Patterns

From Geography

This page means with the word patterns the patterns that are used by Max Weber and Alfred Schütz. There is always a kind of sense in our actions. Those different senses form patterns and those patterns form sort of structures and environments. But those patterns can nog be used as a general explanation of different actions that takes place. Those patterns refer only to the ideal types of action of Weber. Those ideal types of action refers to the way in which actors give meaning to their actions/ make sense of their actions. Thus, those patterns form a simplified model of real action (it is not perfect, but it is a concept of how actions take place).

Later Alfred Schutz shares this idea of Weber's patterns. He was also searching for structures/patterns of relevance for us. He was searching for ideal-typical models of the social life world. He used the word typifications for those patterns. These typifications are absorbed through language and the institutionalized knowledge of society. He gave an example of the activity of mailing a letter. Such an act takes it for granted that there are certain persons like postmen and sorters who will process the letter in certain standard ways (Campbell, 1981). But those typologies do not give us real understanding of the individual people who are assumed to follow these typical patterns. They are learned by a process of socialization in which people come to construct patterns of the actors motives and ends, and even of their characteristic attitues and personalities. This proces of self-typification let see that we are able to co-operate (and reach a certain goal: like mailing the letter) with people of whom we have no personal knowledge (Campbell, 1981). In the following text of the book "On phenomenology and social relations", Schutz also mentioned patterns: Thus, the social world into which man is born and within which he has to find his bearings is experienced by him as a tight knit web of social relations, of systems of signs and symbols with their particular meaning structure, of institutionalized forms of social organization. Of systems of status and prestige, etc. The meaning of all these elements of the social world in all its diversity and stratification, as wel as the pattern of its texture itself, is by those living within it just taken for granted.

References

Campbell, T. (1981) Seven Theories of Human Society. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Chapter 9: Alfred Schütz: A phenomenological Approach. pp. 197-214

Schutz, A. (1970).On phenomenology and social relations. The university of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Published by Evelien Kuypers and Pauline van Heugten