Alfred Schutz’s Fragments on Social Roles as a Phenomenological Alternate to Mainstream Sociology

I am indebted to the Sozialwissenschaftliches Archiv Konstanz/Alfred-Schütz-Gedächtnis-Archiv and its CEO Jochen Dreher for permitting me to consult and quote microfilms of Schtuz’s manuscripts.

Notwithstanding, as will be shown in the next section, Schutz mentions Linton in his papers of the 1950s.

Parsons will develop his well-known theory of social roles later in The Social System (Parsons [1951] 1991). Notwithstanding, Schutz identifies this already in his “voluntaristic theory of action” when stating that Parsons' “conception of normativity implies an effort on the part of the actor to accommodate his role as an agent to the teleological value pattern” (Schutz [1940] 1978: 26).

Although Schutz barely quotes from The Social System, he actually did an exhaustive, reflective reading of this masterpiece as can be appreciated from underlines and annotations found in his personal copy of this book (see Nasu 2002c). I am grateful to Hisashi Nasu for his generous permission to consult and quote this documented and valuable work completed by him and his team to register Schutz's annotations to the books of his personal library (which is currently held at the Sozialwissenschaftliches Archiv of the University of Constance).

Schutz seems to have found this phenomenological distinction in his reading of Husserl’s Ideas I. In his personal copy of this book he writes in the margins of page 265: “Me?—Here is the origin of the social role” (Nasu 2002a: 265).

This can be related to what Berger and Luckmann describe as “the distance that the individual may establish between himself and his role-playing” (1966: 91).

Schutz’s observation of this point anticipates Bourdieu’s considerations about the “mismatches, discordance and misfirings” of the habitus (Bourdieu 2000: 159ff).

Schutz ([1955] 1964: 250f.) accepts the well-known sociological classification of voluntary and involuntary groups (which he also refers to as “existential groups”). As a member of an existential group, the individual must assume his social role as an “existential element” of the situation that he must take into account and with which he has to “come to terms” (Schutz [1955] 1964: 250). Instead, as a member of a voluntary group, he can choose to partake in it or not, and to some extent he has the freedom to choose which roles he will assume (Schutz [1955] 1964: 250f.).

This reference to Ego consciousness does not involve any form of reduction (phenomenological, eidetic, or transcendental). Schutz makes clear that the distinction between genetic-intentionality analysis, which deals with the genesis of meaning, and meaning-stratification analysis applied to already given and constituted meaning-content is previous to the distinction between action and acts and between objective and subjective meaning as addressed in the social sciences (See Schutz [1932] 1967: § 5, 35–38). Only the first type of issue involves the solitary Ego while the second type involves the ego agens which is at least in part already a social self. As Maurice Natanson (1970: 17) states: “The self is the ego clothed with the garments of society”. On this distinction Schutz points out: “We encountered the latter problem in the course of an analysis of the meaningful interpretation of the social world. ‘Meaning’ was for us not the generic ‘predicate’ of my intentional consciousness but had a specific social connotation. When we make the transition to the social sphere, there accrues, in fact, to the pair of concepts ‘objective and subjective meaning’ a new and sociologically relevant significance” (Schutz [1932] 1967: § 5, 37).

Some notes on the relevance of the social person for developing a proper understanding of social roles can be found in Schutz’s marginal notes on Scheler’s Formalismus…, from which he observes: “What he calls social person should possibly [be] subjectively interpreted as identical with ‘social role’” (Nasu 2002b: 165). He also adds: “Social role (from the subjective point of view) as experienced social person” (Nasu 2002b: 165).

Indeed, in his critical review of Parson’s book Schutz makes clear that what “the American literature” appropriately refers to “under the title of ‘social personality’” corresponds to the systems of motives that structure the actor’s experiences. Seen this way, “The self’s manifold experiences of its own basic attitudes in the past, as they are condensed in the form of principles, maxims, and habits, but also of tastes, affects, etc., are the elements for building up such systems which can be personified by the actor” (Schutz [1940] 1978: 34).

This is not an unintended outcome. Schutz was aware that his approach differed from Parsons’ theory of role-expectancies (Schtuz [1955] 1967: 351n73).