Most sociology begins where the ordinary person stops asking questions. That there is a world of solid institutions, that other people are broadly like us, that a queue is a queue and a marriage a marriage — these are the settled assumptions on which research is built. Phenomenology and ethnomethodology refuse the settlement. They take the obviousness of the social world as the thing requiring explanation, and ask how a reality that is entirely the product of human activity comes to be experienced as external, factual and independent of anyone in particular.

The two traditions divide the labour. Phenomenology, following Husserl and then Schutz, asks how the world is constituted in consciousness — what mental furniture must be in place for a stranger's gesture to be immediately legible. Ethnomethodology, following Garfinkel, moves the question from mind to practice and asks what members' methods people are actually using, moment by moment, to produce the sense that things are in order. Their shared and radical conclusion is that social order is not a structure that exists behind conduct but an ongoing accomplishment achieved in and through it.

Husserl and the phenomenological reduction

Edmund Husserl's ambition was a science of consciousness free of unexamined assumption. His method was the reduction, or epoché: to bracket the natural belief that the world exists out there independently of us, not to deny it but to suspend it, so that the structures by which experience is organised become visible. Attention shifts from objects to the acts of consciousness in which objects are given. In his last work Husserl turned to the life-world, the pre-scientific world of lived experience which science presupposes even as it forgets it — a formulation that made phenomenology usable by sociologists, since the life-world is precisely where social life happens.

Schutz and the social life-world

Alfred Schutz grafted this onto Weber. Weber had asserted that action carries subjective meaning but had not explained how meaning is possible between people at all. Schutz supplied the answer. We inhabit the life-world in the natural attitude, in which its existence and its intelligibility simply go without saying. We navigate it using typifications — ready-made classifications of persons, motives and situations, mostly inherited rather than invented — organised into a stock of knowledge at hand that is socially distributed, unevenly held, and adequate for practical purposes rather than true in any strict sense.

Two idealisations make shared experience possible. The interchangeability of standpoints assumes that were I standing where you stand I would see what you see; the congruence of relevance systems assumes our differences of biography do not matter for the purpose in hand. Together these form the reciprocity of perspectives, the tacit agreement that makes the world a common one. Schutz also distinguished relations by degrees of intimacy and anonymity — from consociates encountered face to face, through contemporaries known only as types, to predecessors and successors — and insisted that sociology's second-order constructs must remain answerable to the first-order constructs of the people studied.

Berger, Luckmann and the construction of reality

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann turned Schutz's analysis into a general sociology of knowledge concerned not with ideas of philosophers but with what ordinary people take to be real. Society is a human product through externalisation, becomes an objective reality through objectivation, and is taken back into the person through internalisation in primary and secondary socialisation. Habitualisation and then institutionalisation convert repeated action into typified obligation, and legitimation — from simple vocabulary through proverbs and theories to full symbolic universes — maintains plausibility, especially at moments of doubt, deviance and death. The often-quoted dictum that society is a human product and the human being a social product captures the dialectic without dissolving either side.

Garfinkel, ethnomethodology and the breaching demonstrations

Harold Garfinkel made the sharpest break. Against what he called the dupe of sociological theory — the actor who merely enacts internalised norms — he argued that following a rule always requires unspecified judgement, so competence lies in the methods members use, not in the rules they cite. Accounts are indexical: their sense depends on who says them, when, to whom, in what setting, and no amount of specification removes this. They are also reflexive: describing a situation is part of constituting it, not a report from outside it. Through the documentary method of interpretation people treat what appears as a document of an underlying pattern, and read the pattern back into what appears, each securing the other.

The breaching demonstrations made the tacit visible by disturbing it — students behaving as lodgers in their own homes, or relentlessly demanding that a casual remark be clarified. The reactions, ranging from bewilderment to anger, showed how much unnoticed work sustains ordinary competence. Harvey Sacks carried the programme into conversation analysis, showing that turn-taking, adjacency pairs, repair and membership categorisation are organised with a precision no participant could state. The point throughout is that order is achieved and re-achieved, and that a society is stable only because its members keep on making it so.

Criticisms

The standard charge is triviality: a discipline that studies queueing and turn-taking has traded the great questions of inequality for the minutiae of the encounter. Related is the neglect of power — Schutz's stock of knowledge is never neutral, and the typifications of caste, gender and community are precisely the objects of struggle rather than a shared inheritance. Critics also press ahistoricism: the life-world arrives ready-made, its colonial and class making unexamined. Ethnomethodology's relativism and refusal of explanation trouble those who want sociology to say why arrangements are as they are, and Marxists add that describing how order is accomplished says nothing about whose order it is. The reply is that these are questions of scope, not of validity: no account of domination is complete without an account of how it is made to seem natural in practice, and studies of medical, legal and bureaucratic settings have shown how inequality is transacted in exactly the small procedures the tradition examines.

For the UPSC answer

Deploy this material on questions about non-positivist methodology, the sociology of knowledge, and any question inviting you to explain how the social world is made rather than what it contains. The strongest structure is a chain — Husserl's reduction and life-world, Schutz's natural attitude, typifications and reciprocity of perspectives, Berger and Luckmann's externalisation, objectivation and internalisation, then Garfinkel's indexicality, reflexivity and breaching — because the sequence shows an argument developing rather than a list of names. Pair it against structural functionalism, whose internalised norms it directly attacks, or against Marxism, which supplies the power and history it brackets. Conclude with the trade-off: phenomenology and ethnomethodology recover the constant labour of constructing an orderly world, and set aside the structured inequalities that decide whose construction prevails.

References & further reading

  1. Husserl, E. (1970 [1936]). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press.
  2. Schutz, A. (1967 [1932]). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press.
  3. Schutz, A. (1962). Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. Martinus Nijhoff.
  4. Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. Doubleday.
  5. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall.
  6. Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Polity Press.