Abstract
For a few decades, the debate about the dominant economic theory has focused on the epistemological problems caused by the use of objective categories or “intellectual abstractions,” which involved “oblivion,” or disconnection of social actors understood as concrete persons. In Husserlian terms, this genuine “crisis of the sciences” meant the loss of the life-world as the substratum and foundation of all scientific knowledge. In the context of these discussions, the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz has much to say on the issue. Our article will assert that the postulate of adequacy and its inseparable pair, the postulate of subjective interpretation, have important methodological implications for economic research.
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Notes
The book was published in German under the title Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (Schütz, 2004); however, for the purpose of this article, we will utilise the English version, which was translated as The Phenomenology of the Social World (Schutz, 1967 [1932]).
The German quotations, references and expressions used in this article are my translation.
The original title of this essay was Nationalökonomie: Verhalten des Menschen im sozialen Leben. It was translated into English by Helmut Wagner. The essay was occasioned by Friedrich von Hayek’s visit to Vienna in 1936, where he delivered a lecture to the Viennese Gesellschaft für Wirtschaftswissenschaft on “Knowledge and Economics”. However, in the comments on the new edition of the text, the editors noted that no references to that title had been found in the documentary and bibliographic archives (Eberle et al., 2010b: 91).
The critical study of The Structure of Social Action began with an invitation extended to Schutz in late 1938 by Professor Friedrich Von Hayek, then editor of the Journal Economica affiliated with the London School of Economics. Von Hayek proposed that Schutz write a review of Parsons’s recently published book. The critical study sparked an exchange that lasted only a few months, from November 15, 1940, to April 21, 1941. However, at that time, neither the critical study nor the letters were published. Both the German and English editions of the correspondence were released almost simultaneously. In 1977, the German translation and edition were completed by Walter Sprondel (Schütz & Parsons, 1977), while the original English version was edited in 1978 and published by Richard Grathoff (Schutz & Parsons, 1978).
This concept would be further developed later in his text Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. Lester Embree asserted that “the original version was handwritten in English between August 1947 and August 1951” (Schutz, 2011: 93).
In the upcoming discussion, we will show how the establishment of certain motives as constant and invariant for social actors serves as a foundational aspect supporting the postulate of adequacy.
Steinbock challenged the notion that norms are static and externally imposed. For this purpose, he employed Emile Durkheim’s viewpoint as an illustration of normality conceived as an “average” or what is most commonly distributed, and anything that deviates from these parameters is labelled as “morbid” or “pathological”. Instead, Steinbock argued that beginning with the phenomenon of concordance means that normality is something instituted over time.
Eberle (2019) presented a historical analysis of the evolution of the postulate of adequacy in the work of Schutz. In doing so, he established a dialogue between two versions of the postulate that appear in Schutz’s most substantial methodological contributions: The Phenomenology of the Social World and the article “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action” (Schutz, 1962a). In the latter text, the requirements of the postulate are outlined as follows: “Each term in a scientific model of human action must be constructed in such a way that a human act performed within the life-world by an individual actor in the way indicated by the typical construct would be understandable for the actor himself as well as for his fellow-men in terms of common-sense interpretation of everyday life. Compliance with this postulate warrants the consistency of the constructs of the social scientist with the constructs of common-sense experience of the social reality” (Schutz, 1962a: 140). The possibility for a scientific construction of an action to be understandable within the framework of everyday thinking now suffices to fulfil the criterion of adequacy; the concordance with past experience is excluded from the postulate, as is iterability. Hence, Eberle critically highlighted the conclusive departure from Weberian causal adequacy in Schutz’s last formulation of the postulate (Eberle, 2019: 147).
Like Luckmann, Srubar treated the structure of the life-world as a “matrix,” that is, “a basic formal matrix” that functions as a tertium comparationis that can be used for cross-cultural understanding and comparisons. Pointing in the same direction, Srubar drew a line between the theories of constitution and the empirical studies of science. However, unlike Luckmann, Srubar considered that this matrix is not static: “[…] as opposed to Luckmann’s concept, our matrix here is not static but the constituting mechanisms are seen – at least potentially – as generators of the dynamics, historicity, and differentiation of the life-world” (Srubar, 2005: 250).
See (López, 2023).
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The code name of the research project financing Daniela López’s research is PIBAA 2022-2023 - 28720210100201CO.
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López, D.G. Methodological Implications of the Schutzian Postulate of Adequacy for Economic Research. Hum Stud (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09693-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09693-3