Summary: | The article proposes a selective incursion into the plural terrain of interpretative microsociologies, offering a critical analysis of the social-theoretical contributions bequeathed by Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology and its offshoot in Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodological approach, with a special focus on the foundational problem of the relation between subjectively propelled individual action, on the one hand, and the social contexts in which that action happens, on the other. To use the jargon that has become hegemonic since the rise of the "new theoretical movement" (Alexander), what I intend to do is to discuss possibilities and limits of phenomenological sociology in facing the question of the relationship between agency and structure.
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