ABSTRACT
The primary focus of phenomenologically based sociology has been, following Schutz and Husserl, an emphasis on the commonsense construction of everyday reality, rather than the analysis of specifically intellectual consciousnesses as entities separate from mundane everyday knowledge. Husserlian phenomenology in its distinction between 'natural' and 'eidetic' knowledge had produced a conception of knowledge as rooted wholly in the 'Lebenswelt' in which individuals relate to each other and share intersubjective meanings. Schutz's development of the anti-objectivism of Husserl's attack on science, directed to the realm of social reality, progressed in terms of a fusion of this approach with the Weberian methodology of verstehen. The generalized conception that knowledge is prior to values in respect of social order, which characterizes both the Peter Berger-Thomas Luckmann approach and the viewpoint of ethnomethodology, makes social actors into primarily cognition-centred individuals. The essentially derivative approach Berger and Luckmann take towards the sociology of knowledge is continued in their analysis of the internalization of social reality.
