Phenomenological sociology - a direction of sociology based on the phenomenological method.
Based on the philosophical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl , Alfred Schutz proposed a microsociological approach, also called phenomenology. SchĂĽtz watched how ordinary members of society create and recreate the world in which they live, their life world.
For SchĂĽtz, it was important to bracket the strongly learned questions of life in order to better understand the life world of the studied social objects.
The initial premise of Phenomenological sociology: the individual is not a captive of the social structure, we constantly recreate social reality, depending on our consciousness and our interpretations. Accordingly, human subjectivity must fall into the focus of sociology. However, a look at it from the perspective of an external observer is at least unproductive, and does not allow one to “break through” to its origins. Therefore, immersion is necessary in the world in which a person lives, that is, in the world of life or the life world .
Any sociological strategy adequate to its subject must: 1) proceed from the “taking in brackets” of the question of the existence of a world of objects outside of consciousness; 2) to carry out a phenomenological reduction, that is, to free oneself from the “pre-attitudes” of vision and find the original meaningful for any subject, shared by him (but not independent of him); 3) to fix the natural attitude (the natural, “darkened” direct relation to the world with established conventions and abstractions), which is possible only in the life world; 4) to give an analysis-reconstruction of the possible agreement-understanding achieved by the subjects in intersubjective interaction-communication and to identify the fundamental principles and mechanisms for constructing the sociocultural world at the same time.