Sociological Theory

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Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology

As a philosophical movement, phenomenology is a product of the early twentieth-century intellectual fervour in the Western world. The social crisis between the two world wars generated fresh thinking on the society. Max Weber's interpretive sociology has had already put sociological thinking on a subjective mould. The idealist current in the German intellectual thought continued to probe into the problem of ‘objective’ knowledge of the society. The central question for sociological method and theory remained — whether it is valid to understand and explain the world from the perspective of the observer.

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the German philosopher, founded phenomenology as that philosophy which could ...