PHENOMENOLOGY
Read: Appelrouth & Edles 553-578
Phenomenology - A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness.
Berger and Luckmann’s famous assertion that “society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product.”
From Fehlen and Plessner, Berger and Luckmann borrow the idea that humans, unlike other animals, are “instinctually deprived” or biology underdeveloped. Important organismic developments that take place in the womb in other animals take place in humans’ first year of life. This means not only the survival of the human infant is dependent on certain social arrangements, but that lacking an instinctual basis for action, human beings have to create a world that ensures social stability. Common-sense knowledge and social institutions compensate for biological underdevelopment. They provide a “base” that operates “automatically” (analogous to the instincts that guide other animals’ behavior). “Commonsense knowledge is the knowledge that I share with others in the normal, self-evident routines of everyday life.” It is what allows us to perceive the reality of everyday life as “reality,” to suspend our doubts so that we can act in the world. Social institutions are the bridges between humans and their physical environments. Following Schutz, Berger and Luckmann emphasize that it is the intersubjective character of common-sense knowledge that enables human institutions and culture to produce stability. It is because “most of the time, my encounters with others in everyday life are typical in a double sense—I apprehend the other as a type and I interact with him in a situation that is itself typical” that social interaction is successful. Without intersubjectivity—that you know that I know that we both know—social order and interaction would break down, as we would be left to doubt the most fundamental aspects of communication (554-5).
Luckmann’s first major sole-authored publication, The Invisible Religion (original title Das problem der Religion, 1963). Did not appear in English until the year after the publication of Berger and Luckmann’s groundbreaking The Social Construction of Reality (1966), and he never became quite as well known in the United States as either his teacher, Alfred Schutz, or his collaborator, Peter Berger. Luckmann’s “unequal” relationship with Schutz is duly noted by Luckmann himself in the preface to The Structures of the Life World (Schutz and Luckmann 1973), which he finished editing after Schutz’s death (554).
Berger was a fervent student of religion. He continuously contemplated his own Christian beliefs and spent a “very happy” year at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he studied to be a minister. Indeed, Berger is just as well known for his work in the sociology of religion as in phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge. His now-classic Invitation to Sociology (1963) continues to be one of the most acclaimed and inspiring introductions to the discipline of sociology today (553).
habitualization - the process by which the flexibility of human actions is limited. All activity is subject to habitualization, as repeated actions inevitably become rountinized. Habitualization carries with it the psychological advantage that choices are narrowed. Hat an action may be “performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort” provides a stable back-ground from which human activity can proceed. In other words, from the time we wake up in the morning until we go to bed at night, we can direct our minds and bodies to constructive action only because we take most actions for granted (555).
habitualization actions set the stage for institutionalization, for “institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized action by types of actors.” That is, it is when habitualized action are shared and/or “available to all members of the particular social group” that institutions are born. Akin to habits that function at the level of the individual, then, institutions are not created instantaneously, but rather are “built up in the course of a shared history. In other words, over times, shared habitualized actions become institutions that are taken for granted and therefore limiting for the individuals who are subject to them. Thus, it is through institutions that human life becomes coherent, meaningful, and continuous (555).
Berger and Luckmann use the terms externalization, objectivation, and reification to refer to the process by which human activity and society attain the character of objectivity. Externalization and objectivation enable the actor to confront the social world as something outside herself. Institutions appear external to the individual, as historical and objective facticities. They confront the individual as undeniable facts. Reification is “an extreme step” in process of objectivation. In reification, “the real relationship between man and his world is reversed in consciousness. Man, the producer of a world, is apprehended as its product, and human activity as an epiphenome-non of non-human process.” That is, reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were “non-human or possibly suprahuman” things. For instance, we reify our social roles in such a way that we say, “I have no choice in the matter. I have to act this way.” That is what Berger refers to as “bad faith.” Of course, history is full of examples of the horrendous consequences that ensue from such reification. The Nazi concentration camps relied on guards who are said to have merely “taken orders.” A parallel also can be drawn with the recent example of torture in the Abu Ghraib prison (556).
internalization – is “the immediate apprehension or interpretation of an objective event as expressing meaning,” that is, the process through which individual subjectivity is attained. Internalization means that “the objectivated social world is retrojected into consciousness in the course of socialization.” As such, internalization is the “beginning point” in the process of becoming a member of society, as well as the “end point” in institutionalization. The three moment s of externalization, objectivation, and internalization are not to be understood “as occurring in a temporal sequence,” but rather as a simultaneous, dialectical process. Nevertheless, it is in intergenerational transmission that the process of internalization is complete. As Berger and Luckmann maintain:
only with the transmission of the social world to a new generation (that is, internalization as effectuated in socialization) does the fundamental social dialectic appear in its totality. To repeat, only with the appearance of a new generation can one properly speak of a social world.
In other words, every individual is born into an environment within which she encounters the significant others who are in charge of her socialization. One does not choose one’s own significant others; rather, they are imposed on her. In the process of socialization, the stocks of knowledge that the individual experiences as preexisting objective reality are imposed on her. The individual is thereby “born into not only an objective social structure but also an objective social world (558).”
Berger and Luckmann differentiate two types of socialization based on the extent to which individuals are active and conscious of the process of internalization. Primary socialization refers to “the first socialization an individual undergoes in childhood, through which he becomes a member of society.” On the other hand, secondary socialization refers to subsequent processes of socialization that induct “an already socialized individual into new sectors of the objective world of this society.” Whereas primary socialization is predefined and taken for granted, secondary socialization is acquired in a more conscious way. It is for this reason that primary socialization has so much more of an impact on the individual than secondary socialization. As Berger and Luckmann state:
The child does not internalize the world of his significant others as one of many possible worlds. He internalized it as the world, the only existent and only conceivable world, the world tout court. It is for this reason that the world internalized in primary socialization is so much more firmly entrenched in consciousness than worlds internalized in secondary socialization.
Furthermore, primary socialization is distinguished by the fact that it cannot take place without an emotionally shared identification of the children with his significant others: you have to love your mother, but not your teacher. This distinction between the more intimate (primary) and less intimate (secondary) types of socialization recalls Schutz’s more abstract discussion of umwelt versus mitwelt relations. Each type of relationship is distinguished by a different level of intersubjectivity and typification. Primary socialization and significant others (essential to “we relations”) are far more central to the maintenance of “identity” than are secondary relationships/socialization (558).
http://www.cynthiagilligan.com/sociology/berger~luckman.doc
Edward Said
With the publication of Orientalism (1978), Said was catapulted to international academic fame. The book presented his ideas on Orientalism, the Western study of Eastern cultures. He contended that Orientalist scholarship was and continues to be inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of the work inherently politicized, servile to power, and therefore suspect. Grounding much of this thesis in his intimate knowledge of colonial literature such as the fiction Conrad, and in the post-structuralist theory of Foucault, Derrida and others, Said's Orientalism (1978) and other works proved pioneering in literary theory and criticism, and continue to influence that and several other fields in the humanities. Orientalism affected Middle Eastern studies in particular, transforming the way practitioners of the discipline describe and examine the Middle East. Said came to discuss and vigorously debate the issue of Orientalism with scholars in the fields of history and area studies, many of whom disagreed with his thesis, including most famously Bernard Lewis.
Immanuel Wallerstein
Wallerstein began as an expert of post-colonial African affairs, which he selected as the focus of his studies after an international youth conference in 1951, and which his publications were almost exclusively devoted to until the early 1970s, when he began to distinguish himself as a historian and theorist of the global capitalist economy on a macroscopic level. His early criticism of global capitalism and championship of "anti-systemic movements" have recently made him a gray eminence with the anti-globalization movement within and without the academic community, along with Noam Chomsky and Pierre Bourdieu.
Anthony Giddens
Giddens, the author of over 34 books and 200 articles, essays and reviews has contributed and written about most notable developments in the area of social sciences, with the exception of research design and methods. He has written commentaries on most leading schools and figures and has used most sociological paradigms in both micro and macrosociology. His writings range from abstract, metatheoretical problems to very direct and 'down-to-earth' textbooks for students. Finally, he is also known for his interdisciplinary approach: he has commented not only on the developments in sociology, but also in anthropology, archaeology, psychology, philosophy, history, linguistics, economics, social work and most recently, political science. In view of his knowledge and works, one may view much of his life's work as a form of 'grand synthesis' of sociological theory.
Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Michel Foucault
Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His work on power, and the relationships among power, knowledge, and discourse has been widely discussed. In the 1960s Foucault was associated with Structuralism, a movement from which he distanced himself. Foucault also rejected the post-structuralist and postmodernist labels to which he was often later attributed, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity rooted in Kant. Foucault is particularly influenced by the work of Nietzsche; his "genealogy of knowledge" is a direct allusion to Nietzsche's genealogy of morals.
Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic who is best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and of technological communication. His writing, although consistently interested in the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects — from consumerism to gender relations to the social understanding of history to journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.
Dorothy Smith
In recognition of her contributions in "transformation of sociology", and for extending boundaries of "feminist standpoint theory" to "include race, class, and gender", Dr. Smith received numerous awards from American Sociological Association, including the American Sociological Association's Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (1999) and the Jessie Bernard Award for Feminist Sociology (1993). In recognition of her scholarship, she also received two awards from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association: the Outstanding Contribution Award (1990) and the John Porter Award for her book "The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology." (1990).
Patricia Hill Collins
Collins draws on black women's experiences and voices to explain concepts that have been obscured institutionally, philosophically, and ideologically. Collins's interdisciplinary methodology employs a "both/and" analytical approach to domination and subordination. Collins rejects oppositional thought because "either/or thinking categorizes people, things, and ideas in terms of their differences from one another" which requires objectification and subordination.
C. Wright Mills
Mills is often seen as a "closet Marxist" because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress and attempt to keep Marxist traditions alive in social theory. Just as often, however, others argue that Mills more closely identified with the work of Max Weber, whom many sociologists interpret as an exemplar of sophisticated (and intellectually adequate) anti-Marxism and modern liberalism.
Jurgen Habermas
Habermas's works resonate within the traditions of Kant and the Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason, in part through discourse ethics. While Habermas has stated that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this he distances himself from the Frankfurt School, criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought, for excessive pessimism, misdirected radicalism and exaggerations.
Peter Berger
Berger was a fervent student of religion. He continuously contemplated his own Christian beliefs and spent a “very happy” year at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he studied to be a minister. Indeed, Berger is just as well known for his work in the sociology of religion as in phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge. His now-classic Invitation to Sociology (1963) continues to be one of the most acclaimed and inspiring introductions to the discipline of sociology today.
Thomas Luckman
Luckmann is a follower of the phenomenological school of sociology, established by the German-American scholar Alfred Schütz. In his works, he has developed a theory, known as social constructionism, which argues that all knowledge, including the most basic common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions.
Peter Blau
Blau's sociological specialty was in organizational and social structures, in particular bureaucracy. He produced theories with many applications within social phenomena, including upward mobility, occupational opportunity, heterogeneity, and how population structures can influence human behavior.
Erving Goffman
Goffman was at the forefront of important movements within sociology, for instance, doing ethnomethodology before the ethnomethodologist and exploring the central role of language in social life (the "linguistic turn") well ahead of most of his sociological brethren.
Robert K. Merton
Theories include - deviance, drug addiction, friendship formation, medical education, technology, media, and the history of science.