ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about Thirty theses on epistemology and method in sociology. W. I. Thomas suggested that sociology was concerned, not with simple objective facts, but with the actor's 'definition of the situation'. Alfred Schutz has suggested that the main focus of the human studies should be on 'the phenomenology of everyday life'. Sociology is an odd historical fact at this point in history that the same sociologists who support labelling theory in criminology also insist upon materialist and objectivist perspectives in the sociology of politics. The epistemological problem of the sociologist is only understood if it is recognized that what the sociologist seeks to study as his most elementary unit are social relations. One of the difficulties about phenomenologically oriented sociology is that it tends to talk about the understandings which are presupposed in social interaction, without talking about the social interaction itself.
