1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Phenomenology within sociology, or phenomenological sociology, examines the concept of social reality (German: Lebenswelt or "Lifeworld") as a product of intersubjectivity.
[2] Having developed the initial groundwork for philosophical phenomenology, Edmund Husserl set out to create a method for understanding the properties and structures of consciousness such as, emotions, perceptions of meaning, and aesthetic judgement.
Schütz sought to provide a critical philosophical foundation for Max Weber's interpretive sociology (verstehende Soziologie) by applying methods and insights derived from the philosophy of Husserl to the study of the social world.
[7] While Husserl's work was intended to understand how we reflect on the structures of consciousness in its own right, Schütz was concerned with the relationship between the Lebenswelt ("Lifeworld") and human action.
In Husserl's 'Ideas I', he defines a concept he calls "the general thesis Natural Attitude" as "state of affairs in which we live before we have engaged in philosophy" or as the assumption that "the world is" as we literally perceive it in consciousness.
[13] The general thesis of the Natural Attitude is the ideational foundation for our everyday social experience.
It provides the raw, observable, taken-for-granted "data" upon which the findings of the social sciences are idealized, conceptualized, and offered up for analysis and discourse.
The "stock of knowledge" is typically a "deep background configuration"[19] of a series of past experiences comprising: "one's native language and linguistic rules; conventional modes of interpreting expressions and events; numerous theories and methods; aural and visual forms; shared cultural and normative understandings, and the like.
"[20] Martin Heidegger characterizes Husserl's phenomenological research project as, "the analytic description of intentionality in its a priori;"[21] as it is the phenomenon of intentionality which provides the mode of access for conducting any and all phenomenological investigations, and the ultimate ground or foundation guaranteeing any findings resulting from any such inquiry.
While there is some controversy as to the official name, number, and levels of the reduction, this internal argument among the philosophers need not concern us.
The phenomenological reduction as applied to a mundane analysis of the social world consists of the bracketing [equivalents: methodical disregard, putting out of play, suspension] of the thesis of the natural attitude.
Note that, because we as observers have already been born into an already-existing social world that is already pre-interpreted – through both social meanings and through architectural and business intentionality – and 'made meaningful-to-us' as an intersubjectively available "entity", any proposal that the subject is creating the object, or creating the meaning of the object as an individual achievement in a particular situation is a misrepresentation of what is actually taking place.
Within the 'Natural Attitude of Everyday Life', the subject's role in the constitution of meaningful objects is better understood as a reading off, or interpretation, of the meaning from the object-as-intended.