Sociologies of Everyday Life

Sociologies of everyday life are qualitative sociologies that examine small-group interaction and place a primacy on understanding and reporting the lives of the members of everyday life as they see it or as close as possible to it. They all share a common concern with the members' perspective about society and a qualitative methodological approach to the study of human interaction. Sociologies of everyday life encompass a variety of sociologies, most of which never refer to or associate themselves with the name sociologies of everyday life. The term itself comes from a book by Jack Douglas and some of his graduate students (Douglas et al. 1980).

[Page 774]The origins of the sociologies of everyday life are diverse. Douglas attributes its origin to the nineteenth-century Scottish moral philosophers. Perhaps more direct is the derivation from the two philosophical currents known as pragmatism and phenomenology. Pragmatism, especially in the works of George H. Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, and John Dewey, is the recognized foundation of some sociologies of everyday life. The stress on the study of small-group interaction and the symbols used by the members of society in communication are paramount features of the sociologies of everyday life, as informed by the pragmatist philosophies.

Phenomenology, similarly, focuses on the study of society based on the meaning attributed to it by its members. Stemming loosely from the philosophy of Edmund Husserl with its centrality on understanding the phenomena of the world, phenomenology was applied to sociology primarily by Alfred Schütz (1962), whose work shares fundamental social principles with the pragmatists, especially Mead, and informs some of the sociologies of everyday life. Schütz and Mead both focused on the socialization process (common stock of knowledge) of the members of society, their ability to interact (reciprocity of perspective), and the relevance of understanding the meaning they attributed to everyday life.

Other phenomenologists stressed the incarnate nature of humans, collapsing the dichotomy of self as established by René Descartes. Martin Heidegger refers to it as dasein (being-in-the-world). Maurice Merleau-Ponty also places emphasis on being in the world (étre-au-monde). Phenomenologists (along with others) reject human attributes that can be grasped outside of the realm of everyday life. We (qua humans) are irremediably embedded in this world through the carnality of our bodies—we are our bodies. Thus, the sociologies of everyday life embed the members of society in the world of everyday life while focusing on the negotiated meaning of their interactions.

The sociologies generally considered to be “of everyday life” are the following: symbolic interactionism, dramaturgy, labeling theory, ethnomethodology, existential sociology, and postmodern sociology. They all share some common ideas, which has led to their grouping together, yet at times, they have marked differences.

The first concept shared by the sociologies of everyday life is the concern with maintaining the integrity of phenomena. Researchers must spend time with the members of the group studied to gain an understanding of how the group views and describes the social world, as well as the members' daily concerns. Researchers must not superimpose any theoretical preconception on the study but must, instead, derive their notions as they stem from the accounts of the members themselves. Thus, all the sociologies of everyday life would rely on the methods of participant observation, in-depth-interviewing, or both and on inductive reasoning to reach a better understanding and minimize distortions of the phenomena studied.

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