INTRODUCTION
Alfred schutz (1899-1959). Alfred Schutz was born in Vienna in 1899. He was an only child to an
upper-middle class Austrain Jewish family and had a strong mother. In his youth he attended a
classical Gymnasium in Vienna and developed a lifelong interest in music. After his serving in
world war I, he received his doctorate in the philosophy of law at Vienna.
Alfred schutz was an Austrian philosopher and social phenomenologist whose work bridged
Sociological and phenomelogical tradition. Schultz is gradually being recognized as one of the
20th century's leading philosopher of social science. During his time at the University of Vienna,
he attending lectures given by Max Weber. Schultz also work in a bank. He was once described by
Edmund Husserl as "a banker by day and a philosopher by night". Schultz obtained his PhD from
Vienna in 1921, he also moved to the United States in 1939 where he became a part-time faculty
member at a University New school for social Research in New York. In 1952 he became
professor at the same institution.
Alfred Schutz was very involved with the interpretive sociology of Max Weber. Weber as one of
the distinguished social scientist of his time had a great influence in Schutz's work, particularly in
the issues of subjectivity and social action. It was in these topics that Schutz began to pursue the
application of Husserl's phenomenology, in his work, The phenomenology of social world. He
shows his understanding and his ambitions to use it in the grasping of social phenomena.
Schutz was a founding member of the international Phenomenological society and editor of the
philosophy and Phenomenological Research Journal. His writings had a lasting impact on the
social sciences, both on phenomenological approaches to sociology and ethnomethodology. Peter
L. Berger was also a student of Schutz, was arguably the best-known living sociologist influenced
by Schutz, especially through his creation of the social construction theory. Berger and Thomas
Luckman went on to use Schutz's work to further understand human culture and reality, through
the development of a new form of the Sociology of Knowledge.
PHENOMENOLOGY
Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of the two ways: as a discipline field
in philosophy, or as a movement in history of philosophy. The discipline of phenomenology
may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness.
Literally, phenomenology is the study of "phenomena": appearance of things, or things as
they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meaning
things have in our experience.
Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging
from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily
awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The
structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called
“intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the
property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something.
Phenomenology is an approach to qualitative research that focuses on the commonality
of a lived experience within a particular group. The fundamental goal of the approach is
to arrive at a description of the nature of the particular phenomenon (Creswell, 2013).
Some philosophers argue that we can never have definite knowledge of what the world outside or
