making Music Together,” Schutz provided insight into the social interactions between all participants in the musical process, including composer, performers, and listeners. The key concept in Schutz’s essay is the “mutual tuning-in relationship,” which encompasses the relationship between I and Thou, to form a We Presence. Schutz examined the structure of the mutual tuning-in relationship, which he said, “originates in the possibility of living together simultaneously in specific dimensions of time” (Schutz 1964: 162). During the mutual tuning-in process, members of an ensemble merge into each other’s stream of consciousness. This paper is based on phenomenologically-influenced research conducted at the Cleveland Institute of Music in collaboration with the Cavani String Quartet. The members of the Cavani Quartet teach several specific rehearsal techniques to their students which enable formation of a We Presence. The paper summarizes Schutz’s structures of the mutual tuning-in process and provides illustrations from the research findings which deepen our understanding of the mutual tuning-in process.

The article is a reflection about the controversies on social media. It analyzes a week of Folha de São Paulo’s posts, the largest Brazilian newspaper, on its Facebook page. The methodological basis adopted is the Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 2006). From the results, in a week of data collection, it seeks to theorize over coercive factors for the emergence of discursive struggles, with the aim of outlining a phenomenology of commentaries, based on Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger. Finally, it contrasts this situation of online conflicts with the Brazilian identity and the historical moment of the country.

This article reflects on the contemporary phenomenon of ‘fake news’ from a Schutzian perspective. Discerning the truth or falsity of an utterance – whether it is true, and therefore deemed ‘real’, or not and thus ‘fake’ –, calls for a framework for determining truth value. Thus, after a brief introduction, situating fake news within the history of strategic disinformation and propaganda, we analyze Schutz’s perspective on truth and rationality. Schutz’s concept of truth and rationality are centered around the paradigm of social constructivism, which situates the production of objects of thought in its sociocultural context and considers these objects socially derived or mediated. Reality, from this angle, is tied to group consensus, and, thus, can be considered objectified knowledge within the in-groups to which the members belong. This view of reality seems to follow, essentially, the logic of internet phenomena, such as filter bubbles and echo-chambers.

The aim of the paper is to deal with the links between Schutz and Wittgenstein on the centrality of language and intersubjectivity in the structure of meanings. I believe there are similarities between Schutz’s proto-trust in the natural attitude and Wittgenstein’s animal faith in the basic life form of language games. To this end, Cicourel’s analysis of the relationship between language, Verstehen and empirical research methods will be used. Cicourel renders Schutz and Wittgenstein contiguous, by interpreting the different techniques of empirical research as languages that structure the understanding of meanings on the basis of the order of different realities and different language games.

Alfred Schutz elaborated Edmund Husserl’s term of appresentation to a particular theory of appresentational relations comprising “marks”, “signs”, “symbols” and “indications”. Even though Schutz implied the existence of other such relations, it was Husserl who drew a line between appresentation and proof. Following this differentiation, this paper aims to constitutionally analyse the everyday life phenomenon of proof and to describe its structure by consulting William James’ term of “knowledge about” as well as by discussing Schutz’ theory of relevance. With reference to Husserl’s Logical Investigation and by contrasting proof with indication it is shown that proof is appresentationally constituted through reflectively bringing the polythetical elements of clear, distinctive and consistent knowledge about, functioning as interpretational relevance, into the centre of topical awareness.

The concept of lifeworld as posited by Husserl and developed by Schutz reveals key aspects of human social life. What happens when organized forces of human control tear lifeworlds apart? Gebser warned that without a transformation of consciousness humans would destroy their world. Habermas pointed out that humans were destroying lifeworlds with little awareness of the consequences due to the predominance of rational/legal thinking, thus creating “Deathworlds”. Transformative Phenomenology has become a community-of-practice that is an antidote to Deathworld-Making. Transformative phenomenology includes hermeneutics, somatics and leregogic practices and phenomenologists trained in this way exhibit ten qualities of being. We offer the Rising Sun project, a phenomenologically based social innovation, as a case example. The call to maintain and restore lifeworlds is the call to oneness and peace. In the era of growing Deathworlds, we, phenomenologists, are urged to respond and contribute to this call.

In this essay, the meaning contexts of poetry are considered. It is argued that poetry represents a pairing of semantic meaning with that of music. The analysis first proceeds by exploring Alfred Schutz’s ideas about the constitution of meaning and the experience of music. Next, using these insights the essay turns to an analysis of my poem “Perspective” in order to investigate how poetry is composed and how it is experienced by a reader / listener.

This essay considers how normal aging (without disease or cognitive impairment) might over the long run be thought of as undermining to “thinking as usual” in a society undergoing rapid social change. Informed by the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, the criteria for thinking as usual are considered. Derived from his essay “The Stranger,” these criteria were developed by Schutz about the experience of an immigrant stranger approaching a new culture (Schutz 1964a). Here it is argued that they might also help us better understand the experience of aging. It is suggested that in the context of social change older people can, under the right circumstances, feel like strangers in the culture they have known all their lives.

Hikikomori has been one of the social problems in Japan since late 1990s. This term refers to young people who do not go to school or work and stay at home. The aim of this paper is to criticize the current framework of support for them, and to clarify the foundations of a support relationship for them by referring to interview data from hikikomori people and to Alfred Schutz’s theoretical framework. It is not only possible, but also important, to set up basic principles for supporting them, given that a death of a hikikomori person occurred in a private institution which trained hikikomori people in 2006. This paper points out the problems of one mainstream model of the hikikomori support relationship, paternalism, and develops the following 3 principles as the foundation of hikikomori support based on empirical and theoretical considerations: (1) to respect self-determination, (2) to value consensus making in shared-determination, and (3) to take account of the biographically determined, intersubjective foundation at both levels of self-definition and decision making.

This paper aims to show the logical consistency between the subjective and the intersubjective constitution of meaning in Alfred Schutz by revealing his insight into the dynamic character of reality. In reconstructing what is implied by the proposition “the problem of meaning is a time problem,” this paper reveals that the interrelationship between the past and the present, namely “becoming,” is fundamental to meaning-constitution. By critically introducing the Bergsonian view of the tension between the durée and its symbolization, Schutz thematizes our meaningful reality in the fluidity. From this perspective, the intersubjective world is characterized as a continuous dynamic reality taken for granted by the actors. While subjectivity, as a function of articulating experiences in becoming, is a condition of the intersubjective world, the intersubjective process enables the taken-for-grantedness of subjective reality. Schutzian phenomenology may lead to a theory of the complexity and uncertainty of social reality.