Lifeworld

The lifeworld, or the world of everyday life and commonsense realities, is a concept that comes from the work of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and has been developed for sociology by the phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schütz (1899–1959). Schütz was concerned with the domain (the world of everyday life, the commonsense world) in which individuals grapple with the consciousness of others while living in their own stream of consciousness. The lifeworld to Schütz represented an intersubjective terrain in which people both created their social realities and were simultaneously constrained by those social and cultural structures already in place. It was in existence long before our birth, but we do have the power to act back upon it. Furthermore, each of us has our own individual lifeworld, ...