ABSTRACT
In terms of both the substantive themes brought under examination and the formal properties of the structures examined, professional and lay sociologist are in tacit agreement. The agreement indicates sociology’s profound embeddedness in and dependence upon the world of everyday life. Social-scientific investigation is itself an integral feature of the order of affairs transformed into a phenomenon by the reduction recommended in the notion of the occasioned corpus. The “givens” of professional inquiry, the fundamental availability of the social structures to study as such, are then coterminous with the “givens” of lay inquiry. The formal properties of the social world encountered under the attitude of everyday life are the formal properties that Durkheim attributed to the social structures that were to be sociology’s topic. This chapter offers several brief examples of the way in which the presuppositions of the attitude of everyday life are tacitly employed as resources of professional investigation.
