ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what phenomenological sociology can tell us about everyday life. In particular the author will be engaging with the work of Alfred Schutz and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. This is a tradition that refuses to take everyday life for granted. It insists that if we begin with pre-defined categories, such as class struggle or the unconscious, we will only theorize about the everyday. Therefore to understand everyday life we have to strip it down to its basic human constructedness and see it as a human product, or, more precisely, an ongoing human production. According to phenomenological sociology to fully understand everyday life we need to recognize that it exists simultaneously in an ongoing dialectical process of the three moments of externalization, objectivations and internalization. In conclusion, then, phenomenological sociology seeks to show how everyday life is a human construct that each individual confronts at birth as a taken-for-granted realm of routine.
