ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses phenomenology and sociology, and its particular implications in the field of the sociology of deviance. It presents deeper and more detailed articulation of philosophical problems and perspectives. The deviance perspective is an emergent orientation which draws from the radically different traditions of structural-functionalism, and symbolic interactionism. The boundaries of the interpretive field are apparently clearly predetermined by the terms ‘deviance’ and ‘control’. But the use of these sociological terms for defining the subject area presumes observers’ rules, known in common by observers, which state the conditions under which deviance and its control may be said to have occurred. The development of a sociology of everyday life, grounded in A. Schutz’s descriptions of the constitution of the natural attitude, has been commenced by the ethnomethodologists.
