The Social Construction of Reality

The phenomenological analysis of everyday life, or rather of the subjective experience of everyday life, refrains from any causal or genetic hypotheses, as well as from assertions about the ontological status of the phenomena analyzed. Different objects present themselves to consciousness as constituents of different spheres of reality. The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality. The reality of everyday life encompasses both kinds of sectors, as long as what appears as a problem does not pertain to a different reality altogether. As long as the routines of everyday life continue without interruption they are apprehended as unproblematic. All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern.