Schütz's theory of society

From Geography

Alfred Schütz theory of society is based on the idea that we have a stock of knowledge and social consciousness in daily life. The life-world of an individual is derived from experiences, shared experience is part of social relationships. Where for example two individuals will see a car pass by, they create a shared experience. A person will extend shared experiences and shared typifications into his life-world or common world. This world is shared with other individuals who, based on typificitions have the same view or shared world. Communities create a shared stock of knowledge using typifications, which help to solve recurrent problems and create further knowledge. Schütz has used everyday life as a example for his theory of society. Explaining taken for granted actions and typifications in society using stock of knowledge as a shared knowledge of society.

The consciousness of the everyday life is a social consciousness. This has two different reasons. The first reason is that consciousness takes for granted the existence of other people as inhabitants of the same shared world (Campbell, 1981). The second reason is that a group of people has a shared history. People speak the same language, and they also share their symbols and signs which embody sets of typifications and abstractions. People’s individual lifeworld is a world with shared meanings and a sense of belonging to a group. For example, people from Holland feel connected with each other because of the shared language and lifestyle. Schütz claims that not every individual is aware of the fact that people in their environment experience the world the same way as himself. When a person is aware that another person is experiencing the same thing as he does, he speaks of a ‘we’ experience. According to Schütz, we-relationships are the basic structures of the world of everyday life. Every social relationship is derived from a ‘we’ relationship.

The 'we' relationship is not part of all social relationships. It only occurs when one person is aware of himself simultaneously experiencing the same world as another. This type of 'we' relationship is very dominant in small communities or in already existing groups which are selfselected and often consist of people who are like-minded. In order to being part of the 'we' relationship, persons have to constantly update their face-to-face interactions. When people only thinking of eachother, the lack of face-to-face interaction undermines the 'we'relationship. This is further described in Schutz's essay called 'Stranger'.

References

• Campbell, T. (1981). Alfred Schutz: A Phenomenological Approach. In: Seven theories of human society. Oxford University Press: Oxford

Contributors

• page created by--DennisPrince 15:44, 16 September 2012 (CEST)
• edited by --StefTomesen 24 October 2012
• edited by --MichielVanRijn 25 October 2012