ABSTRACT
The objectivist approach considers social reality as having its own intrinsic structure that the scientist must discover while staying absolutely impartial. Consequently, classification’s aim is to form classes that are as homogeneous as possible as regards the differences between each class. For subjectivists, classification in social research, like all typification, deals with intersubjective relationships; the origin of the knowledge produced by the scientific community is always the prescientific experience. It consists of joining – creatively and reflexively – elements drawn from prior knowledge to necessarily unexplored situations, thus making the world familiar. For social phenomenology, constructing types is linked to the social actors’ practical purposes: consequently, classifications are always provisional, incomplete and fuzzy, open to inductive revision to reflect contingencies and based on an examination of concrete situations.
