Day 11: Phenomenological Sociology

Didn't make much progress today. My illness confined me to bed most of the afternoon again. I must ask my doc in next visit if this is the result of my sleep apnea, allergy, hypoxia, hypothyroid, or all of the above. :-p It's not fun living with all those symptoms and more when you try to do a dissertation. It's worst when they all hit you at the same time when you think you just had it going for the first time in 3 long years!

Well, complaints aside, I had a good day because I managed to get another great tip from my friend! This time, in a form of clear explanation of the phenomenological approach that I could perhaps use in my dissertation! It got me excited for the first time! The light at the end of the tunnel seems to be bigger by the day!

However, like in Buddhism's teaching, my joy did not last long. After I checked my Encyclopedia of Sociology, I discovered that Phenomenology is a bad boy of Sociology! Would I ever get away from this curse? Just look at this excerpt:

Phenomenological sociology has not greatly influenced sociology as a whole and has also been subjected to extensive criticism. It has been argued that it deals with trivial topics, is purely descriptive, has had very little empirical application and neglects the notion of social structure. (Abercrombie, Hill & Turner, 2000, p. 262).

I still have to find out more about all this. But one thing that perhaps cheers me up a bit was the "See Also:" part at the bottom of the entry. Among others was the term "Verstehen," the German word for Insight or Understanding that was one of the first terms in sociology that actually thrilled me. Come to think of it, there has been almost no other sociological terms that has ever made an impression on me in a big way, although "Sociological Imagination" came pretty close.

Needless to say, I fell for the word Verstehen not because of its exotic and sexy accent, but because of its close meaning to the idea of Insight as in Insight Meditation in Buddhism which means Vipassana Meditation which is what I really want to talk about in my dissertation.

So we'll see. May be phenomenological sociology would be my answer after all, academically controversial and all that, if I get my advisor's blessings, of course.

Day 10: Methodology Reloaded

Today I am fortunate enough to get a visit from fellow sufferer in this world of dissertation headache. She kindly enlightened me that my case falls right into what we call Phenomenology.

Well, I feel so embarrassed to say that I totally forgot what I studied two years ago in Philosophy of Science course! Well, not exactly all of them. But to make sure I make an accurate next step and stay on the right course, I did look up my trusted online source for all things philosophical--the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy--. This is after a visit to Wiki made me more confused than before!

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Phenomenology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology • Note created April 14, 2007

Phenomenology and Ontology, Epistemology, Logic, Ethics

The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophy among others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to, other fields in philosophy?

Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields or disciplines: ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic. Suppose phenomenology joins that list. Consider then these elementary definitions of field:

• Ontology is the study of beings or their being — what is.
• Epistemology is the study of knowledge — how we know.
• Logic is the study of valid reasoning — how to reason.
• Ethics is the study of right and wrong — how we should act.
• Phenomenology is the study of our experience — how we experience.

The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, and they seem to call for different methods of study.

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So, my friend kindly suggested I should use a phenomenological approach in my dissertation. I would certainly bring this up to my advisor this time. I hope this would not sound too metaphysical for my sociological degree over here!

Oh, sociological is such a difficult field to tackle! It is supposed to be scientific, yet is is very abstract. And all I want to do is a simple thesis to tell the world that mindfulness is indeed a good thing not only to yourself but to the community you live in.

But I guess there is no such thing as a "simple" thesis?

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Now let's look on how I could apply phenomenology to sociological study

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phenomenology

hss.fullerton.edu/sociology/orleans/phenomenology.... • Note created April 14, 2007

PHENOMENOLOGY

Myron Orleans

Encyclopedia of Sociology

Phenomenology is a movement in philosophy that has been adapted by certain sociologists to promote an understanding of the relationship between states of individual consciousness and social life. As an approach within sociology, phenomenology seeks to reveal how human awareness is implicated in the production of social action, social situations and social worlds (Natanson 1970).

Phenomenology was initially developed by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), a German mathematician who felt that the objectivism of science precluded an adequate apprehension of the world (Husserl 1931, 1970). He presented various philosophical conceptualizations and techniques designed to locate the sources or essences of reality in the human consciousness. It was not until Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) came upon some problems in Max Weber's theory of action that phenomenology entered the domain of sociology (Schutz 1967). Schutz distilled from Husserl's rather dense writings a sociologically relevant approach. Schutz set about describing how subjective meanings give rise to an apparently objective social world (Schutz, 1962, 1964, 1966, 1970. 1996; Schutz and Luckmann 1973; Wagner 1983).

Schutz's migration to the United States prior to World War II, along with that of other phenomenologically inclined scholars, resulted in the transmission of this approach to American academic circles and to its ultimate transformation into interpretive sociology. Two expressions of this approach have been called reality constructionism and ethnomethodology. Reality constructionism synthesizes Schutz's distillation of phenomenology and the corpus of classical sociological thought to account for the possibility of social reality (Berger 1963, 1967; Berger and Berger 1972; Berger and Kellner 1981; Berger and Luckmann 1966; Potter 1996). Ethnomethodology integrates the Parsonian concern for social order into phenomenology and examines the means by which actors make ordinary life possible (Garfinkel 1967; Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). Reality constructionism and ethnomethodology are recognized to be among the most fertile orientations in the field of sociology (Ritzer 1996).

Phenomenology is used in two basic ways in sociology: (1) to theorize about substantive sociological problems and (2) to enhance the adequacy of sociological research methods. Since phenomenology insists that society is a human construction, sociology itself and its theories and methods are also constructions (Cicourel 1964; 1973). Thus, phenomenology seeks to offer a corrective to the field's emphasis on positivist conceptualizations and research methods that may take for granted the very issues that phenomenologists find of interest. Phenomenology presents theoretical techniques and qualitative methods that illuminate the human meanings of social life.

Phenomenology has until recently been viewed as at most a challenger of the more conventional styles of sociological work and at the least an irritant. Increasingly, phenomenology is coming to be viewed as an adjunctive or even integral part of the discipline, contributing useful analytic tools to balance objectivist approaches (Aho 1998; Levesque-Lopman 1988; Luckmann 1978; Psathas 1973; Rogers 1983).