Phenomenological sociology is a kind of understanding sociology whose proponents characterize society as a phenomenon that has been created and is constantly being recreated in the spiritual interaction of individuals. Phenomenological philosophy was founded by Edmund Husserl. Engaged in the development of radical concepts, he wanted to create a philosophy that would appeal to the source of our experience and knowledge. He believed that scientific knowledge is increasingly moving away from reality, and that phenomenology can restore such a connection. After 50 years, Husserl’s argument was used by several other sociologists and aimed at eliminating established social theory, especially against structural functionalism, which was considered divorced from social life and experience.
The phenomenological philosophy of science was also studied by another famous person - Alfred Schütz, who was a student of Edmund Husserl. Under the influence of symbolic interactionism and the ideas of American pragmatic theory, A. Schütz attempted to combine these two directions with a phenomenological understanding, which is clearly reflected in his main work - “The Phenomenology of the Social World”. Another significant phenomenological social research is the work of T. Luckman and P. Berger "Social construction of reality." The beginning of their work is a phenomenological analysis of everyday knowledge, which typification is almost always inherent in. By their very nature, knowledge is always aimed at solving certain practical problems. Further, Luckman and Berger argue that practical knowledge is produced by individuals who are influenced by the entire amount of knowledge produced by other people.
The appearance of phenomenological sociology in literary sources is very often associated with the opposition of positivism, naturalism, structural functionalism and empiricism. To some extent this is true. And yet, in order for phenomenological sociology to appear, there were other important reasons, some of which were in the logic of development of all sociological science. One of the main reasons is the need to study the social world as the everyday, so-called everyday, world of the individual. At the same time, this refers to an individual who knows how to feel, experience and strive to achieve something. Proceeding from this, the social world, being the object of sociological research, turned into a world of subjective experience, in other words, a phenomenal world. Now the social world is the life world of people whose actions have a subjective meaning and are completely dependent on those objects that affect them. This is the life world that phenomenological sociology should have studied.
Modern phenomenology in sociology, and in particular its supporters, is guided by the fact that the surrounding (external) world of people is the result of their creation of consciousness. Without denying the existence of the objective world, sociologists believe that it becomes important for people only when they perceive it real, and also when it turns from an objective external to an internal subjective one. At the same time, individuals perceive not so much the world itself as its phenomena, that is, phenomena. Phenomenological sociology in this case has one main task - to find out, understand and understand how people organize (structure) the phenomena of the perceived world in their consciousness, and then embody their knowledge of the world in everyday life. To make it more convenient to solve such a problem, along with the phenomenological sociology, the sociology of knowledge is used. Thus, phenomenological sociology is interested not so much in the objective world of social processes and phenomena, but in how the world and numerous structures are perceived by ordinary people in their daily lives. That is why we can confidently say that the proponents of this trend set the following goal: to comprehend and understand the world in its spiritual being.