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What in everyday life are mostly unarticulated, intuitive distinctions must be taken seriously in sociological research. The discipline is about "defamiliarizing the familiar" (Bauman & May, 2001), about reflecting on everyday interactions, social processes, trends, and their meanings with the intention to feed clarifying reinterpretations back into social life. In that context it is well to remember what Alfred Schutz (1973) had to say about the relationship between common sense thinking and social science knowledge. In everyday life we use abstractions, constructs, and concepts that help us cut through the complexities of daily living; they help us select meanings relevant to given situations. What differentiates common sense and the social sciences is, according to Schutz, that "the constructs used by the social scientist … are constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene whose behavior the scientist observes and tries to explain" (Schutz, 1973, p. 6, my emphasis). Social scientists not only describe common words in their own terms, but also seek to understand the patterns of behaviors, practices, and attitudes they denote. Moreover, as Anthony Giddens (1984, p. 284) has made clear, the concepts that may result from social science research may become re-appropriated by people in the context of their everyday lives by way of the "double hermeneutic", the interpretive feedback loop between research and everyday understandings.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137316400_3

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