Alfred Schutz

Alfred Schutz was an Austrian-American philosopher and sociologist who founded phenomenological sociology by applying Edmund Husserl's phenomenology to the study of everyday social life. In The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932) he analyzed how individuals experience, interpret, and construct meaning within a shared social reality he called the lifeworld, examining concepts such as intersubjectivity, typification, and the stock of common-sense knowledge people use to navigate ordinary interaction. Schutz's work, developed further after he emigrated to the United States, directly shaped the sociology of knowledge of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann and the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel.