Problems of Conceptualizing and Studying Everyday Life As An Object of Sociological Inquiry

Abstract

Everyday life has become in recent years an object of growing theoretical and empirical interest and inquiry. In close inspection it seems however that these studies suffer from serious problems of conceptualization relating to the essential characteristics, content and production and reproduction of daily life and bear the danger of leading to an understanding which treats daily life as something ordinary and existing on its own and independently of the agents and of their understanding, action and the meaning they attach to their actions. In this context, the problem of conceptualization of everyday life makes it necessary to include the discussions of labor, work and social reproduction in parallel with how it is produced. For this reason, it is essential to open the current concepts for discussion so that possible problems of meaning citations can be eliminated and an empirical research process can be reasonably built. This study makes a critical assessment of each one of these problems of conceptualization and proposes a new way of approaching to its conceptualization and of a set of fundamental questions to be asked and answered in any empirical research on daily life. These questions are what daily life means for the agents, what jobs are regarded as labor, what is regarded as work, what activities are placed in leisure time, and how these activities are positioned in the daily life budget with regard to starting, going on, interrupting and ending. On the basis of the realist social science methodology, it is envisaged that the incidental qualities of everyday life will be distinguished from the necessary qualities and the formal relationships of their essential relationships.