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21. Schutzian Research: Volume > 12
Alexis Gros

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The present paper constitutes an attempt to articulate, systematize, and further develop the implicit traces of a phenomenological critical theory that, according to Michael Barber’s reading, are to be found in Schutz’s thought. It is my contention that a good way to achieve this aim is by reading Schutz against the background of novel, phenomenologically and hermeneutically informed accounts of Critical Theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, such as Hartmut Rosa’s. In order to achieve the stated objective, I will proceed in four steps. First (1), I will briefly reconstruct the mostly negative reception of phenomenology, the interpretive social sciences, and Schutz by both the Frankfurt School and contemporary critical social theory. Second (2), I will present Barber’s alternative reading of Schutzian phenomenology as entailing an implicit ethics and a rudimentary critical theory based thereon. Third (3), I will sketch out Rosa’s formal model of Critical Theory as an heuristic means for articulating Schutz’s unspoken social-critical insights. Finally (4), establishing a dialogue between Barber’s reading of Schutz and Rosa’s account, I will provide a preliminary articulation of Schutz’s rudimentary critical theory.
22. Schutzian Research: Volume > 12
Max Gropper

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In his famous work on the stranger, Alfred Schutz focuses on the interpretative discrepancies between in-groups and out-groups from the per­spective of a stranger approaching a new group. In doing so, Schutz emphasizes that strangers can overcome their strangeness within a social group by adapting to the prevalent cultural patterns. Shifting the perspective from the stranger to the in-group this essay aims to argue that the experience of the Other’s strangeness due to a discrepancy of interpretative schemes is only one dimension of how the stranger is perceived in everyday life. A second dimension can be derived from Schutz’ work on appresentation. This essay will follow four analytical steps. First, this essay summarizes the Schutzian approach on perceiving the Other as a taken-for-granted part of everyday life within an assumed intersubjective understanding based on an assumed reciprocity of perspectives. Referring to Eberle’s description of an irreciprocity of perspectives, the second section analyzes the Schutzian stranger based on an intersubjective understanding. The third section then focuses on the appresentational pro­cesses of perceiving the stranger in everyday life. By using Goffman’s distinction between virtual and actual social identity, the interplay of categorizing and experiencing the Other in everyday life can be described. Finally, considering the question of how it comes that people can find themselves strangers in their own society, this paper closes by merging the argumentation with a description of the Schutzian perspective on the processes of stigmatization.
23. Schutzian Research: Volume > 12
Karsten Krampe, Svenja Reinhardt, Sebastian Weste

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In this paper we examine the concept of waiting from a phenomenological point of view. In order to do so, we start with a definition from Andreas Göttlich and contextualize it within the theoretical framework provided by Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann and Peter L. Berger. Additionally, we discuss waiting on the basis of our previous research, specifically within the context of a field extract from an earlier life-world analytical ethnography on the parents of pre-adolescent, non-professional soccer players. The field vignette depicts a mother who has problematic possibilities of conflicting preferences due to the apperception of her soccer playing child, who was injured during the match. This negotiation within projects of action will be outlined as a specific facet of waiting.
24. Schutzian Research: Volume > 12
Ellen Jacobsson

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This paper suggests that Alfred Schutz’s account of systems of typi­fication together with Sara Ahmed’s account of the proximity of the stranger allows for a different understanding of social integration. The paper proposes to rethink the political and social relationship of the in-group and the stranger, approached through the face-to-face encounter between an integration counselor and an immigrant. The encounter offers a disruption of what is taken for granted by the in-group and functions as a catalyst for a system of reference to appear at all. Through Ahmed’s account on the familiarity and proximity of the stranger, I argue that integration practices are considered to produce, rather than translate, a coherent system of reference for an in-group. The institutionalization of social integration is consequently risking concealing the “unintegratable” stranger rather than offering a solution for the more epistemological dimensions of social exclusion that we find in the experience of sameness and difference.
25. Schutzian Research: Volume > 12
Christian Etzrodt

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The goal of this paper is to develop a consistent framework for a phenomenological discourse analysis of political debates. The political sphere arises through the questioning of taken-for-granted definitions of reality: a crisis. During a crisis meaning has to be restored, and different interest groups will try to push their definition of reality, which is advantageous for them. For the analysis of such a political discourse phenomenology provides several tools that can help us to understand the background of the discourse, the severity of the crisis, the level of expertise of the participants, the source of the information, discourse strategies and what arguments the audience accepts. These tools allow a unique phenomenological approach towards political discourse analysis.
26. Schutzian Research: Volume > 12
Jochem Kotthaus

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The vague idea of likening soccer to religion, specifically in watching soccer as a fan, is widespread spread in both everyday life media and academia. The slightly muddled discourse can be clarified by focusing on two variations, differentiating between sport in religion and sport as religion. Concentrating on sport as a form of religious activity and experience, it seems obvious that one’s theoretical framework here connects Durkheim’s elevation of formerly profane objects to a Sacred with concepts of individualization and secularization. Yet, taking a critical look from the perspective of Luckmann’s theory of invisible or private religion, religion ought to be more narrowly conceived as a specific experience of transcendency. Employing Berger, it is plausible to employ a different rationale, leading to the conclusion that fandom constitutes a mimicry-religion. Mimicry-religion adheres to the inclination of the Self to understand his or her experience as religious for the need of a nomos, a legitimization of social institutionalizations.
27. Schutzian Research: Volume > 12
Jerry Williams

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This essay considers social science as a finite province of meaning. It is argued that teasing out common-sense meanings from social scientific conceptions is difficult because the meanings of scientific concepts are often veiled in life-worldly taken-for-grantedness. If social scientists have successfully created a scientific province of meaning, attempts to communicate findings outside of this reduced sphere of science should be somewhat problematic.

28. Schutzian Research: Volume > 11
Michael D. Barber Orcid-ID

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29. Schutzian Research: Volume > 11
Daniela López, Valeria Laborda

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The paper aims to analyse the potentiality of Schutzian phenomenological approach on institutions. We will maintain that this point of view has to take into account at least three aspects of institutions. Firstly, institutions should be considered as objective and sedimented configurations of meaning. Secondly, the historicity and the genesis of the institutional objectified meaning should be explored. Thirdly, life in modern societies shows how reference to the generating activities has been lost in our institutions and how that process has led to the disaffection of the citizens towards them. Motivated by understanding the process through which certain actors question their relative-natural concept of economic life and institute alternative types of economic actions, the article explores a case study of an economic institution in the City of Buenos Aires belonging to the so-called “Other” economy. Following the model of the well-informed citizen, the manuscript describes a type of “economic citizen” who transforms the imposed economic relevances experienced in everyday life into the centre of interest. The emergence of that interest is analysed by tracing back this particular economic institution to the process of sedimentation and of genesis of meaning. It is demonstrated that the process of institutionalization is shaped in contrast to dominant anonymous economic institutions.
30. Schutzian Research: Volume > 11
Carlos Belvedere, Alexis Gros

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There is a broad consensus that the study of social institutions is one of the fundamental concerns of the social sciences. The idea that phenomenology has ignored this topic is also widely accepted. As against this view, the present paper aims at demonstrating that especially Schutzian phenomenology—that is, the social-phenomenological tradition started by Alfred Schutz and continued by Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, among others—provides rich insights on the nature and workings of social institutions that could contribute to enriching the current social-scientific debate on the issue. In order to show this, the authors attempt to unearth and systematically reconstruct Schutz’s and Berger and Luckmann’s insights on social institutions and to confront them with current approaches.
31. Schutzian Research: Volume > 11
Germán D. Fernández-Vavrik

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As a consequence of the explosion of enrollments, higher education institutions have been confronted by new categories of students the last forty years. In this paper, cultural and political dimensions of the integration of students into educational institutions will be explored. The focus will be on the experience of what I called “newleavers,” namely, people who are leaving their environment of origin without knowing if they will return. The contradictory commitments and challenges faced by newleavers will be studied with a sociological approach based on intercultural, phenomenological and praxiological research. To sketch an analysis of the experience of newleavers in general, I will explore strangeness and uprooting in an educational setting; the research is based on the experience of Huarpes students at the University of Cuyo, in Argentina. I claim that newleavers who keep ties with their environment of origin develop an “ethnographic stance,” namely, a moral posture and a cognitive perspective allowing them to critically identify rules, norms, and values, by comparing environments and groups.
32. Schutzian Research: Volume > 11
Ingeborg K. Helling

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In his “Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt” (1932; engl. tr. 1967) Alfred Schutz refers frequently and mostly positively to the author Fritz Sander. In contrast to other members of the Viennese social science milieus in interwar Vienna, Sander has been neglected in the abundant literature on Schutz. Following Henrich’s (1991) Konstellationsforschung approach, Schutz and Sander are placed in the setting of interwar Viennese social science. Explicit references to Sander made by Schutz will be described, similarities and differences in their treatments of Max Weber’s concepts of social action and subjective meaning will be examined, and their respective views of a phenomenological grounding of social science will be discussed.
33. Schutzian Research: Volume > 11
Marek Chojnacki

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Assuming the importance of Alfred Schutz’s “protosociology” in social theory as a given, the paper tries to explore its philosophical core, treating Schutz’s sociophenomenology as an answer to the most fundamental questions of phenomenology, such as evidence and phenomenological reduction. It analyses Schutz’s point of departure – the problematization of Max Weber’s concept of the meaning of social action and its deepening by means of Henri Bergson’s and Edmund Husserl’s notion of time – and tries to unravel the double structure of consciousness (first in Brentano and Husserl, then in Schutz), revealing increasingly its complex temporal character. Brentano’s and Husserl’s double intentionality, seeming to offer a kind of “decent realism” in modern philosophical context, in Schutz turns out to be marked by the profound pastness of reflexive consciousness, reaching the primary stream experience only by means of primary and secondary acts of remembrance, re-effectuated intersubjectively in acts of phantasying about future (modo futuri exacti), thus constituting the very core of meaning, with its reference to external objects. It appears that only analysing this mode of phantasying in reference to its motives that we can solve the conundrum of realism in its modern shape.

34. Schutzian Research: Volume > 10
Michael D. Barber Orcid-ID

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35. Schutzian Research: Volume > 10
Luigi Muzzetto

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The first part of this paper aims to highlight the analogies between Schutz’s vision of the natural attitude and Wittgenstein’s vision of a phenomenon that concerns the same problematic field, i.e. certainty, the belief of common sense that is free of all doubt, that the world “out there” is as it appears, absolutely real. These certainties form the basis, the foundation of language games and therefore of knowledge in general and in its entirety. This foundation is unfounded and yet indispensable. The second part of the paper examines an important topic analysed by Wittgenstein, related to the aforementioned problem: the language transposition of pre-predicative, pre-reflective and non-propositional certainties, the cornerstones of which are “hinge propositions”, whose hybrid nature can be identified in the shift from empirical propositions to grammatical rules.
36. Schutzian Research: Volume > 10
Frédéric Guillaume Gass-Quintero

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The aim of this paper is to show that we are entitled to see in Schütz’s article “Equality and the Social Meaning Structure” the proposal for a formal analysis of group membership understood as a kind of We-experience irreducible to pure We-relationships (Wirbeziehung). First I argue that such an account defines the experience of group membership as a “situation definition process”. Then I show the relevance of this approach for the description of membership experiences and current debates on Collective Intentionality. Finally, I point to its unclarified conceptual presuppositions—such as the at­tribution of situations to groups—, and propose an interpretative solution by drawing on the notions of “social situation” and community of relevances from The Structures of the Life-World.
37. Schutzian Research: Volume > 10
Barton Buechner, Sergej van Middendorp, Rik Spann

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Today’s fast-moving, (new) media lifeworld embodies many of the metaphors of its analog predecessors – including those of warfare and conflict. The metaphor of warfare is used to describe everything from corporate marketing strategies to political campaigns, often with harmful consequences. In one way of exploring the front lines of the resulting war on truth, we describe some lessons learned from the experience of military veterans who have actually endured the liminality of combat, and who emerge with what is increasingly termed moral injuries. We use their experience as an analogy for competing (ante)narratives in cyberspace, where objective standards of truth and facticity are apparent casualties, and where fake news is emerging as victorious. We then apply models of social construction, specifically the practical theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), and the metaphor of jazz improvisation in the context of Schutz’s lifeworld phenomenology as possibly useful, helpful, and hopeful ways of acting into the complexity of truth together.
38. Schutzian Research: Volume > 10
Daniela Griselda López

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There is no question that nowadays the phenomenon of prices is central to the media and political agenda and is the object of heated debates in the Argentine public arena. However, it is striking that these discussions forget to mention the social conditions in which market actors significantly set and shape prices. Debates focus on price increase and the spontaneous movements of the supply and demand curves supported by the neoclassical economic perspective, while the market agents that specifically cause such increase fade into the background and the subjective aspects of the phenomenon of price formation are underestimated as a mere manifestation of states of mind or individual preferences. This article argues that it is possible to criticize the neoclassical paradigm presuppositions based on the work of Alfred Schutz. His phenomenologically oriented sociology takes a critical stand facing the approaches that only consider the movements of the supply and demand curves in price formation, and that put aside the subjective values of the actors in the market. It is held that in line with the sociology of valuation, Schutz’s perspective resumes the inquiry around the intersubjective structures of meaning showing the importance of his thought to help us think about present-day problems.
39. Schutzian Research: Volume > 10
Dorianne Cotter-Lockard

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In his essay, “Making Music Together,” Schutz provided insight into the social interactions between all participants in the musical process, including composer, performers, and listeners. The key concept in Schutz’s essay is the “mutual tuning-in relationship,” which encompasses the relationship between I and Thou, to form a We Presence. Schutz examined the structure of the mutual tuning-in relationship, which he said, “originates in the possibility of living together simultaneously in specific dimensions of time” (Schutz 1964: 162). During the mutual tuning-in process, members of an ensemble merge into each other’s stream of consciousness. This paper is based on phenomenologically-influenced research conducted at the Cleveland Institute of Music in collaboration with the Cavani String Quartet. The members of the Cavani Quartet teach several specific rehearsal techniques to their students which enable formation of a We Presence. The paper summarizes Schutz’s structures of the mutual tuning-in process and provides illustrations from the research findings which deepen our understanding of the mutual tuning-in process.
40. Schutzian Research: Volume > 10
Manuel Petrik

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The article is a reflection about the controversies on social media. It analyzes a week of Folha de São Paulo’s posts, the largest Brazilian newspaper, on its Facebook page. The methodological basis adopted is the Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 2006). From the results, in a week of data collection, it seeks to theorize over coercive factors for the emergence of discursive struggles, with the aim of outlining a phenomenology of commentaries, based on Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger. Finally, it contrasts this situation of online conflicts with the Brazilian identity and the historical moment of the country.