This study, originally published in 1977, focuses on a critical examination of the life-work of Alfred Schutz, the most important and influential ‘father’ of several recent schools of empirical social research.
The author shows why Shutz and his followers fail in their attempts to ‘humanize’ empirical social science. The problems they encounter, he argues, are due to their attempt to achieve a methodological synthesis of self-determining subjectivity and empirical criteria of validation, based on Schutz’s heuristic adoption of relevant ideas from Weber and Husserl. This is, in effect, an artificial union of subjectivity and objectivity – their ‘dual vision’ – that satisfies neither phenomenological nor naturalist perspectives. Dr Gorman suggests that the radical implications of phenomenology must lead to a consistent, socially-conscious method of inquiry, and, in a final chapter, he re-defines the methodological implications of phenomenology with the aid of existential and Marxist categories.
Author(s): Robert Gorman
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2015
Language: English
Pages: 248
City: London
Cover
Routledge Library Editions: Phenomenology
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
1 Phenomenology and methodology of social science: the origins
1 Max Weber's methodology in its historical context
2 Schutz's critique of Weber
3 Edmund Husserl's phenomenology
Summary and conclusions
2 Phenomenological social science
1 The social structure of individuality
2 The intersubjective common-sense world
3 Individual action in society
4 The social determinants of individual action
5 A sociological method
Summary and conclusions
3 Phenomenology, free action, empirical social science: some theoretical and practical problems
1 The tensions within Schutz's philosophical anthropology
2 The impersonal world of 'das Man'
3 The operationalization of phenomenological social science in decision-making theory
4 Ethnomethodology and the 'humanization' of social science
Summary and conclusions
4 The 'objectivity' of empirical social science: a philosophical perspective
1 Naturalism as a philosophy of science
2 Phenomenology as rigorous science
3 Two organic views of 'science'
4 Phenomenology and the methodology of natural and social science
5 Schutz's attempt at synthesis
Summary and conclusions
5 Epilogue: an alternative phenomenological approach to social inquiry
1 Phenomenology revisited: an existential view
2 Existential ontology
3 Social ontology
4 Phenomenology social science and radicalism
Appendix
References
Bibliography
Index
