12 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
From its inception, phenomenologists argued that meaning making takes place in the “lifeworld”
(Lebenswelt) of the individual—the bedrock of beliefs against which the very ordinary, mundane
moving through one’s everyday world, interacting with others, takes place and through which
one shapes and reaffirms one’s sense of oneself and the elements of one’s social world. This was
to be the focus of social scientific study. It requires accessing what is meaningful to social, politi-
cal, cultural, and other groups, and to individuals within them, as well as understanding how
meaning is developed, expressed, and communicated. In a phenomenological approach, much of
everyday life is seen as consisting of common-sense, taken-for-granted, unspoken, yet widely
shared and known “rules” for acting and interacting. It is the articulation of these “rules” that
constitutes one of the central concerns of phenomenological analysis and of methods informed by
this perspective, such as ethnomethodology and other forms of conversation analysis, symbolic
interaction, ethnography, and participant-observation. As the social scientist is herself embedded
in that social reality, the analytic problem is to extricate herself sufficiently from that unspoken
common sense in order to render it “uncommon,” reflect on it, and make sense of it (which is the
purchase claimed by ethnographic and participant-observer research for the researcher’s standing
as “stranger” to the situation being studied; this argument informs the chapters by Joe Soss, Ellen
Pader, Clare Ginger, Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno, and Samer Shehata).
Social realities are seen as “willed into existence through intentional acts” (Burrell and Mor-
gan 1979, 233), through “consciousness” or “mind.” Something, in other words, intercedes in the
phenomenal experience between sensing and sense-making A knock on the door at different
times of day may produce identical sound wave sine curves, but what those sound waves mean
differs if the knock comes at two in the afternoon and we are U.S. citizens sitting in a classroom
in Hayward, California, in 2005 or if it comes at two in the morning and we are Jews hiding in an
attic in Amsterdam in 1944.^17 What we claim as knowledge of social phenomena comes from a
willed (or intentional) interpretation of our sense perceptions, not from an uninterpreted register-
ing of them, against the backdrop of preexisting conceptual categories derived from life experi-
ence in interaction with others.
Other terms—lens, frame, paradigm, worldview or weltanschauung—capture aspects of the
same idea as mind or consciousness.^18 Husserl, in his approach to phenomenology, argued that
analysis should focus not on the phenomena of lived experience themselves—the objects or events
or terms were to be “bracketed” and set aside—but on the perceptual processes or mental con-
structs humans create in order to make sense of those experiences, what in these other terms
might be called the organizing frames or lenses or conceptual boxes that structure perception and
comprehension of that reality.^19 This shifts the analytic process from “What do you know?” to
“How do you know [what you claim as knowledge]?” So, for example, in attempting to under-
stand arguments about abortion from “pro-life” and “pro-choice” camps, the researcher or policy
analyst would “bracket” the arguments themselves—making no attempt to discern their objective
“reality”—and focus instead on their “experienced reality”—on how those arguments are experi-
enced by those making and hearing them and how they become “factual” reality to them, as Luker
(1984) did. In this “transcendental” phenomenology, Husserl attempted to transcend experience
to focus analysis on “pure” consciousness.
In his approach to phenomenology, Schütz directed inquiry back toward an engagement with
lived experience, toward a more “existential” phenomenology in which the individual is engaged
in and with a social world. For him, as for Heidegger, experience was about “being in the world,”
and so its analysis, too, should be about engaging that world rather than bracketing it and setting
it aside. It is this set of ideas that has been more productive for interpretive social science and its
methods. In this view, each knower comes to his subject with prior knowledge that has grown out