Alfred Schutz and the Sociology of Common-sense Knowledge

This chapter describes Alfred Schutz's treatment of the interest-knowledge relation in the everyday world. In a skeletal sense, the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the relationship between interests, broadly conceived, and “mental products,” or knowledge. In puzzling out the relation between interests and the everyday knowledge that structures people actions or interactions, Schutz has developed a sociology of common-sense knowledge that involves a complete reconstruction of the sociological framework, from its philosophical assumptions to suggestions for sociological investigations. Schutz’s concern differs radically from that of earlier sociologists of knowledge in that they usually focused on particular, organized regions of social life, such as “the Chinese literati,” “the intelligentsia,” or “university.” This is as true of Schutz as it is of such macrosociologists as Marx and Durkheim. Even Durkheim, working in a different direction, ended his development with a study of the highly abstract Kantian categories

Common sense · Epistemology · Social science · Sociology · Sociology of knowledge · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · German Social Sciences and History · Philosophy

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