ABSTRACT
Sociological phenomenology is rapidly emerging from the present crisis in the sociology of education as the new orthodoxy. The approach advocated in this chapter requires an awareness of the crucial issues involved without advocating premature commitment to either side of the debate. The thrust of the main argument of the chapter depends upon the view that phenomenological sociology is primarily concerned with a social-psychological and not a sociological problematic. Sociologists, unfortunately, frequently fail to articulate the basic psychological assumptions and theories on which their sociological formulations depend. The psychological problematic has been resolved through a systematic sociological reductivism. Sociological phenomenology offers one such solution. It seems, however, that far from overcoming these dualisms and dichotomies, its solution lies firmly within the idealist tradition. To use the term sociological phenomenology does not necessarily imply that the authors accept that sociological phenomenology necessarily derives from or is consistent with the phenomenological tradition in German philosophy.
