Psychology Commons^™

Rules Of Order: Or So To Speak, Arthur Emanuel Blank

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How members of a social unit acquire their shared knowledge about the social world was approached in Sherif's (1935, 1936) writings on norm formation and in the phenomenological descriptions of Schutz (1971, 1973) and Berger and Luckmann (1967). Both traditions presume that shared understandings originate in face-to-face encounters, but they diverge in that the phenomenologists argue that talk, and the construction of "typifications," plays a prominent role in the acquisition of shared knowledge. For the phenomenologists, a "typification" enables members to categorize behavior as a known event and permits individuals to consider disparate behaviors as belonging to the same class …