Society in the structures of everyday world: Methodological aspects of studying

• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Russian Academy of Sciences, Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology 2008-06-01
• Series: Социологический журнал
• Online Access: http://jour.fnisc.ru/upload/journals/1/articles/994/submission/proof/994-61-1851-1-10-20150320.pdf

The paper is devoted to investigating of meaningful structures in the social reality. Communicative and sign elements of social experience as the basis of social and institutional conditions of human life are analyzed.The problems of vital world implicitly characterize social theory. The doctrine of vital world developed to overcome technocratic dominance in European science was aimed to consider its sense foundation and intentional aspects of society. The idea was to fill scientific concepts with concrete vital meanings and hence let science concern reality. As a result, scientific constructs began to depend on meaningful every-day-life structures and interpretations conditioned by phenomenological evidence of world perception.The paper is mainly concerned with symbolic means of social attitude representations in processes of interaction. Particular emphasis is placed on systematization of methodology to phenomenologically describe traditional social practices. The author claims that phenomenological approach allows to illuminate such a meta-level of social reality which provides premises (social knowledge in particular) necessary for institutional structure of society. At the same time, phenomenological social theory helps to shed misconceptions of naive objective attitude to society and warns against being captured by naturalism and reduction in describing and explaining social phenomena.