JOHN R.

HALL

ALFRED SCHUTZ, HIS CRITICS,

AND APPLIED PHENOMENOLOGY

Recently Alfred Schutz’s attempt at a phenomenological solution to

methodological and conceptual problems in the social sciences has been
subjected to careful scrutiny. Some critics of Schutz have questioned the
philosophical adequacy of his approach to phenomenology and the problem
of intersubjectivity; others have questioned his relevance for comparative
sociology. Objectivist critics such as Barry Hindess lament the implication
they derive from Schutz, that social science is nothing more than &dquo;a special
kind of story-telling&dquo;.
In the present essay, I draw on critiques of Schutz’s phenomenology
of the social world as a way of clarifying Schutz’s limited intentions and
assessing the real limitations of his work. I want to suggest that Schutz’s
social phenomenology can provide a basis for a sociological enterprise which
he himself did not attempt - the comparative analysis of extant lifeworlds.
Applied phenomenology, as I term this extension of Schutz’s thought,
parallels the logic of interpretive sociology: it moves back and forth
between a phenomenological a priori and interpretations of lifeworldly
events, just as Max Weber moved between conceptual universals, ideal
types, and interpretations of historical events. Applied phenomenology is
an attempt to move beyond narrowly conceived methodological concerns

to more decisive sociological issues. It seeks to provide for lifeworldly

investigations what Weber provided for history - a comparative analytic
approach grounded in situations and actions of individuals, based on an
epistemology which takes cognizance of the social locations of actors and
the interpreter.

RECENT CRITIQUES OF SCHUTZ’S PROGRAM

Some social theorists (e.g., Peritore, 1975) interested in the possibility of a

phenomenological basis for the social sciences have called for inquiry
transpiring totally within the phenomenological reduction described by
Husserl. Others (e.g., Heap and Roth, 1973:361) argue that &dquo;the possibility
of a phenomenological sociology in the sense envisioned by Husserl is
highly questionable&dquo;. Like Peritore, they would want such accepted
266

phenomenological methods of inquiry as the transcendental reduction and

imaginative variation to provide a truly phenomenological foundation for
sociology by clarifying &dquo;the essence and essential relationships of such
objects of empirical sociology as society and the family...&dquo; (1973: 359). But
Heap and Roth go on to suggest that abstractions such as ’society’ disappear
in the transcendental reduction. No basis within the reduction is provided
for the discovery of the essence of an objectified abstraction. Rather, such
abstractions exist intrinsically as typifications made and used by persons
operating in the lifeworld. In the view of Heap and Roth, the reduction
leaves only a Transcendental Ego, for whom the world of social others and
meaningful relations has slipped away in a purely phenomenological con-
sciousness which purposely excludes cognitive conventions.
Alfred Schutz recognized the problem of ’transcendental intersubjectivity’
as requiring solution if transcendental phenomenology is to avoid mere

solipsism. He believed ’Thouness’ and Weness’ - through the lifeworldly

fact of birth - to be foundations of the possibility of the transcendental
reduction (1966: 82) and potentially available for investigations within
the reduction (1966: 58). But in his analysis of Max Weber’s problem of
subjective meaning, Schutz (1967) avoided a totally transcendental
approach. For Schutz, subjective meaning, whatever its nature, would be an
Act of consciousness involving temporal duration (i.e., one which occurs in
the vivid present unfolding stream of consciousness). He therefore chose to
clarify the nature of subjective meaning by employing the transcendental
reduction described by Husserl (1931: 11 lff.). But Schutz also held that
subjective meaning typically has as its object an element of the lifeworld
constituted in the ’natural attitude’ of the &dquo;World-given-to-me-as-being-
there&dquo; (1967: 43; cf. Husserl, 1931: 106). Further, he treated the problem
of intersubjectivity - a necessary basis of an observer’s meaning - as best
solved for sociological purposes on the mundane plane of the natural
attitude (Schutz, 1966: 82; 1967: 98, 165). Schutz therefore examined the
essence of meaning in internal time consciousness and applied the results of
that transcendental analysis to a subsequent study of meaning construction
in the mundane world of the natural attitude 1. He did not attempt to
transcendentally establish the essence of objects of sociologically analytic
consciousness (such as ’the’ family).
Hindess (1972: 7) is thus hardly illuminating when he faults Schutz for
failing to take on Husserl’s project of a sociology within the phenom-
enological reduction. Schutz self-avowedly regarded this project as a red
herring. Contrary to Hindess, Schutz’s analysis does have a phenomenological
 267

basis: in its transcendental grounding in an analysis of internal time con-

sciousness, it makes possible the investigation of Acts of consciousness
whereby meaning is established. Yet since Schutz regarded the phenomena
of meaning-establishment as typically transpiring among social actors
operating within cognitive conventions of the natural attitude, he sought
to explicate mundane constructions of intersubjectivity and meaning in the
social world.
With less polemic and more insight than Hindess, Peritore (1975: 134)
insists that Schutz’s work suffers from its incomplete bracketing of the
natural attitude. In this view, for phenomenology to offer a philosophical
grounding of the sociological enterprise, it would have to provide the
essence (in Husserl’s phenomenological sense) of meaning and intersubjectiv-

ity, as well as ’embodiment’ and ’mood’. And this is something that Schutz
could not accomplish through his partial bracketing.
At the crux of the matter is the issue of whether people constitute
meaning and intersubjectivity in a way which makes them available as
essences within the transcendental reduction. This problem may be resolved,
if at all, only through a purely phenomenological investigation. For now, it
can only be said that intersubjectivity and intersubjective meaning cannot
be ruled out as possible transcendental Objects of consciousness. Until the
implications of a phenomenological investigation have been described,
sociological research must proceed on the basis of a mundane phenom-
enological approach, while remaining open to various constitutions of
meaning and intersubjectivity among social actors who in one way or
another themselves transcend mundane assumptions of the natural attitude.
The &dquo;general thesis of the alter ego&dquo; stands as the assumption within the
natural attitude which Schutz claimed both sociologists and people in
general depend upon in order to intersubjectively establish meaning.
According to the thesis, &dquo;The Thou [or other person] is conscious, and his
stream of consciousness is temporal, exhibiting the same general form as
mine&dquo; (Schutz, 1967: 98). For the most part, as Schutz (1967: 38) has
noted, the intersubjective situation has pragmatic limits: people assume the
existence of others, and on that basis, seek to establish other persons’
meanings insofar as they regard it as relevant to their everyday concerns.
It behooves the social scientist to remain open to transcendental inter-
subjectivity - a situation in which the constituted objectivities of what
in the natural attitude are assumed to be ’Others’ would appear as immanent
Objects of consciousness. Such a situation could occur, but it remains only
one out of myriad lifeworld possibilities. A transcendental understanding
268

of intersubjectivity may have much to reveal about ultimate limits of social

possibilities. But the assumption of the Other’s existence and the inter-
subjective referral of meaning typically transpire within the natural attitude
as phenomena which may have as their essential feature an absence of

phenomenological bracketing. Insofar as sociology is to attend to subjective

meaning for the participants in order to understand action, it must try to
unmask intersubjective phenomena on the basis of the (typically mundane)
operating assumptions of actors themselves.
Both Peritore (1975: 134-135) and Hindess (1972: 6-8) claim Schutz’s
incomplete phenomenological reduction and his general thesis of the alter
ego to violate canons of phenomenological method and obscure the real

epistemological problems of social science. But in the end their predilections

toward particular methods prevent them from recognizing the diversity of
phenomenological methods and the diversity of entry points to phenom-
enological analysis. For instance, Peritore maintains (1975: 134, 136, 139)
that the essence of objects may be perceived only under the discipline of the
total phenomenological reduction. But both Spiegelberg (1969: 133-134,
690-691) and Schutz (1971: 113) agree that eidetic science is possible
without recourse to the total reduction. Further, Schutz (1971: 113) noted
the possibility of phenomenological analysis &dquo;applied within the empirical
sphere...&dquo;; while Spiegelberg (1969: 690) supports this claim by suggesting
that Husserl himself (in the realist Logische Untersuchungen) performed
some of his most successful phenomenological analyses prior to his specifi-
cation of the transcendental reduction as a device of phenomenological
research. Nor is this simply a feature of Husserl’s early work. In the crucial
turning point marked by his 1905 lectures on internal time consciousness,
it would appear that Husserl (1964: e.g., 43, 73) embraced a kind of
’phenomenological realism’: he examined transcendent possibilities such
as sonic echos within a phenomenological investigation of time and con-

sciousness. In his final years, Husserl once again entertained notions of

realism by suggesting the possibility of a ’mundane phenomenology’ which
gains access to the lifeworld through an initial reduction involving the
suspension of Science (Spiegelberg, 1969: 160: cf. Husserl, 1970: ss. 34-36).
It is this kind of mundane phenomenology which Schutz’s work would seem
to represent.
By carrying out both a transcendental examination of Ego-consciousness
and a mundane phenomenology of the natural attitude, Schutz tried to
offer a unique epistemological and substantive groundwork for sociological
inquiry. Epistemologically, he sought to clarify the position of sociological
 269

observers and the status of their (mundane) subjective and objective inter-
pretations. Substantively, Schutz’s work posed the lifeworld as the site of
subjectively meaningful action; it provided the first step toward a phenom-
enologically based sociology by explicating the structures of the lifeworld
via a phenomenology of the natural attitude (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973).
The result is a formal description of Ego-consciousness, time, Others,
intersubjectivity, meaning, themes and relevances. But for all the promise
which Schutz’s approach might seem to hold, the pursuit of his program -
both as phenomenological inquiry and as a basis for sociological analysis -
has been less than totally successful.
The mundane phenomenological analysis suffers from boundary problems,
for it is not clear where lifeworldly structures end and cultural ’essentials’
begin. As Peritore (1975: 137) has pointed out, Schutz depended so thor-
oughly on his &dquo;general thesis of the alter ego&dquo; as a basis of his mundane
analysis that he in some instances solved empirical problems by the fiat
of reference to the thesis. Thus Schutz (1967: 101) alluded to a &dquo;Code of
interpretation&dquo; by which the Ego is directed from outward behavior to
&dquo;underlying lived experience&dquo; of the Other. In his search for the structures
of the lifeworld, Schutz did not make thematic the possibility of variance in
the code of interpretation either within a We-relation, among actors in
disparate cultural or existential situations, or among sociological observers.
This does not necessarily invalidate Schutz’s ’general thesis’ as an approach
to mundane intersubjectivity. But it does suggest that Schutz unnecessarily
broadened the thesis to include propositions which are in no way essential
to it2. These propositions should be subjected to lifeworldly investigation.
If Schutz’s a priori seems to have been overextended, his substantive
contribution was at best tentative. Only in the most incipient way, for
example in his essays on citizenship and the stranger (1964), did Schutz
try to apply his formal mundane phenomenology to extant worlds of
social life. Even these attempts simply represent ideal typical models of
social actors (e.g., the technical expert, the man on the street). There is a
certain irony in Schutz: while he convincingly argued that subjective meaning
involves conscious activity ori an occasion, he did not apply his phenom-
enologically grounded perspective to the explication of any particular,
non-anonymous lifeworld occasion, wherein he claimed subjective meaning
would be situated. Max Weber, the object of Schutz’s critique of Verstehen,
had relaxed certain methodological requirements in order to offer a com-
parative historical sociology in part based on interpretation of subjectively
meaningful phenomena (Hall, 1977: App. I; Gorman, 1975a: 15). Schutz,
270

on the other
hand, sought to maintain a high degree of philosophical and
methodological consistency, while failing to demonstrate the relevance of
his perspective to understanding diverse social formations where subjective
meanings are constituted. As Hindess (1972: 19) and Gorman (1975b: 403)
are quick to point out, Schutz never used his approach to come to terms

with sociological issues of domination, inequality, revolution and the like3.

Schutz did not really attempt an extensive phenomenological sociology;
instead he devoted most of his energies to clarifying the epistemological
status of a verstehende Soziologie and describing the limits of the lifeworld
to which it pertains.
Apparently Schutz wanted to remain the philosopher and scientist -
aloof from the world of everyday life : though he regarded understanding
of subjectively meaningful action as a necessary feature of sociological
methodology, such an approach, he found, is not only necessarily approxi-
mate, but also necessarily objective. The immediately given social world,
though the origin of the possibility for understanding subjective meaning,
can never be captured by typification without treating the moment as an

object of thought. To the degree that the social scientist himself enters
into social action, taking on a heretofore observed situation as his own, he
may come to experience his own and consociates’ motives and under-
standings in a purely subjective fashion. Yet in this act, Schutz (1971: 40)
argued, the sociologist gives up his scientific perspective with its special
concerns beyond the concerns of other individuals within the situation.
Here Schutz’s attempt to ground a scientific sociology in phenomeno-
logy strains credulity. As Valone (1976: 201) has suggested, Schutz per-
petuated the crisis of science by maintaining the disjuncture between human
interests in knowledge and scientific interests in knowledge about social
relations among humans. Perhaps Schutz was overly sensitive to charges that
his approach is ’unscientific’. In any event, though he (19711 43) maintained
that scientific model-building must remain true to a &dquo;postulate of subjective
interpretation&dquo;, Schutz nevertheless denied that active participation in the
social world can be considered a basis of scientific knowledge. Instead, the
models constructed by sociologists are ideal types &dquo;without duration or
spontaneity&dquo; (1967: 241).
It is here, rather than in his earlier analysis of intersubjectivity, that Schutz
abandoned the program of a phenomenological sociology. Since subjective
meaning is a product of an occasion, it is manifested in actors who experi-
ence the world in streams of consciousness. Subjective meaning and social
relations are situated within unfolding moments. It is on such occasions that
 271

meaning is constituted, action initiated, and so forth. However much

sociological typification inevitably involves abstraction and the placing
of subjects’ actions and meanings within the observer’s context of meaning,
this secondary and objective context of meaning must include subjects’
time structures, attitudes toward the lifeworld, interactions with others,
and so forth as components of its typifications, or else it denies the very
postulate of subjective interpretation which Schutz has called for. While
any typification necessarily exists as an independent cultural product which
has neither duration nor spontaneity itself, the typification may refer to the
production of meanings and actions within streams of duration. Indeed, to
have any authenticity, the typification - whether empirical or ideal -
would necessarily be based on examination of such momentary production
of meaning. But it is this subjective basis of social knowledge from which
Schutz sought to sever himself. By maintaining the posture of a detached
scientist, he limited his initially radical program. He avoided coming to
grips with either embedded subjectivity or the relevance of historical narra-
tive, even though his problematic initially stemmed from exactly these
concerns in the work of Max Weber.

AN APPLIED PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL WORLD

A phenomenologically based sociology is not achieved simply through

Schutz’s &dquo;constitutive phenomenological psychology&dquo;. Though this approach
can describe structures of the lifeworld and elucidate the basis of observer’s

meaningful typifications, it does not look to the myriad ways in which

meaning and action are constituted by actors themselves. Here it is a matter
of recognizing that a priori limits do not identify alternative formations
of actual phenomena within these limits. An applied phenomenology of
the social world, while remaining within the conceptual frame of lifeworld
structures, would be concerned with the actual constitution of meaning
and action on the parts of actors themselves. In the empirical world, it
would parallel the philosophical phenomenology of essence and possibility
by providing a comparative a posteriori analysis of actualities and their
mundane ’essences’.
Such an enterprise does not escape the inevitability of the observer’s
typification, nor does it avoid the fragmentary and limited access which the
observer can have to an actor’s subjective stream of attention. An Ego’s
understanding of an Other is at best only an approximation (Schutz, 1967:
109). Both sociologists and everybody else, because situated in the lifeworld,
,
272

can never know with certainty that they understand the meaning of an
Other’s actions. From the perspective of Schutz’s mundane phenomenology,
the epistemological limits of social knowledge are contained not in any
formal and abstract logics of inference, proof and validity, but rather, in
the limits of knowledge in the situated and occasional perception of Others
and their artifacts.
Such understanding - however approximate it may be - provides the
best basis for sociological knowledge of human action, for it looks to the
lifeworldly episodes where action unfolds. In this enterprise of applied
phenomenology, the observer need not exclude the assumption that Others
exist, but this general thesis of the alter ego should not be extended to
include further assumptions about the ’Code of interpretation’ or ’contents’
of that existence. The observer thus initiates a difficult but potentially
rewarding attempt to comprehend the horizons of the actor’s world, the
actor’s temporal orientation to the world, and the cognitive frames in terms
of which he acts in the world. The social observer need not restrict this kind
of interpretive gaze to one individual. The same approach may be employed
with any number of individuals, both those who act socially in relation to
one another, and those who are anonymous to one another. Outcomes of
social interaction may be understood by noting the various concerns and
objectives of individuals, their perceptions of others and the other’s motives,
the externalities which they take into account, and other externalities which
they ignore. Of course the fundamental distinction between events and their
analytic typification should never be blurred. But insofar as the observer
studies subjects’ streams of attention and subjects’ interactions with natural,
cultural and social phenomena, his typifications - themselves abstractions
without duration or spontaneity - can begin to describe social phenomena
of the lifeworld as the convergence of multiple subjective realities.
In any such enterprise, the observer inevitably moves into objective
interpretation: when he moves beyond the description of one Other’s
subjectively meaningful action, he arrives at an objective context of meaning
within which he tries to plausibly fit various actors with their distinctive
meaning contexts and motives. Even an ideal type of subjectively meaningful
action per se, since it moves beyond interpretation of subjective meaning
for an individual to a model of subjective meaning devoid of ambiguities
in an actual situation, stands as a case of objective interpretation (Schutz,
1967: 135).
As a kind of objective interpretation, applied phenomenology would be
distinctive in its groundings in a phenomenological epistemology and an
 273

a matrix (itself the subject of parallel investigations). As an approach

priori
grounded in philosophical phenomenology, applied phenomenology would
be distinctive in focusing a comparative inquiry in the lifeworld itself. It is
there, rather than in any a priori analysis, that the observer can deal, as
Valone (1976) would want it, with the temporality of ’thought in action’,
of living subjects in a world at times transcended by objective realities and
reified structures of consciousness.
Several writers have described the phenomenological method in some
detail, both as a general method of investigation (Spiegelberg, 1969: 653ff.),
and as an approach to sociology (Bruyn, 1966; Heap and Roth, 1973).
Still, it is worthwhile to note the specific character of an applied phenom-
enology of the lifeworld and its relation to Weber’s verstehende Soziologie;
taken together, they comprise a unified approach to sociology and history -
one which takes into account both actors’ and observers’ points of view.
As Schutz (1967: 104) argued, on the mundane level, intersubjectivity is
possible when two or more Ego-consciousnesses share the same vivid present.
The case of ‘quasi-simultaneity’ (observational understanding through
artifacts) sets the originary point for Weber’s historical-comparative research.
But in the vivid present situation, observational understanding based on
quasi-simultaneity may be supplanted by direct intersubjectivity. Under
such conditions, a ’participant-observer’, i.e., one who attends to a vivid
present, does not start with an outcome of action and seek to reconstruct
the genesis and meaning of that action; instead, he is present as &dquo;the other
person’s action unfolds step by step before his eyes&dquo;. A participant-observer
thus stands a chance of ’keeping pace’ with the objects of attention (Schutz,
1967: 115).
Of course, the observer is limited, for if he could know the other person’s
every thought, he would be that same person (Schutz, 1967: 106). More-
over, as Weber (1968: 4) has pointed out, some action is covert; some
consists of ambiguous acquiescence. Like any other research activities,
direct intersubjectivity falls within a priori conditions of the interpretation
of meaning (understood as events of internal time consciousness contex-
tualized by attention to the unfolding world, in-order-to motives or because
motives). The validity of one research activity or another, then, has less to
do with the nature of the activity per se than with the cognitive status of
the knowledge produced as a moment of consciousness. Knowing the
occasional position of the knowledge, the sociologist may use it within its
self-contained limitations.
Under conditions of direct intersubjectivity it is possible for a participant-
274

observer to move with an Other through various Acts of consciousness,

including direct perception, reproduction of remembered experience, and
so forth. A sociology adequate at the mundane phenomenal level of subjec-
tive meaning is achieved by use of examples drawn from such a sociology
of arcane knowledge: the participant-observers (i.e., the Ego-consciousnesses
in a given vivid present) ’show each other the world’. No one gets the whole
story; there is always more that can be brought into relevance in relation to
a given theme.

Still, it should be recognized that a strategy of interviewing to search

out further details or interpretations breaks the pragmatic limits of meaning
display and interrupts the previously established streams of cognitions and
events. The interviewer constitutes a reality apart from subjects’ pragmatic
lifeworldly attention to interests as his information base. While such a
strategy can be quite informative, it necessarily involves reflective reproduc-
tion on the parts of subjects. Like history, it can proceed on the basis of
quasi-simultaneity, though the quasi-simultaneity is of one or more contem-
poraries who ’relive’ or ’play back’ their previous experiences. But inter-
viewing can also direct attention to ideal reflections which have never before
existed as moments of experience.
In contrast to interviewing, free attention to the moment at hand provides
access to shifts among various cognitions and acts as they transpire in an

uninterrupted situation. The participant-observer attends to events as they

are constituted by others in an ongoing stream of life activities. While the

participant-observer, like anyone else, doesn’t have access to all of the

multiple realities which are the horizons of an episode, he participates in
the vivid present intersubjective world as it happens, and thus becomes
exposed to meanings and their invocation as they transpire in the course
of persons’ daily lives. The participant-observer may later summarize life-
worldly constitutions of events and their modes of appearing, and establish
social boundaries of such phenomena with negative evidence.
Such a grounding of typification in the phenomenal events cognized
by social actors in unfolding time then can become the basis for assessing
the validity of more comparative sociological concepts. The issue becomes
one of whether ideal typical constructs of subjectively meaningful action
have referents discernible through an applied mundane phenomenology.
In theory at least, Max Weber’s interpretive typifications of subjective
meanings and their consequences may be reconciled with experiences of
actors described within the lifeworldly framework proposed by Schutz.
If it has any sociological utility, an applied mundane phenomenology
 275

should be capable of discerning among quite different subjective ’Codes of

interpretation’ for the existence of Others and constitutions of meaning
and action. By the same token, so long as Weber’s typifications of subjective
meanings derived from an observer’s viewpoint reflect subjective meanings
for actors, they should be compatible with such a mundane phenomenol-
ogical analysis of alternatively cognized lifeworlds. If these conditions are
met, it should be possible to delineate, for example, an applied phenom-
enology of domination, of charisma, of bureaucracy, or of socio-historical
phenomena such as medieval capitalism, Buddhist monasticism, industrial
agriculture, fascism, and so on. Such a phenomenological sociology would
describe lifeworldly constitutions of these types of phenomena as kinds of
internal time consciousness, accents on reality, and ways of invoking themes
and relevances in We-relations, with consociates, towards contemporaries,
and so forth (cf. Schutz and Luckmann, 1973).
This kind of analysis would deny neither the determinate sphere of
history nor the interaction with material and cognitive cultural artifacts
and social others. Instead, it would demand that an account of a phenom-
enon’s historical features unmask the cultural products (material and ideal)
which condition human beings’ perceptions of meaning and interactions
with material phenomena. In the classic Marxian problem of the ’objective’
meaning of an individual’s relation to the means of production, lifeworldly
analysis would trace not only the producing individual’s subjective meanings
and interactions with social others and material phenomena, but also the
managerial project and its in-order-to motive, the objective (i.e., completed)
product of that project, the managerial meanings which circumscribe
workers’ participation in the means of production, and so forth. Far from
denying the incorporation of history or material and social conditions as
features of individuals’ meanings and actions, an applied mundane phenom-
enology stringently requires that such ’causes’ be shown to be actual
phenomenal elements in the vivid present unfoldings of action. Instead of
assembling an abstract framework of concepts and their interrelations, an
applied phenomenological sociology requires analysis of phenomena and
their interrelations in the lifeworld acts of conscious beings.
A correspondence between phenomena of the lifeworld and sociological
categories of subjective meanings can be established by this kind of analysis4.
The phenomenological sociologist moves between (1) mundane phenom-
enological concepts concerning the structure of the lifeworld, (2)
configurational models (ideal types) of the constitution, boundaries and
unfolding of various kinds of phenomena, (3) lifeworldly models (observers’
276

typifications) of actual social phenomena (cases), themselves based on (4)

participant-observers’ chronicles of situated lifeworldly events drawn on
vivid present perceptions.
These possibilities, based on intersubjective meaning, provide counter-

point in a comparative sociology of lifeworlds to Max Weber’s use in inter-

pretive sociology of (1) formal, universal concepts of meaning and action,
(2) ideal types or ’socio-historical models’ (e.g., of patrimonial domination)
which elucidate configurational aspects of repetitive social forms and their
dynamics, (3) ’secular theories’ which describe and explain broad historical
phenomena, and (4) situational analysis of particular events, based on
archival and artifactual data (Roth, 1976). Applied phenomenological
sociology, as proposed here, parallels the logic of Weber’s interpretive
sociology described by Roth (1971: 126-128): case and situational analysis
can be used to clarify models and concepts, while batteries of concepts and
models may be drawn upon to elucidate features of cases and situations.
The difference between applied phenomenology and interpretive sociology
is a simple one: the former deals with intersubjectively experienced life-
worldly events, while the latter deals in quasi-simultaneity with interpretation
of historical events. Differences of methodology are thus based on differences
in sources of data which delimit different entry points to the events to be
understood. Nevertheless, the broadly shared epistemological presuppositions
of the two empirical approaches should permit cross-validation of results,
since they share a focus of the sociological enterprise on the actions of
human beings in worlds they constitute as meaningful.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Alfred Schutz attempted a philosophical basis for the verstehende Sozio-

logie of Max Weber by grounding it in a constitutive phenomenology of
the lifeworld, thereby discerning the a pn’ori structures of the lifeworld.
Though critics like Peritore and Hindess have faulted Schutz for his incom-
plete phenomenological reduction, even in Husserl’s view, phenomenological
analysis may proceed by other methods than the transcendental reduction.
Instead of subjecting the mundane assumption of the existence of the Other
to radical doubt, Schutz took that assumption to be the essential one that
human beings in a social world ’take for granted’. His analysis thus reveals
the a priori structures of the lifeworld as it is lived by human beings in the
natural attitude. On the basis of his analysis, Schutz traced the phenomenal
sources of meaning construction in the cultural and social disciplines. But a
 277

more radical application of Schutz’s epistemology may be derived: its a

priori limits may be used as the analytic framework for the comparative
study of lifeworlds themselves. Such an approach need be neither solipsistic
nor insensitive to history and situation. Nor does it inherently favor idealist

or materialist explanations. An applied phenomenology breaks from any

dogmatic sociological theories as well as from abstract debates over phenom-

enology ; it begins the difficult but potentially rewarding program that
Husserl called for, by going ’to the things themselves’. Applied phenom-
enology takes social action and meaning to be occasional, and it looks to
actors’ concerns, interests, projects and their consequences in lifeworld
situations. Such an approach parallels Max Weber’s historical-comparative
studies, but looks to the vivid present as the basis of its understanding.

University of Missouri
Columbia, Missouri

NOTES

1 as they relate to subjective and objective meaning may

Schutz’s conclusions insofar
be briefly summarized. Using a strictly phenomenological method, Schutz found the
concept of subjective meaning to have no simple or unambiguous usage, but to gloss
over distinctly different Acts of consciousness. In Schutz’s analysis, subjective meaning
could consist (1) metaphorically, of "the special way in which the subject attends to
his lived experience" in the vivid present (Schutz, 1967: 215); and non-metaphorically,
of an act of reflection, either (2) toward a projected goal — in which case action is
given meaning in terms of an ’in-order-to motive’ of the project; or (3) as an account
of the genetic events which led up to an action — in which case meaning context is
given through a ’because motive’ (1967: 86-95).
Moving from transcendental analysis to a procedure based on his mundane "general
thesis of the alter ego", Schutz described the situation for an observer of subjective
meaning. The observer experiences the Other in his own meaning context, based on
limited access to objectifications stemming from the Other’s stream of life activity
(1967: 106). If the observer simply takes the artifact or action of the Other qua
product and fits that product within his own meaning context, interpretation is of
the completed object, independent of any subjective meaning intended in its produc-
tion (hence objective meaning). Since there may be more than one observer, alternative
objective interpretations may arise from examination of the same product (1967:
133-136). The differences among provinces of objective understanding thus have to do
not with their phenomenological status, but with the focus of inquiry, the raison
d’être of inquiry, standards of evidence, and so forth.
On the other hand, the observer dealing with a product of action may look beyond
the product as object to try to determine its subjective meaning, that is, "the meaning
context within which the product stands or stood in the mind of the producer" (1967:
133). As distinct from objective interpretation, subjective interpretation involves an
attempt to understand the various acts of an individual as he himself intends or
intended them within his own contexts of meaning. The observer may attempt three
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broad types of subjective understanding, each keyed to one of the kinds of subjective
meaning events of consciousness described above, i.e., the ’metaphoric’ meanings which
comprise paying-attention-to-the-world in the Here and Now, reflected meaning in the
context of an in-order-to motive and reflected meaning given as the because motive
or genesis of an action.
2 Valone (1976) describes a converse problem — that of conceiving universal struc-
tures of the lifeworld too narrowly. However, in my opinion, Valone mistakes empir-
ical for mundane phenomenological problems. He is correct to note that Schutz
glossed the lived dialectic of subject and object, but wrong to suggest that existential
possibilities (such as anxiety over death) are part of the structures of the lifeworld.
As Valone (1976: 203) himself acknowledges, Schutz recognized the subject-object
tension of existence (especially in The Structures of the Lifeworld
). But Schutz (wisely)
did not try to spell out the invariant nature of such a tension, leaving it instead to
empirical investigation.
3 Additionally, Gorman (1975b: 402) finds the empirical sociological studies out of
the Schutzian perspective — notably those of ethnomethodologists — to be "less than
profound".
4I attempt this kind of analysis in my (1977) study of communal living groups.

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