School of Psychology
In partnership with the Family Centre
Lower Hutt, Wellington, and the Taos Institute

Post-Graduate Diploma in Discursive Therapies
M.Phil in Psychology

Alfred Schutz

Alfred Schutz was born in Vienna in 1899. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, and then studied law and social science in Vienna. He worked in financial positions in the banking sector, and emigrated to the USA in 1938, arriving there in 1939. He joined what was to become the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, and simultaneously with his academic position resumed a full-time career in the financial sector. He died in 1959.

It is not our intention here to provide a definitive outline of Schutz' work. Neither are we going to be concerned with detailing the minutuae of his thinking. Our concern is with the broad sweep and thrust of his work, and within that we have again been selective, since the broad sweep of his work was in fact to pursue the establishment of a coherent science of sociology in its full extent, a concern which goes beyond ours. Drawing from the phenomenology of Husserl, Schutz' standpoint was firmly located within the conscious experience of the individual, since the individual human is the spatio-temporal point at which conscious experience is to be found.

His overall standpoint shares a deal in common with George Herbert Mead's (whom we will encounter later in this course), as Schutz himself acknowledged. That is, both of them were concerned with making sense of peoples' actions from an 'insider's perspective'. The view was that individuals have particular perspectives upon the world that make sense of their experiences very much as 'their experiences'. The paramount questions were: 'How is this done'? 'What is it that enables people to make sense of their worlds'? 'How does this sense-making process operate, and what is it composed of'? We will approach Schutz' answers under three headings. The first concerns what we we might call 'cognitive issues' in that it deals with how a 'life-world' is constructed. The second concerns the nature of 'action' in the 'life-world'. And the third considers Schutz' more socially oriented views as to how relationships between the separate subjectivities that interact with each other to make up social groups can be analyzed.

Acting in the life-world: cognition

zones of things just taken for granted, blind beliefs, bare suppositions, mere guesswork, zones in which it will merely do to 'put one's trust'. And finally, there are regions of our complete ignorance (1952: 6)

In addition, the world also has an element of 'cognitive prestructurization' to it, in that while each individual constructs his or her own 'world' out of his or her own experience of it, this is done with the help of building blocks and methods that pre-exist any particular individual. Consequently, one of Schutz' goals is to analyse the interplay between an individual's efforts at making sense of the world and the cognitive prestructurization of the world itself. Not surprisingly, he considers:

the typifying medium par excellence by which socially derived knowledge is transmitted is the vocabulary and syntax of everyday language (1953: 9).

We could pursue his division of the tokens of meaning, following Husserl, into the categories of marks, indications, signs and symbols. But more relevant is Schutz' discussion of the way meaning is practically handled. What he points out is that language is much more than those linguistic elements that can be looked up in dictionaries, or formalizations of syntactic rules, important though these are. But the trouble with them is that while these aspects of language can be translated into another language (and thereby perhaps, in learning how to translate, make one aware for the first time of such things in one's own grasp of one's 'given' language), there is much more to language than this. These formal characteristics, along with bits of slang, transient connotations and the like, might be translatable, but a native grasp of a language is only accessible to members of the in-group. This is something that is

not teachable and cannot be learned in the same way as, for example, the vocabulary. In order to command a language freely as a scheme of expression, one must have written a love letter in it; one has to know how to pray and curse in it and how to say things with every shade appropriate to the addressee and the situation. Only members of the in-group have the scheme of expression as a genuine one in hand and command it freely within their thinking as usual (1953: 10).

Schutz makes this point concrete by considering the problems confronted by a 'stranger', 'the man who has to place in question nearly everything that seems to be unquestionable to the members of the approached group (1944: 502). The historical situation of the culture of the new group may be accessible to the stranger, but it is not a part of his or her biography: the stranger is a person without history in his or her new land, reliant on their own 'home base orientation, which not only no longer works, but in addition brings with it its own model of what this new society 'ought to be like' - an outsider's model that is often counter-productive while proving inadequate. Again, what one knows as an outsider is a subject of one's thought: what is now needed are the recipes for action: a major mismatch.

Now, there is no easy solution to this mismatch. First:

He who wants to use a map successfully has first of all to know his standpoint in two respects: its location on the ground and its representation on the map. ... This means that only members of the in-group, having a definite status in the hierarchy and also being aware of it, can use its cultural pattern as a natural and trustworthy scheme of orientation (1944: 504).

The final topic we will look at here is the motivational aspect of action. This relates to the fact that, in any situation, what is attended to, communicated, and understood is only a fraction of what could be noticed, acted on, etc. What, then are the things which make some things relevant and others not? On occasion some factors of the situation can impose themselves and their relevance on the actor. Other factors may be singled out by the actor, and these assume a kind of 'volitional' relevance. In his later work, Schutz (1966) distinguished, in addition to imposed and volitional relevances, another three forms: motivational, thematic, and interpretational.

Motivational relevance comes from the actor's interests at a particular time in a specific situation, and alert the actor to the particular elements of the situation which serve to define it in the light of the actors interests at hand. Motivational relevance can be imposed - things have to be paid attention to so as to deal with them - or volitional - and thus definitive of the situation at hand in terms of the actor's plans and intentions. If this is not the case, then these motivations must be suspended, and the situation becomes problematic. The actor has to turn from a potential actor to a potential problem solver. This requires defining the problem, and this requires a shift from action to investigation.

In these situations, Schutz talks of thematic motivation. The actor, instead of proceeding with his or her plans, must concentrate on investigating the situation: problem-solving takes priority over the original project. Interpretational relevance is an extension of this. The frustrating problem needs to be set in a wider context to appreciate its possible parameters (as grasped within the actors horizon). If the problem is 'simple' from the present position, its resolution can occur quickly, and action can be resumed. If it is difficult, then further reflection will be needed before action can be continued. The 'simplicity' of the problem is, however, not something that can be objectively defined. In certain circumstances, the actor can be positioned in the Now such that an almost obvious solution can escape his or her grasp.

The final topic Schutz considers concerning the way in which our worlds are made cognitively manageable is that of typification. The world does not present us with a problem of working out what every new encounter might be. Consciousness structures itself around a set of similarities that are evoked when we come across something 'new'.. Every encounter with the world is 'informed' by previous ones, and thus 'the factual world of our experience ... is experienced from the outset as a typical one' (1950: 388). Now while this whole issue is very much a stock in trade of traditional cognitive psychology, the phenomenolgical approach does not seek to reduce this phenomenon to some theoretical explanation, but to recognise its existence within conscious experience. What we find there is that

What has been experienced in the actual perception of one object is apperceptively [ie, spontaneously] transferred to any other similar object, perceived merely as to its type (1950: 389).

Claude Monet
French, 1840-1926
Water Lilies, c.1919-26
oil on canvas
78 3/4 x 167 3/4 inches
Gift of The Steinberg Charitable Fund 134:1956

Now, it may not immediately jump out at you, but it will next time you look at this picture, but this is not a pond of water lilies. It is in fact a representation of a duck, flying from right to left in the middle of the picture. The beak, head and neck are quite clear, and from there we see its wings take shape behind them. But then, when we look at the forepart of its wing, we suddenly notice a grotesque, pop-eyed face staring out at us. We can find these 'typifications' when we have been 'set up to', in this case by my words that have oriented you to them; or we may have brought some project to this situation that predisposes us to see these 'things'.

Similarly, such typifications enter into the organisation of our social lives.

What the sociologist calls 'system,' 'role,' 'status,' 'role expectation,' 'situation,' and 'institutionalization,' is experienced by the individual actor on the social scene in entirely different terms. To him, all the factors denoted by these concepts are elements of a network of typifications - typifications of human individuals, of their course-of-action patterns, of their motives and goals, or of the sociocultural products which originated in their actions. ... [Typifications] function as both a scheme of interpretation and as a scheme of orientation for each member of the in-group and constitutes therewith a universe of discourse among them (1959: 79).

Schutz, A. (1944) The stranger: An essay in social psychology. American Journal of Sociology 50: 499-507. CP Vol 2: 91-105.

Schutz, A. (1950) Language, language disturbances, and the texture of consciousness. Social Research 17: 365-94. CP Vol 1: pp 180-203.

Schutz, A. (1953) Common sense and scientific interpretation of human action. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 13: 1-37. CP Vol 1: pp., 3-47.

Schutz, A. (1957) Equality and the meaning structure of the social world. Originally in L. Bryson, C.H.Faust and L. Finkelstein (Eds) Aspects of human equality. New York: Harper and Brothers. CP Vol 2: 226-73

Schutz, A. (1959) Tiresias, or our knowledge of future events. Social Research 26: 71-89. CP Vol 2: 277-93.

Schutz, A. (1966) Some stuctures of the life world. CP Vol 3: 116-32