Alfred Schütz

From Geography

The work of Alfred Schütz was involved with influences of different streamings like Symbolic interactionism and Ethnomethodology. His most famous work is Phenomenology of the Social world (Campbell, 1991).

Schütz tries to bring the social system in front of the concept of action. He sees it as a basic element. He tries to explain spatial action by using social systems. Husserl had a great influence on the methodology of Schütz. His method was examining of phenomena as they occure. This is called 'the stream of consciousness'.

Beside that Schütz is saying that meaning is produced by acting and knowing. He takes the subject as a basis of social reality. Social reality can be subscribed as intersubjectively created reality, everbody has his own reality, so the social reality is in between(Werlen, 2010). Example of this is a song that's played. For one person it can be expierenced as the most beautiful song in the world, for another person although the most worse noise ever.

Schütz is also talking about the shared stock of knowledge. The shared knowledge is existing of one shared body of perceptions or interpretations of a subject, altough every person has his/her own view about a subject. This common shared interests (the 'stock of knowledge') is what he calls social reality. This can also be translated in spatial context (Campbell, 1991).

Space is a construction of reality. Basic coordinates are experiences of the body and brain. There are many different concepts of space, because we are all making spaces ourselves. A good thing to know is that Schütz notes that there are no spaces existing in itself. We only see things as spatial, because our own body shares the space with other things (Werlen, 2010).

References:

Campbell, J. (1991). Alfred Schütz. New York: Penguin

Werlen, B.(2010). Personal communication. Nijmegen: 28-09-2010

Published by Bas Boselie & Chriss van Pul