Schütz, Alfred

Austrian-born phenomenologist and social theorist Alfred Schütz made charting the structures of the lifeworld his life's work. In the course of this endeavor, he added a host of terms to the vocabulary of social science, including “typification,” “in-order-to and because-motives,” “course-of-action and personal ideal types,” “multiple realities,” “finite provinces of meaning,” and “the social distribution of knowledge.” Following his death in 1959, his devoted students published his collected papers, unfinished manuscripts, and an intellectual biography; arranged to have his first book translated into English (Schütz 1967); and integrated his concepts into a new theoretical perspective called social constructionism (Berger and Luckmann 1966). A number of scholars in Europe and America continue to undertake phenomenological research in the Schützian style. A group of economists explores Schütz's ...