Apply theory to social issues

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Introduction

This discusses the theories of Erving Goffman , Alfred Schutz , and Harold Garfinkel . The three authors are sociologists and yet looking at social issues through different perspectives . This will explain why there are similarities as well as differences . In to understand their theories their written works will be compared and contrasted in the following pages . Moreover , for the sake of clarity three social issue will be discussed using one or two theories to explain the underlying reasons behind a particular human behavior p

Explaining the Theories

Alfred Schutz : Phenomenological Theory

The main argument of Alfred Schuts is built on the idea that there can be derived relationships . In other words there is a means of dealing with other people even if a personal and face-to-face interaction did not exist . There is a way of knowing people indirectly and that Schutz demonstrated that a human being posses the ability to get something from indirect relationships because even with the people that a person continually deals with and interacts with there comes a time that the two shall go on separate ways . For friends it may be a temporary parting but sometimes it could mean years of not seeing each other and yet in the separation there is always that ability to remember and to relate to that person . This same ability to deal with long lost friends is the same used to deal with people that a person knew existed but may never get the chance to know them in a face-to-face encounter

Another major aspect of his theory tells of how man learns from the past especially when dealing with documents such as letters and books And Schutz wrote

My knowledge of my contemporaries is , therefore , inferential and discursive . It stands by its essential nature , in an objective context of measuring and only in such . It has within it no intrinsic reference to persons nor to the subjective matrix within which the experiences in question where constituted However , it is due to this very abstraction from subjective context of meaning that they exhibit the property which we have called their again and again ' character . they are treated as typical conscious experiences of someone ' and , as such , as basically homogeneous and repeatable

The above statements provide a scientific explanation as to why a human being can be moved by reading books and letters . There is that unexplainable power that certain books can have on people . There is also that obvious effect when a person gets hold of a letter and read it . It does not matter if that letter was addressed to that person , there is still that mechanism that kicks in while reading the note . But Schutz with his brilliant analytical mind was able to isolate the sociological principles at work and in so many words he was able to explain that the reader was actually communicating to the letter writer of the past no matter how far it goes back through time...