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For Schütz, the principal area of investigation was commonsense knowledge, what “everybody knows” in a given group or society. This shared knowledge provides the basis of social reality, the beliefs and values, the social objects and institutions that inform our daily lives and behaviour, as well as the practical reasoning processes we employ continually to “make sense” of specific real-life situations (1964). Finally, if they are to understand “what’s going on”, both analysts (such as sociologists) and actual participants need to know in their different ways something about the historical and social processes through which knowledge is established and communicated from individual to individual, from group to group, and from generation to generation. Such knowledge is essential if they are to make valid judgements about the meaning and appropriateness of behaviour—their own or others’. This was the topic of Norbert Elias’ The Civilising Process: The History of Manners (1939/1978). By examining the development of “normal behaviour”, such as table manners, and by analysing the discourse used to teach and describe it, Elias was able not only to identify the norms in question but to draw conclusions about changes in the processes through which the social self is constructed and perceived.
From this brief summary, it will, I hope, be clear why Chia-Mei Jane Coughlan has found Mannheim’s approach particularly appropriate and helpful in focussing her own work, though she has been careful to call on subsequent writers, too—in particular, David Bloor.
As we have seen, then, the field of the sociology of knowledge embraces the whole range of a society’s intellectual output, including its belief systems and ideologies, its collective representations, its theories and discourses, its culture, as well as the social structures and practices which vehiculate them. Whereas classical epistemology and the history of ideas both deal with ideas and knowledge as if they were immanent, independent of social influences, and vacuum packed, the sociology of knowledge focuses on the social construction of consciousness and reality. An important aim of the sociologists of knowledge is to describe and analyse the social knowledge system: From this perspective, society is seen as a set of functions and structures for the management of knowledge, including knowledge creation, organisation, distribution, storage, legitimisation, and utilisation.