1st Edition
Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology, and the Renewal of Interpretive Social Science
1. Introduction 2. The Vanishing Mediator: The Phenomenological Moment in American Social Science 3. Relevance Analysis: Cognition and Knowledge in Social Phenomenology 4. Thematic, Interpretive, and Motivational Relevances: Belief, Meaning, and Action in the Social World 5. Symbol Relations and Social Reality: Culture and Structure in the Social World 6. From Phenomenology to the Sociology and Political Economy of Knowledge: Culture, Power, and the Social Distribution of Knowledge 7. Conclusion: Phenomenology, Social Theory, and Interpretive Social Science
Biography
Besnik Pula is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, USA, where he also serves as Director of the International Studies Program. He is the author of Globalization Under and After Socialism: The Evolution of Transnational Capital in Central and Eastern Europe.
“Pula’s book offers an important basis to rethink our theoretical apparatus in ways more adequate to understanding our contemporary world. Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology, and the Renewal of Interpretive Social Science is a fruitful elaboration of social phenomenology and it advances a theoretically informed way to pursue sociohistorical inquiry in the absence of grand theory. Reading Pula’s book should provoke social scientists, serious graduate students, and keen undergraduates to rethink our collective project.” - John R. Hall, Social Forces
"Through a sophisticated re-examination of Alfred Schutz’s work, [Pula] shows how Schutz’s theoretical approach is a living resource for rethinking the orientation of interpretive social sciences, analyzing subjective experience in a reflective manner, and critically engaging with the social logic of knowledge and power […]. Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology, and the Renewal of Interpretive Social Science thus offers valuable insights and significant impetus for both Schutzian research and interpretive social science. This book shows that social sciences still have much to learn from phenomenology." - Ekkehard Coenen, Symbolic Interaction
