ABSTRACT
The foundation for much social science thinking on the everyday realities which people construct for themselves, and on the sense of naturalness with which these realities come to be invested, has been laid by the work of Alfred Scheutz. In a famous formulation (which is itself built on the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl) SCHUETZ (1964) posits that individuals regularly and habitually apprehend the world around them courtesy of a set of “background expectancies”, which typify their experience and make it comprehensible. However concrete, obvious, and natural the facts of an individual’s everyday life seem, these facts are already constructs. All thought, Schuetz claims, involves such constructs, along with rules concerning how thinking with those constructs should properly proceed: abstractions, idealizations, generalizations, and formalizations thus always intercede between human beings and the world, pre-selecting and pre-interpreting it for us. These background expectancies are taught and learnt from birth, thereby also becoming intersubjective norms shared by members of a sociocultural milieu: not only socially derived, they are also socially approved, controlled, maintained, and institutionalized. Indeed, Schuetz suggests that group membership should be analytically conceived of in terms of its members’ sharing of a set of common background expectancies by which the world is properly to be typified and known.
