Phenomenology: Alfred Schutz’s Structures of the Life-World and Their Implications

The phenomenological life-world analysis by Alfred Schutz exerted a tremendous influence on qualitative social research by emphasizing the problem of meaning on a theoretical as well as methodological level. This chapter delineates the development from Husserl’s transcendental philosophy to Schutz’s mundane phenomenology and its methodological postulates for the social sciences. Most important is the postulate of subjective interpretation which requires of social scientist to explore the common-sense world of actors in their everyday lives and the ways actors orient to and make sense of their situations. As important is the postulate of adequacy which demands that the scientific second-order constructs are consistent with the common-sense, first-order constructs of the researched actors.
Special emphasis is given to a point which has been vastly overlooked in the international literature, namely that ‘adequacy’ also implies that second-order constructs are compatible with phenomenological analyses. Schutz has devoted his whole lifework to the goal of creating an adequate foundation of the methodology of social sciences. His ‘structures of the life-world’ serve as a protosociology, and his methodological postulates must be interpreted in this context.
Phenomenology argues that interpretive qualitative research is not simply a set of techniques but a theoretically driven enterprise. The pivotal question is how researchers deal with sense and meaning. Phenomenology has not produced a specific research design but is compatible with different research designs. It allows, however, to assess the (in)adequacy of concrete designs.