mass-communication-theory

phenomenology
Theory developed
by European philosophersfocusing
on individual
experience of the
physical and social
world
typifications
“Mental images”
that enable people
to quickly classify
objects and actions
and then
structure their
own actions in
response
Chapter 11 Media and Culture Theories: Meaning-Making in the Social World 325
around us in order to structure and coordinate our daily actions. He asked, “How
are we able to do this with such ease that we don’t even realize we are doing it?”
When it comes to money, Americans continue to be mysterious. The U.S. Treasury
has found that it’s impossible to introduce a dollar coin. It recently made a
third attempt; it too failed (“Dollar Coins,” 2008), as did a move, favored by President
Obama, to retire the penny (Mankiw, 2009). Must a dollar be printed on
paper to be real? Why the penny? It costs more to produce than its face value.
Can’t Americans round up or down? If you’ve traveled to a foreign country, you
probably thought the money used there looked like play money. You didn’t really
trust it until you made a few purchases with it.
For answers to this riddle about the origin and maintenance of social order,
Schutz turned to a body of social theory developed in Europe, phenomenology.
Relying on phenomenological notions, he asked his students at the New School
for Social Research in New York to bracket, or set aside, their commonsense
taken-for-granted explanations for what they were doing and recognize that everyday
life was actually much more complicated than they assumed. Schutz argued
that we conduct our lives with little effort or thought because we have developed
stocks of social knowledge that we use to quickly make sense of what goes on
around us and then structure our actions using this knowledge. Our knowledge of
how to use money, with our attitudes toward and feelings about money, are just
one example of a small part of these stocks of social knowledge.
It’s important to note that we usually don’t have much conscious awareness of
this knowledge. When we are questioned about how or why we are engaging in a
wide range of everyday actions, we find the questions puzzling or absurd. There’s
no obvious answers to these questions, but why would anyone even bother to ask
them?
Schutz labeled one of the most important forms of knowledge we possess typifications.
They enable us to quickly classify objects and actions we observe and
then quickly and routinely structure our own actions in response. But typifications
operate to some extent like stereotypes—though they make it easy to interpret even
ambiguous situations, they also distort and bias our experience of these situations.
Typifications we’ve learned before can be applied over and over again as long as
we have the sense that they enable us to see things as they “really” are. We’re
likely to go on applying typifications even when problems arise and our interpretations
cause trouble.
The concept of typifications is similar to Mead’s idea of symbols and the notion
of schemas in information-processing theory. It differs from these in emphasizing
that these elements of culture can be beyond our conscious control even when
they are quite crucial in making sense of things and guiding our actions. Mead
thought of symbols as created in face-to-face interaction. But are the roles on his
hypothetical baseball team really that flexible? Maybe they might better be conceived
of as made up of Schutz’s typifications. A little league team might tolerate a
lot of innovation, but on a “real” team, when the game is being played “for real,”
players’ actions are expected to closely adhere to certain norms, including such
seemingly minor things as how to warm up or chatter from the bench.
Typifications may get communicated in face-to-face interactions, but they are
propagated by social institutions and serve to preserve the power and authority of
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