Handout 3

Phenomenology and Interpretive Research

There are several major strands to interpretive research. We could consider approaches to interpretive research in the various disciplines -- anthropology, history, psychology, sociology -- but our strategy will be one that cuts across these disciplines by considering shared metatheoretical issues. This handout describes the strand known as phenomenology. (Subsequent handouts will describe how hermeneutics and critical theory have contributed to the interpretive paradigm.) We will consider four important varieties of phenomenology: (1) the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, (2) the social phenomenologicy of Alfred Schutz, (3) the social construction of reality explored by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and (4) the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel.  At the end of the handout is a summary chart.

Phenomenology is, viewed most generally, a descriptive approach to human experience, one which starts from the recognition that ‘things’ (objects, events, processes, other people) are always objects for consciousness. As Webster’s defines it, phenomenology is "the description of the formal structure of the objects of awareness and of awareness itself in abstraction from any claims concerning existence." It deals with the "logic" of "phenomena." Phenomenology arose in the eighteenth century as part of a reaction against positivism and empiricism. Phenomenologists are critical of natural scientists for treating the things they study as independently exiting entities, when in fact we have access to them only as they are given to us, as they appear to us, in human consciousness.

It is important to understand the changes over time in the way phenomenology has been conceived, since some qualitative researchers draw from ‘older’ versions and some from the ‘newer.’ Phenomenology has moved from a strictly philosophical approach to an empirical methodology in the human sciences.

1.  Transcendental Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

Phenomenology was first included as part of a philosophical system by Georg Hegel (1770-1831), but it was Edmund Husserl who first elaborated a phenomenological method.

Husserl argued that the sciences, despite their claims to objectivity and neutrality, are in fact shot through with human interests and concerns, with what he considered to be historical and cultural baggage. The sciences, decided Husserl, needed to be put on a firm foundation through a kind of investigation which would lay bare the basic structures of reality -- of phenomena of all kinds -- free from the distortions introduced by our everyday concerns, worries and interests, and by natural scientists’ concerns with empirical proof and causal conditions. This technique was transcendental phenomenology.

Husserl distinguished between the "natural attitude" and the "phenomenological attitude": "We begin our considerations as human beings who are living naturally, judging, feeling, willing ‘in the natural attitude.’" The natural attitude "posits" the world as a factually existing actuality: it has the characteristic of "being there." We experience its existence without thematizing it, or thinking or theorizing about it. In this attitude, "corporeal things with some spatial distribution or other are simply there for me." Animate beings are immediately there for me too, distinctly or indistinctly, clearly or obscurely. And all this is surrounded by a more obscure and indeterminate horizon, stretching out infinitely. If this is the kind of order of the spatial present, the same can be said about its order in time: "In my waking consciousness I find myself in this manner at all times." The world is always there, not just as a world of mere things, but also as "a world of objects with value, a world of goods, a practical world." This is "the world in which I find myself and which is, at the same time, my surrounding world." The natural attitude simply accepts this one spatiotemporal actuality, even if some part of it may turn out to be surprising, or doubtful, or illusory, or a hallucination.

But "instead of remaining in the natural attitude, we propose to alter it radically." We can modify the natural attitude’s positing, its unthought conviction that the world exists simply as we immediately experience it; we can "put it [this conviction] out of action" if we "exclude it," or "parenthesize it." We make an effort to suspend the naively held belief that everyday objects exist in such a way as to be unaltered by our consciousness of them. This is an attempt at a simple, but radical change of attitude: an abstention from our untutored tendency to posit objects, events, or mental acts as real, as existing outside consciousness, and independent of consciousness. The everyday world does not vanish; "It is still there, like the parenthesized in the parentheses, like the excluded outside the context of inclusion." But we have added a "definite, specifically peculiar mode of consciousness." This is the phenomenological attitude.

Getting from the natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude is achieved by employing a bracketing or epoché (epoch¢) or reduction. The term epoché (used first by the ancient Greek philosophers known as skeptics) conveys the difference between a phenomenological description of an object and the kind of account that is given by physics: "in the phenomenological description one has to abstain from making any claims concerning the actual reality of the object; all questions concerning actual reality have to be bracketed, set aside, left unanswered. For instance, I might accurately describe a present experience as one of seeing a round tower out there. If, later on, it should turn out that the tower in question was actually square, or that in actual reality there was no tower there (that I had been having a hallucination), my previous description would still remain a true phenomenological description" (Kung, in Elliston & McCormick).

As Husserl described it:

Nor is the transcendental attitude a matter of attempting what positivism demands: of "excluding all prejudices that cloud the pure objectivity of research... about the value of which there is, indeed, no question." On the contrary, Husserl explains: "What we demand lies in another direction. The whole prediscovered world posited in the natural attitude, actually found in experience and taken with perfect ‘freedom from theories’ as it is actually experienced, as it clearly shows itself in the concatenations of experience, is now without validity for us; without being tested and also without being contested, it shall be parenthesized. In like manner all theories and sciences which relate to this world, no matter how well they may be grounded positivistically or otherwise, shall meet the same fate."

As Husserl saw it, the use of the epoché and description of objects from the special attitude of transcendental subjectivity, meant that "phenomenology is, in fact, a purely descriptive discipline, exploring the field of transcendentally pure consciousness by pure intuition." It excluded, Husserl believed, all the social, practical, cultural factors that he felt interfered with our ability to be objective about the formal structure of our human reality:

There are some very serious problems with Husserl’s project. In its general form, Husserl’s project was Cartesian in its attempt to ground knowledge claims in an indubitable foundation. Descartes used the "method of doubt" in order to do this, doubting all sensory experience and so coming to build his reconstruction of knowledge on the cogito ("I think, therefore I am"). Unlike Descartes, Husserl didn’t abandon all sensory experience, just the notion that the senses tell us about objects that really exist as we experience them. "Husserl’s doubt is steadily focussed: it is aimed at eliminating all ideas related to the existence of objects our consciousness tells us about; to be exact -- the existence of objects apart from, and independently of, their presence in our consciousness" (Bauman, p. 118). But nonetheless, Husserl’s aim, like Descartes’, was to achieve an ultimate, final, objectivity -- pure consciousness. In the phenomenological method, consciousness was to cut itself off from its historical and social entanglements. Consciousness thus "liberated from the world will be capable of grasping the true meaning; not the contingent meaning, meaning as it happens to be -- but meaning in its true, necessary, essence" (Bauman, p. 111). Husserl’s was an attempt to "purify the process of understanding from those germs of relativism which are brought to it by its contact with history and the psychic worlds of historically limited actors" (p. 111).

But would there really be anything left to talk about if the transcendental attitude were achieved? Even if it were, how would these findings be communicated to others? Would people care? Knowledge as Husserl viewed it seems inherently solipsistic: it provides no access to intersubjective meanings and experiences. If the "natural attitude" is as oblivious to critique and questioning as Husserl thought it, noone would have any interest in the results of his transcendental phenomenology. "What is epoche, what is the whole series of phenomenological reductions, if not an effort to peel away successive layers of content, to arrive at the end at the tough nucleus which is explicable only from itself, and not reducible any more to either tradition, or culture, or society? But how do we know that such a nucleus exists? What kind of evidence can we ever get that it does?" (Bauman, p. 121).

Husserl himself was aware of some of these problems, and he repeatedly announced fresh attempts to start all over again on the path to pure consciousness. But this pure consciousness is separated from the natural context of communication, of discourse, of social interaction with others, and misunderstanding, and the consequent search for genuine understanding, arise in the mundane world of everyday life. Husserl asked us to abandon that world. Ultimately, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology amounted to a dubious search for truly eternal truths, conceived in highly elitist terms -- ordinary people cannot contribute anything.

Nonetheless, Husserl’s work can be learned from. He pointed out the organized character of experience (the distinctions between act of awareness and object of awareness; between figure and ground, between inner horizon and outer horizon), and the complexity and immensity of each domain of experience. He drew people’s attention to the life-world: to the complex structures within which we encounter objects in everyday life, even though he himself had difficulty figuring out how to deal with this region. Both the sciences and philosophy have generally ignored the phenomenon of "world," and talked simply of the universe of all objects rather than the world in which these objects have their position. Husserl pointed out the taken-for-granted character of this world, though he was perhaps overly pessimistic about the naivite of the "natural attitude." He also pointed out the constituted character of the life-world; the fact that it could be otherwise; though his claim that the constituting is done by a transcendental subjectivity is difficult to comprehend. And Husserl also provided, unwittingly of course, a convincing demonstration that the search for absolute knowledge must fail. When Husserl viewed genuine knowledge as necessarily context-free and uncommitted, as abstract and detached, he was simply following the traditional line in philosophy and science, but he took this line to its logical extension and showed its impossibility. As Bauman puts it: "We can now be sure that there is nothing at the end of the road which -- as Husserl hoped and we, tentatively, hoped with him -- led to the station called certainty" (p. 129).

Not all these lessons were immediately drawn from Husserl’s work, however. Indeed, some qualitative researchers still search for eidetic structures, by that or a similar name (e.g. Giorgi, and other members of the Duquesne school).

2.  Phenomenology of the Social World:  Alfred Schutz (1899 - 1959)

Alfred Schutz modified the phenomenological project to take account of some of the problems we have noted. Schutz was born in Austria, where he had contact with Husserl (though sociologist Weber was his first influence), but as a refugee from the second world war he came to America and, teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York, he discovered themes in American philosophy with affinities to continental work (James, Mead, Dewey) and taught sociologists such as Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger (see below). He also communicated with and commented on the work of Nagel, Hempel and other empirical-analytic philosophers of science.

Like Husserl, Schutz undertook an "objective study of subjective meaning." But unlike Husserl, Schutz’s goal was to obtain organized knowledge of the everyday life-world. The kind of knowledge he sought was not knowledge of its empirical regularities, as are described by the naturalistic, empirical-analytic social science that just assumes and takes for granted the reality of the life-world, but knowledge of the way the life world is constutited and maintained by human activity, and especially the ways in which it is an intersubjective world: "how actors in their common-sense thinking interpret their own actions and the actions of others" (Bernstein, 138).

As Bernstein describes it, "to understand human action we must not take the position of an outside observer who ‘sees’ only the physical manifestation of these acts; rather we must develop categories for understanding what the actor -- from his own point of view -- ‘means’ in his actions. Verstehen [German: understanding] according to Schutz, is first of all the name of a complex process by which all of us in our everyday life interpret the meaning of our own actions and those of others with whom we interact" (p. 138-139).

Schutz employed the phenomenological method to understand everyday social phenomena like human action. Action, as Schutz saw it, is a spontaneous activity oriented to the future. The span and unity of an action is determined by the project of which it is part. An act is the product of a completed action; what is projected in action is the completed act, the goal of the action. One isn’t just "walking towards the window" (let alone just "putting one foot in front of the other"), one is "going to open the window." Schutz called the projected future act of an action the "in-order-to motive" for the action. This was the action’s subjective meaning. That is to say, the meaning of any action is its corresponding projected act. The goal of the action defines, is constitutive of, its meaning, and is a necessary part of any description of action. When it comes to scientific explanation of social phenomena, the "in-order-to motive" explains the act in terms of the project to which it was the goal, while the "because-motive" explains the project in terms of the actor’s past experiences. The former has been neglected, but both are necessary. The two types of explanation are quire differemt (in terms of what and how they explain), but they are interdependent: in particular, we need to obtain the "in-order-to motive" if we are to grasp the project see we can try to figure out the "because-motive."

Schutz noted that our social world comprises multiple realities, or "finite provinces of meaning." Primary among these is the intersubjective world of everyday life, the "world of the natural attitude with its dominant pragmatic motives," but there are many others: the worlds of dreams, of fantasy, of science, of religion. Each province has its distinct style of lived experience or cognitive style, a distinct accent to reality, distinct structures and spatial and temporal relations, and its own systems of relevance and schemes of interpretation. We "leap" among these worlds. The "world of scientific theory" is itself one of these multiple realities. The natural attitude involves its own kind of epoché: "Individuals suspend doubt, not belief, in the Lebenswelt."

Schutz proposed that the interpretive schemes with which we understand our ongong experiences are social and intersubjective, not strictly personal and subjective. He had problems, however, in describing exactly how this was so. This problem was related to his uncertainty over whether the social world was the product of the actions and hence the subjective intentions of actors, or whether (vice versa) the social world somehow shaped people’s goals and intentions. (This debate continues: Anthony Giddens calls it the problem of double structuring.) Nonetheless Schutz described in some detail how face-to-face interaction is central in everyday life, how it has a structure different from other forms of social interaction, and how typification is an essential part of all social relations.

Schutz contrasted the phenomenological "subjectivist" approach with both the "objectivist" behaviorism of his time, and also with a different objectivism, one "which accepts naively the social world with all the alter egos and institutions in it as a meaningful universe, meaningful namely for the observer whose only scientific task consists in describing and explaining his and his co-workers’ experiences of it." On this account,

Despite these remaining difficulties, Schutz’ work contributed more pieces to the puzzle of how to study social phenomena. He articulated clearly the necessity of refering in any description of action and of the social world to the subjective meaning of that action, even though he located this meaning rather narrowly in the end or goal of action. He articulated the way any study of the social world deals in "second level constructs": interpretations of interpretations. He pointed out how the world of everyday life is a world of routine, and that meaning becomes apparent only retrospectively (cf. Bernstein, p. 143). His emphasis on the complexly structured world (his last work was titled "Structures of the Life-World"), and on the way this was a constituted world, were important, even though in his view this world is constituted still by the consciousness of the individual ego: that is to say, constituted as known, as perceived. His emphasis on face-to-face encounter, on social types and typified behavior patterns, and on the multiple character of reality have influenced subsequent researchers.

3.  The Social Construction of Reality: Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann

In 1966 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann published an influential book titled "The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge." Acknowledging that they owed much to Schutz, they explained that "[t]he basic contentions of the argument of this book are implicit in its title and subtitle, namely, that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyze the processes in which this occurs." As was the case for Husserl and Schutz, the reality to be considered and analyzed by Berger and Luckmann was not, however, the reality described either by the natural sciences or by the social sciences as they are usually practiced: it was to be the reality of everyday life, experienced in "the commonsense of the ordinary members of society." "It will be enough, for our purposes, to define ‘reality’ as a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot ‘wish them away’), and to define ‘knowledge’ as the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics" (p. 1). Berger and Luckmann stressed that "the sociological understanding of ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ falls somewhere in the middle between that of the man in the street and that of the philosopher" (p. 2). The sociologist cannot take reality for granted, in part because she knows different people inhabit different realities; the philosopher is aiming to distinguish a genuine underlying reality.

As the term "sociology of knowledge" indicates, Berger and Luckmann saw "reality" as a matter of knowledge, but they included "everything that passes for ‘knowledge’ in society": commonsense knowledge not just ‘ideas.’ "Only a few are concerned with the theoretical interpretation of the world, but everybody lives in a world of some sort" (p. 15). They thus moved far from the elitism of Husserl’s transcendental attitude, though still engaging in a bracketing of commonsense interpretations about everyday reality. "The method we consider best suited to clarify the foundations of knowledge in everyday life is that of phenomenological analysis, a purely descriptive method and, as such, ‘empirical’ but not ‘scientific’ -- as we understand the nature of the empirical sciences. The phenomenological analysis of everyday life, or rather of the subjective experience of everyday life, refrains from any causal or genetic hypotheses, as well as from assertions about the ontological status of the phenomenon analyzed" (p. 20).

For Berger and Luckmann sociology is still a science (and for them this meant that it could still be "value-free"), but it is a science that deals with "man as man" [sic]; it is a humanistic discipline; "...sociology must be carried on in a continuous conversation with both history and philosophy or lose its proper object of inquiry. This object is society as part of a human world, made by men, inhabited by men, and, in turn, making men, in an ongoing historical process. It is not the least fruit of a humanistic sociology that it reawakens our wonder at this astonishing phenomenon" (p. 189).

As seen by Berger and Luckmann, sociology must move in and out of the phenomenological attitude, and this is reflected in the organization of their book. "Thus some problems are viewed within phenomenological brackets in Section I [The Foundations of Knowledge in Everyday Life], taken up again in Section II [Society as Objective Reality] with these brackets removed and with an interest in their empirical genesis, and then taken up once more in Section III [Society as Subjective Reality] on the level of subjective consciousness" (p. vi). Their task was "a sociological analysis of the reality of everyday life, more precisely, of knowledge that guides conduct in everyday life" (p. 19). Society exists as both objective and subjective reality, and an adequate sociology must grasp both aspects. "[T]hese aspects receive their proper recognition if society is understood in terms of an ongoing dialectical process composed of the three moments of externalization, objectivation, and internalization" (p. 129).

Like Schutz, Berger and Luckmann emphasized the existence of different spheres of reality. Among these multiple realities the reality of everyday life is "reality par excellence," and is experienced in a wide-awake state with the highest tension of consciousness. Here most clearly the world appears already objectified, full of objects defined as objects "before I arrive on the scene." It is taken for granted, the world of "here" and "now," an intersubjective world I share with others. Generally it is routine and unproblematic, and problems are quickly integrated into the unproblematic. Other people are experienced in several different modes: in the prototypical case of face-to-face encounters; and in a continuum of progressively anonymous contacts apprehended by means of "typificatory schemes" (as "an ingratiating fellow," "a salesman," "an American").

Everyday life is dominated by the pragmatic motive, and so recipe knowledge -- "that is, knowledge limited to pragmatic competence in routine performances" -- is prominent in the social stock of knowledge. People’s knowledge in everyday life is structured in terms of relevances: "It is irrelevant to me how my wife goes about cooking my favorite goulash as long as it turns out the way I like it" (p. 45). And "my relevance structures intersect with the relevance structures of others at many points, as a result of which we have ‘interesting’ things to say to each other" (p. 45). Knowledge is socially distributed -- different people have different kinds of expertize -- and knowledge of how it is distributed is an important part of that stock of knowledge.

Berger and Luckmann took on directly the problem of the constitution of the social world, and remarked on the transfer of this problem from philosophy to the social sciences:

4.  Ethnomethodology: Harold Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel is responsible for another varient of phenomenology: "ethnomethodology." Here sociology is taken to perhaps its most reflexive extreme, as any attempt to translate the situated events of the social world into a neutral and objective scientific terminology is abandoned as "unrealizably programmatic." Ethno-method-ology refers to the study (logos) of the methods that folk (ethnos) employ in their commonsense everyday activity in performing the task of living.

In their edited collection on "Understanding and Social Inquiry," Fred Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy were able to say in 1977 that "[a]mong the offshoots of phenomenological sociology, ethnomethodology enjoys the widest attention today. The central aim of this type of inquiry is to elucidate the arena of commonsense experience and to ‘understand’ life-world situations as perceived by concrete social actors or participants" (Dallmayr & McCarthy, 1977, p. 222). As Garfinkel described it, in 1967, ethnomethodology seeks "to treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually accorded extraordinary events, seeks to learn about them as phenomena in their own right. [Our] central recommendation is that the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with member’s procedures for making these settings ‘account-able.’" (Garfinkel, 1967/1977, p. 240).

Notice here that "practical sociological reasoning" is placed on the same level as other everyday practical activities. The sociologist does not have a special status; sociological accounts are on a continuum with all the other kinds of accounts that are a continual accomplishment of everyday life. Giving accounts -- accounting -- is an endless process, too: there is no final point at which an exhaustive, objective accounting has been completed.

Anthony Giddens (1977) distinguishes five theses at work in "ethmeth" (as it came to be known by friends and foes alike). This first of these is its focus on agency: "the thesis that society is a skilled accomplishment of actors, and this is true of even the most trivial social encounter." As viewed by ethnomethodologists, people’s social conduct is improvisatory: like good jazz, it is skillfully made up on the spot from available materials, rather than following prescribed rules laid down in advance (cf. David’s Sudnow’s phenomenological account of piano playing, Sudnow, 1974). Second is reflexivity: action is "bound up with the capacity of human agents for self-reflection, for the rational ‘monitoring’ of their own conduct." Often this reflexivity is treated by social scientists as a nuisance; ethmeth sees it as a central part of everyday life, and in doing so sees a continuity between sociological activity and other everyday activity, as we noted above. Third, language "is conceived, not simply as a set of symbols or signs, as a mode of representing things, but as a ‘medium of practical activity’, a mode of doing things." Ordinary language and its ‘ambiguity’ cannot be ignored or replaced by a scientific language that is ‘more precise.’ "[T]o study a form of life involves grasping lay modes of talk which express that form of life." Fourth is "the theme of the temporal and contextual locating of action.... In ethnomethodology... the locating of interaction in time becomes of central interest. In the conduct of a conversation, for example, it is pointed out that participants typically use the conversation reflexively to characterize ‘what has been said’, and also anticipate its future course to characterize ‘what is being said’." Fifth is the theme of tacit or ‘taken for granted understandings.’ "In the active constitution of interaction as a skilled performance, the ‘silences’ are as important as the words that are uttered, and indeed make up the necessary background of mutual knowledge in terms of which utterances ‘make sense’ or, rather, sense is made of them. Tacit understandings are drawn upon by actors as ordinary, but unexplicated, conditions of social interaction" (Giddens, 1977, p. 167-169).

Like Schutz, Garfinkel is interested in the mundane reality that Husserl believed should be bracketed. But despite this and other continuities with Schutz and with Berger and Luckmann, Garfinkel has abandoned the notion that the researcher can and should adopt the stance of the external observer of the social world. In the multiplicity of life-worlds the life-world of sociology is one among many, with no special claim to knowledge. On the contrary, "knowledge" and "rationality" are themselves practical social accomplishments: people construct reality in and by means of their social interaction, and at the same time, and as parts of this reality, they construct accounts that are taken as rational and objective by their fellow participants. Knowledge-claims are part of mundane reality, and they are constructed and understood by people engaged in concrete practical tasks. Abstractions are simply part of a particular, peculiar, kind of discourse: academic discourse, in particular.

Garfinkel’s attention is not so much on what is being said when people interact together, but on how it is said. In this respect the question of genesis has taken priority over questions of structure. Where Schutz and Berger and Luckmann were most interested in elucidating the "basic elements" of the "social stock of knowledge," and paid little attention to the cutting edge of social life, where new elements were presumably being added to this stock, ethnomethodology focuses all its attention on the "methods" through which meanings are produced in practice.

Problems remain, however. First, the term "ethno-" in ethnomethodology is misleading, insofar as this is a general sociology that pays little attention if any to cultural differences. This follows from the fact that ethnomethodology can be accused of being, as William Mayrl (1973) has put it, a "sociology without society." For Garfinkel, detachment from the mundane tasks of everyday life is impossible, and one consequence of this is that any sense of the social whole, of the larger-scale structure of society, is impossible. How could one know it? Society, and larger-scale social organizations such as ethnic cultures and sub-cultures, are at least ineffable, perhaps an illusion. Ethnomethodology talks of the production of society, but much less of the reproduction of social structures in which actors find themselves.

Giddens notes several additional problems. First, the focus on ways in which a meaningful social world is achieved in everyday social interaction excludes attention to the meshings and conflicts of interest among actors. Actors’ particular goals and motives are lost when attention is paid only to their shared methods of accomplishment. Second, no attention is paid to power, as "a matter of what makes some ‘accounts’ count." Third, the focus on ‘common sense’ as mutual knowledge providing necessary resources for everyday life is such as to preclude the possibility of any critique of what is taken as common sense (Giddens, 1977, p. 175-177).

5.  Out of the phenomenological trees and into the phenomenological wood

Let’s try now to step back and get a sense of the bigger picture. What has phenomenology contributed to research conducted within the interpretive paradigm? How has it helped define the interpretive paradigm?

Phenomenology contributes an approach to the analysis of phenomena quite different from that used in the empirical-analytic paradigm. The latter seeks to describe and explain relationships between independent entities: scores; variables. When it considers more than one element it does so by aggregation. Phenomenology views phenomena instead as structured wholes: as complexes where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and where parts can only be identified and described given some sense of the whole. The visual metaphor of figure/ground; focus/horizon is one form of this: the visual field is a structured whole, within which parts stand out only through their relation to the whole. The text metaphor we have explored in class is another form: the parts of a narrative (different kinds of agent; trouble; goal; etc.) can only be identified given a familiarity with the whole that defines them (the plot; the theme).

Phenomenology also contributes a view of the human subject quite different from that assumed in the empirical-analytic paradigm. That paradigm operates within the natural attitude: people are assumed to be simply one kind of material entity in a universe made up of different kinds of material entities. They are a special kind of entity in so far as they can obtain knowledge about the other material entities, in the form of beliefs, desires, opinions, facts, etc. From the phenomenology perspective, this account ignores the ways that the world is constituted by people. We have seen that different phenomenologists have viewed constitution differently: they have differed on whether it happens on a very high mental plane (Husserl), or on the very concrete level of material practice (Garfinkel). They have differed on whether constutition is an individual (Husserl) or a social (Garfinkel) matter. In general the historical movement in phenomenological writing, as we have described here, has been towards the view that people constitute the world in their concrete, material practice.

This notion takes some getting used to. We generally find ourselves falling back into the "natural attitude" that the world is just "there" all around us. What on earth does "constitution" mean? It may help to think about a game like chess. (Charles Taylor explores this analogy.) If chess could be viewed strictly objectively, presumably we would see only a piece of wood or card with black and white squares on it, together with a bunch of wooden or plastic objects placed upon it. (Taylor calls this "brute data description." Arguably even this requires human judgement and a human community, and so is not objective in the empirical-analytic sense, but let’s leave this aside for now.) But these don’t tell us anything about chess. Nor do the opinions, attitudes or beliefs that people have about chess: that it is hard, for instance, or that one particular opening gambit is the strongest. What we need to know if we are to understand chess are the constitutive rules that make chess what it is. These rules define the pieces and their legal moves. These are not "regulative" rules, applying to behavior that would exist whether or not the rules existed. They are constitutive of the game: without them, the whole range of activity we call chess playing would not exist.

People can of course tell us about these rules, but that doesn’t mean that the rules are just personal or subjective beliefs and opinions. The constitutive rules of chess are intersubjective rules; they are the common property of the community of chess-players. In Taylor’s terms, they are "constitutive of the social matrix in which individuals find themselves."

Phenomenology suggests that what is true of chess is true of the rest of our social world, too. Where chess has rules, the rest of life is less explicit and formal, but it is constituted none the less. The resources and "methods" that people draw upon are not ones they can simply tell us about, as they can tell us the rules of chess. We have to infer them, either from observing people using them in actual, concrete, practical situations, or by asking people to describe such situations to them. From their narratives and arguments, we can infer the cultural categories which constitute the phenomenon they are describing.

Interpretive research assumes that even the description of a phenomenon must take into account the fact that it is already understood by the people who are involved in it. This pre-interpretation is where the cultural categories come in. A full description of a chess game must include the way that game is understood in terms of the constitutive rules of chess: we would never think of describing a game in terms of wood and cardboard. A full description of a classroom discussion, for instance, must include the way that discussion is understood in terms of the constitutive cultural categories that teacher and students bring to that discussion. As researchers, we need to approach a phenomenon like a classroom discussion as though it is an example of a game we are not familiar with; our task is to discover the categories, the terms and norms, by means of which that discussion was constituted, as a "situated practical accomplishment" in Garfinkel’s terms, by those people who participated in it.
 

Works cited and additional resources:

© Martin Packer 1999