Rethinking Interpretive Social Science From a Schutzian Perspective

Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology, and the Renewal of Interpretive Social Science By Besnik Pula (Routledge, 2024) Interpretative analyses are well established within the social sciences. Since the cultural turn, at the latest, there have been numerous efforts through which the world has been interpreted as text or, at times, made even more opaque. What has fallen by the wayside in the process is the relevance and status of subjective knowledge in the social sciences. While this represents a necessary sacrifice for those who unreservedly follow postmodern approaches, there are also advocates of interpretative approaches who do not simply want to relegate the subject, their knowledge, and their perspective on the world to the background, or even to dismiss them altogether. The latter includes Besnik Pula, who, in Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology, and the Renewal of Interpretive Social Science, presents a plea for “neoclassical interpretivism” (p. 195). Through a sophisticated re-examination of Alfred Schutz's work, he shows how Schutz's theoretical approach is a living resource for rethinking the orientation of interpretive social sciences, analyzing subjective experience in a reflective manner, and critically engaging with the social logic of knowledge and power. Pula begins with a historical contextualization of Schutz's work (Ch. 2), exploring the question of why a phenomenological perspective failed to become institutionalized in American social sciences in the late 20th century—although this regional narrowing may seem surprising given the international scope of Schutz's reception. Schutz played a key role in bringing Husserl's phenomenology to America. But despite all his efforts, his theoretical perspective was marginalized there. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that there was a flourishing reception of his work, albeit short-lived, which led to “a fundamental redefinition of what it meant to do sociology and to theorize sociologically in the American tradition” (p. 25). Pula traces three central strands that were closely linked to Schutz but did not further his theoretical interests at their core: First, Harold Garfinkel took up Schutz in his ethnomethodology to attack Talcott Parsons' “grand theory” (Mills 1959). This was both a “blessing” and a “curse” (p. 28), as it led to a broad reception of Schutz on the one hand, but also to strong criticism of him from the ranks of ethnomethodologists on the other. Secondly, the prominent reception of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's (1966) The Social Construction of Reality led to a rediscovery of Schutzian theory. Although the two Schutz students succeeded in combining social phenomenology with classical concerns of sociology, they deviated from their teacher's perspective on some essential points. In addition, constructionism developed a life of its own over time and increasingly distanced itself from Schutz's fundamental assumptions and interests. Thirdly, the broad reception of Berger and Luckmann also resulted in a lively interest in what was inappropriately labeled “phenomenological sociology.” This included not only Schutz's approach to phenomenology, but in addition to symbolic interactionism, it also included ethnomethodology. Schutz's reception suffered considerably under this “heavy shadow” (p. 41), as critics regarded Garfinkel's approach as a natural continuation of Schutz's approach. All this meant that Schutz's endeavor to interconnect Husserl's phenomenology with Max Weber's sociology was not consistently pursued in the late 20th century. After this historical classification of theories, a fundamental reinterpretation of Schutz's writings follows. At least in the first parts of the book, this holds few surprises for those familiar with social phenomenology, but it also makes it accessible to less familiar readers. Pula starts from a sociological call he has heard for a convergence of cultural sociology on the one hand and cognitive science and psychology on the other (Ch. 3). According to him, social phenomenology is a suitable link, as it does not separate cognition from the social world and does not portray the actor as a “cognitive machine” (p. 49). Here, Schutz's concept of relevance is important, a “threshold concept that stands as a bridge between phenomenological egology and observational (social) analysis” (p. 52). For Schutz, relevance means selective attention that is not based on pure interest, but on an interest that manifests itself in a person's engagement with an object. Since interests are typified, they express a sociocultural relevance. Overall, relevance is thus an alternative concept to the static norms often used in the social sciences, which, at best, typify situations and courses of action but do not allow any statements to be made about actual events or prevailing preferences, which merely reflect subjectivity. In contrast, relevances are open-ended and embodied. They are based “on the constitutive role of embodied knowledge in the social and cultural world, one whose fund is active, ongoing, but always bounded and thus never infinite” (p. 73). Based on this, Pula outlines Schutz's distinction between the dimensions of relevance (Ch. 4). Thematic relevance refers to attention and problem focus. Schutz expands Aron Gurwitsch's (2010) “thematic field” with an “accumulated stock of knowledge” to make it clear that the thematic field is a structure of meaning and an essential domain for take-for-grantedness. While thematic relevance reflects the “principle of distinction,” interpretive relevance focuses on the “principle of judgment” (p. 90), that is, the assignment of a characteristic to the topic by drawing on the actor's embodied experience schemata. Motivational relevance, on the other hand, refers to the reasons for action, that is, interests, purposes and orientations of action. The associated because- and in-order-to-motives, which Schutz distinguishes, bind the actors and observers to time. Time thus has not only an analytical but also an ontological significance in the social sciences. After these rather basic yet necessary explanations, Pula gradually expands on the theoretical aspects. First, he extends the concept of symbolic relations and their connections to social structures and social reality (Ch. 5). Pula aims to develop a specific critique of the distribution of knowledge using Schutz's theory of language and the structures of the lifeworld. Here, the starting point is Schutz's mundane concept of transcendence, which is strongly linked to symbols. These not only establish we-relations but also refer to a more abstract level beyond the immediate “here” and “now.” As “pointers to another, virtual reality” (p. 128)—that is, to what Schutz (1945:551) refers to as “finite provinces of meaning,” such as religion, literature, and art—symbols enable experiences of transcendence. At this point, a fruitful dialog between Schutz and Cassirer begins. Although the former did not explicitly refer to the latter, for Pula, “Schutz's work represents an effort to realign Cassirer's meta-cultural symbolic analysis with Husserl's focus on the fundamental role of experience in the constitution of reality” (p. 135). Symbols are the inevitable basis of consciousness, which has a dual role: they constitute and represent the present. Symbol relations are not types or categories, but rather a transcendent universe that gives types their meaning in the first place—a universe that “thus makes the real object ‘more than’ what it is” (p. 142). Pula elaborates on this idea by developing a form of cultural analysis that shows how cognition and the body are involved in the constitution of social reality. Symbols not only form cultural worlds. Instead, they also have the potential to humiliate and defame actors and groups through “symbolic violence.” This reinforces the role of the symbolic power of misperceptions, which not only include misjudgments, but also enable intentional collective denigration and stigmatization of social groups. This argument culminates in a chapter that examines the movement in Schutz's interest from phenomenology to the sociology and political economy of knowledge (Ch. 6). Here, the book takes an innovative approach by linking Schutz's approach to questions of power, culture and the distribution of knowledge. Pula highlights four points in his discussion. First, for Schutz, knowledge is not an ideal construct, an institutional end product or the result of an economic division of labor, but an ontological fact. Knowledge is sedimented in the body, and it is only on this basis that it is externalized and objectified in everyday life. It encompasses embodied forms of mutually oriented pragmatics and their (non-)realization in anticipatory mode. Thus, “this understanding of knowledge is not about validity in the predicate sense, but of the actor's competence—including (as is empirically the case) of the limits and failures of competence—relative to the objective world” (p. 160). Secondly, Pula places the social distribution of knowledge at the center of his discussion. He notes that this is both a cause and an effect of the (de)institutionalization of modern power relations. Thirdly, he discusses the consequences of representing and communicating society as a symbolically represented reality. And fourthly, he highlights the tensions involved in institutionalizing expert knowledge in a democratic society: disputes among experts over the control of the interpretation and distribution of specialist knowledge, the differentiation of the contexts of relevance of knowledge, and the fragmentation and subdivision of the general social stock of knowledge. The book concludes by emphasizing that although Schutz did not regard phenomenology as a social science, he believed that the social sciences cannot be interpretive without phenomenology (Ch. 7). Phenomenology calls for a return to things themselves—primarily through a call back to the sensually perceiving, experiencing body as the locus of all objectivities in the world. Pula presents an insightful re-reading of Alfred Schutz's work in order to incorporate subjective experience and the body into the understanding of social reality. He shows that Schutz's social phenomenology is often ignored by contemporary interpretive social science, but that it is nevertheless enormously important. In particular, concepts such as relevance, symbolic relations, language, and lifeworld can provide a coherent foundation for understanding social action. Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology, and the Renewal of Interpretive Social Science thus offers valuable insights and significant impetus for both Schutzian research and interpretive social science. This book shows that social sciences still have much to learn from phenomenology. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Ekkehard Coenen is a research assistant at the Chair of Cultural and Media Sociology at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He studied cultural scientific media research, media culture, sociology and musicology. His dissertation examined the temporal structures and coordination efforts within the German funeral industry. In his postdoctoral project, he developed a sociology of knowledge approach to violence. His research focuses on the sociology of knowledge, media sociology, sociological theory, sociology of violence, and the sociology of death, dying, and bereavement. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.