Overview
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ASSIGNMENT: Please respond to the 6 classmate’s discussion post.
Garrett Boggs:
I’ve been thinking about Schutz’s idea of the lifeworld and how it connects to typifications, and I don’t think he’s saying we can ever totally step outside of them. The lifeworld is just the world we move through every day, full of the assumptions that make things make sense. Typifications fit into that because they’re the patterns we use to figure people and situations out without starting from scratch each time. Schutz talks about bracketing, but it doesn’t sound like he means we can really escape the social world; instead, he suggests we can notice it more clearly. I'm confused what that actually looks like, though. Is bracketing just reflecting after something happens, or is there a way to catch myself doing it while I’m in the middle of everyday life? Maybe some simple examples could help me better understand this in detail.
Avery McWhirter:
Schutz (p. 327–328) says our everyday life is guided by a “stock of knowledge” we take for granted, but sometimes we pause and reflect. I have a question on when exactly does that shift from tacit knowledge to reflection happen, and how can we ever see something that is “never presented in concreto” (p. 328). I think most of the time we operate without thinking by using habits, shared understandings, and assumptions. When something surprises us, breaks expectations, or is unfamiliar, we stop and try to interpret our assumptions. That’s when reflection happens. But I’m pretty sure that even then, we only glimpse parts of our underlying assumptions, not the whole invisible stock.
What im confused on is on p. 328, the phrase “the underlying stock is never presented in concreto but rather … underlies the possibility of presenting, reflectively, concrete things” confuses me. If it’s never “presented in concreto,” how can we ever become aware of it to reflect? Is the boundary between tacit and reflective knowledge strict, or can something be partially tacit and partially conscious? Also, after I reflect and maybe change something, do these changes go back into the “stock”?
Haley Ruth:
One idea that stayed with me from Berger and Luckmann is how people build the world and then slowly forget that they built it. They call this process reification, when our own social creations begin to feel natural or inevitable (p. 356). I understand this conceptually, but I keep turning it over in my head and trying to picture what it looks like in everyday life. For example, at work I notice how scheduling systems or company hierarchies were obviously created by people, yet over time they start to seem unquestionable, almost like the “laws” of the job. When that happens, people forget that those systems were once choices, and they start defending them as if they were facts of nature.
If Berger and Luckmann are right that we tend to forget our own role in creating reality, where do you think this happens most clearly today? Why do you think some social worlds become so deeply reified that people stop recognizing them as human creations?
Nathan Savage:
This chapter on Phenomenology poses some interesting questions about what motivates people to participate in society and where they acquire the particular behaviors that we see and use in our daily interactions, in the eyes of Berger, Luckmann, and Schutz. The part that has struck me as the most interesting is typification. From my understanding, it is a partaking in a certain role based upon the surrounding factors of a person's lifeworld, or their cultural and personal influences. The part of The Social Construction of Reality that I honed in on was p. 350-351 which discusses typification in face-to-face interactions and the way that labels may be applied to people that we interact with so that we may determine how to proceed in an interaction. To bring this idea into the more modern times, how might this be applied to online interactions, such as social media, online multiplayer games, or our online discussions here on D2L?
In the words of Berger and Luckmann, I see these interactions as a more 'concrete' kind of interaction due to the weekly discussions that we have with each other. Of course, there is still a distance in the interaction due to it being online. On some social media, like Twitter or a YouTube comment section, there is usually more anonymity, and the typification of some people may be much broader than the typification we would assign each other as classmates. I suppose the question should also be asked if these conversations even fit into the 'face-to-face' conversations that Berger and Luckmann are talking about?
Applerouth, S., & Edles, L. D. (2016). Sociological theory in the contemporary era: Text and readings (3rd ed.). Sage Publications.
Calea Law:
What stood out most to me this week was how Alfred Schutz and Berger & Luckmann both uncover the hidden processes that make everyday life feel stable and “real.” Schutz’s idea of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) helped me understand that we live inside a shared world of meaning that we rarely stop to question. It’s the taken-for-granted background where all our interactions make sense. Through bracketing, Schutz argues that we can momentarily suspend this everyday attitude to analyze how those meanings are formed, but most of the time, we don’t. We act within them. His distinctions between Umwelt (our immediate circle of face-to-face relations), Mitwelt (people we know exist but never meet), and Eigenwelt (our private inner world) show how complex our social reality really is. These layers explain how our sense of meaning depends on shared understandings that connect even distant or unseen others.
Berger and Luckmann build on this by showing how the world becomes real through the social construction of reality. They describe a cycle: people create meaning through action (externalization), those meanings take on object-like permanence (objectification), and individuals later absorb them as part of their worldview (internalization). Over time, repeated interactions become habitualized and eventually institutionalized, giving the illusion of permanence and authority. What fascinates me is how something purely social, like a routine or norm, can become so solid that we treat it as an objective fact.
It made me wonder: if our “reality” is continually produced and sustained through these processes, what happens when people start to reject or reinterpret those shared meanings? Can reality itself begin to fracture, or evolve into something new? Mairead
Fennelly:
In Schutz’s writing (pp. 324–332), one of the most interesting ideas is the concept of the lifeworld. This is the everyday background of shared meanings that makes social interaction possible. He breaks this down into relational zones. Umwelt refers to people we directly relate to, Mitwelt to strangers we assume things about, and Eigenwelt to our internal, personal world. Schutz further claims that within these zones of social interaction we depend on typifications. Cognitive shortcuts which allow us to forecast others’ conduct and respond in the same way. An example would be a bus driver’s personality, regardless of the fact whether we know the driver or not. This helps us function socially, but it also makes interactions shallow and scripted. We don’t treat most people as full individuals, just as roles. According to Berger and Luckmann (pp. 340–359), habitualization is one of the processes of the social construction of reality, whereby society is progressively created through a series of actions that become patterns. They categorize the whole phenomenon into three stages: through externalization we create norms, through objectification we forget the origin of the norms and accept them as real, and finally through internalization we assimilate them as truth. What stuck with me is how primary socialization, especially in childhood, makes these patterns feel like common sense. We’re trained to believe in society’s “reality” long before we can question it. Schutz gives us the micro-level building blocks, and Berger and Luckmann show how those create the larger social order.