ABSTRACT
Alfred Schutz wrote his The Phenomenology of the Social World in Vienna, before fleeing Hitler’s Anschluss and coming to the United States in 1939, where he spent the next twenty years extending his philosophical work into such areas as semiotics, multiple realities, and assorted philosophical questions. In his The Phenomenology of the Social World, he initially employs the phenomenological reduction to become clear about internal time-consciousness of any actor, even though he dispenses with the reduction as he proceeds to examine social interaction and its structures. The essential features of action consist in typifications, relevances, motivations, and temporality. While the idealization of the reciprocity of motives serves as a prototype of all social relationships, typifications, central to Schutz’s theory of action, also make it clear how social relationships pervade action. Although Schutz’s general account of action is most applicable for everyday life, there are other types of action that can be found within what he calls various provinces of meaning.
