Breaking down the question
The statement asserts that phenomenological sociology rejects "many of the assumptions of positivism". The command word "comment" invites you to explain the claim, assess how far it is true, and offer a measured judgement. The examiner is testing your grasp of the deep methodological cleavage between positivist and interpretive traditions, with phenomenology as a leading variant of the latter.
To answer well you must first state clearly what positivism assumes — that society is an objective reality external to individuals, that social facts can be observed and measured like natural phenomena, that causal laws govern social life, and that sociology should model itself on the natural sciences. Only against this backdrop can you show precisely which assumptions phenomenology rejects and why.
The word "many" in the statement is a useful cue. It signals that the rejection is substantial but perhaps not total, leaving room for a nuanced conclusion. The wider family of interpretive and non-positivist methods is set out in our notes on non-positivist methodologies.
How to approach it
Begin by summarising the core assumptions of positivism compactly, since your critique depends on naming them. Then introduce phenomenology through Husserl and, above all, Alfred Schutz, who translated it into a sociological programme.
Work through the specific rejections one by one — the rejection of an objective external social reality, of the natural-science model, of measurement and quantification, and of the neglect of subjective meaning and common-sense knowledge. Bring in Berger and Luckmann on the social construction of reality and Garfinkel's ethnomethodology as the phenomenological legacy.
Conclude by commenting on how far the rejection goes. Acknowledge the force of the phenomenological critique while noting its own limitations, and suggest that the two traditions may be partial rather than wholly incompatible. This balanced verdict answers the "comment" directly.
Model answer
Positivism, the founding methodological orientation of sociology associated with Comte and Durkheim, rests on several linked assumptions. It holds that social reality exists objectively and externally to individuals, that social facts can be observed and measured much as natural facts are, that regular causal relationships or laws govern social life, and that sociology should therefore adopt the logic and methods of the natural sciences to produce value-free, generalisable knowledge. Phenomenological sociology, developed from the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and given sociological form by Alfred Schutz, challenges each of these assumptions at a fundamental level, which lends considerable truth to the statement.
The first and deepest rejection concerns the nature of social reality itself. For positivism, society is a thing "out there", a system of external structures that constrain individuals from without, as in Durkheim's treatment of social facts. Phenomenology reverses this. Drawing on Husserl's concern with the "life-world" — the taken-for-granted world of everyday experience — Schutz argued that social reality is not an objective given but is continuously constituted through the consciousness and interpretive activity of actors. Society exists in and through the meanings that people attach to their situations; it is intersubjectively built, not externally imposed. The social world is therefore made of meaning, not of thing-like facts.
The second rejection follows directly: phenomenology denies that sociology can or should model itself on the natural sciences. Natural phenomena do not interpret themselves, but human beings constantly classify, typify and give meaning to their world. Schutz insisted that the objects of the social sciences already possess meaning for the actors involved, so the sociologist studies a "pre-interpreted" reality. The scientist must grasp these first-order meanings before constructing second-order concepts. This makes the methods of the natural sciences, which treat their objects as meaningless matter, inappropriate for the study of meaningful human conduct.
The third rejection targets measurement and quantification. Because positivism treats social facts as measurable, it favours statistics, correlation and the search for causal regularities. Phenomenologists regard such quantities as artefacts of the categories imposed by researchers rather than as neutral reflections of reality. In a celebrated argument, the ethnomethodologists Cicourel and others showed that official statistics — on suicide, crime or delinquency — are not objective facts but the outcome of the interpretive and classifying practices of officials. What positivists take as hard data is itself socially constructed, so quantification conceals rather than reveals the meaningful processes that produce the numbers.
The fourth rejection concerns the status of common-sense knowledge. Positivism sharply separates scientific knowledge from lay common sense and seeks to move beyond the latter. Phenomenology instead makes common-sense knowledge its central object of study. Schutz analysed the stock of taken-for-granted "typifications" and "recipes" through which ordinary members make their world orderly and predictable. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in "The Social Construction of Reality", developed this into an account of how everyday knowledge is produced, objectivated and internalised, so that the humanly constructed world comes to appear as an objective order. Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology pushed further, studying the tacit methods by which members accomplish the sense of a shared, factual social world, and demonstrating through his "breaching experiments" how fragile and constructed that sense is.
At the same time, the statement's qualifier "many" is well judged, and a comment should register the limits of the rejection. Phenomenology does not reject the ambition to produce systematic knowledge as such; Schutz sought rigorous, if interpretive, concepts. Nor does it deny that patterned regularities exist — it locates their source in shared typifications rather than in external laws. Critics, moreover, charge phenomenology with neglecting power, structure and material constraint: by dissolving society into meaning and consciousness, it risks losing sight of the objective inequalities and institutions that positivist and Marxist sociology foreground. Its focus on the micro-processes of meaning can leave it unable to explain macro-level change.
In sum, the statement is largely accurate. Phenomenological sociology does reject the core positivist assumptions — the objectivity of social reality, the natural-science model, the primacy of measurement and the dismissal of common sense — and replaces them with an account of the social world as an intersubjectively constructed order of meaning. Yet the rejection is a corrective as much as a wholesale repudiation. The most defensible position treats positivism and phenomenology as illuminating different aspects of social life — external structure and internal meaning — so that a complete sociology must attend to both.
Examiner's perspective
High-scoring answers make the contrast precise. Rather than describing positivism and phenomenology separately, they set the phenomenological rejections directly against named positivist assumptions — objectivity, the natural-science model, measurement, the disdain for common sense — so the "reject" in the question is demonstrated point by point.
Naming the right thinkers matters here: Husserl and Schutz for the foundations, Berger and Luckmann for social construction, and Garfinkel and Cicourel for the ethnomethodological critique of statistics. The strongest scripts then honour "comment" by weighing how far the rejection goes, noting phenomenology's neglect of structure and power, and closing with a judgement that the two traditions capture complementary dimensions of social reality. Answers that merely narrate two schools without confronting them stay in the middle band.