Theories of Everyday Life
The intellectual traditions — Marxist, phenomenological and dramaturgical — that established everyday life as a serious object of theory.
Definition
Theories of everyday life are systematic frameworks that take the ordinary, taken-for-granted realm of daily existence as their object, explaining how it is structured, experienced and made meaningful.
Scope
This topic surveys the principal theoretical approaches to everyday life. It covers Lefebvre's Marxist critique, the phenomenological concept of the life-world, Goffman's dramaturgical analysis of social interaction, and the way cultural studies synthesised these strands. It supplies the conceptual background against which the area's more specific topics on tactics, rhythm and space are situated.
Core questions
- How does Lefebvre analyse everyday life as a site of alienation and possibility?
- What is the phenomenological concept of the life-world?
- How does Goffman treat everyday social interaction as a kind of performance?
- How did cultural studies draw these traditions together?
Key concepts
- everyday life
- alienation
- life-world
- intersubjectivity
- impression management
- front stage and back stage
Key theories
- Marxist critique of the everyday
- Lefebvre treats everyday life as the level at which capitalism is reproduced through commodification and routine, yet also as a potential site of festival, desire and transformation.
- The life-world
- Phenomenological sociology, following Schutz, describes the everyday life-world as the taken-for-granted, intersubjective reality within which people act using stocks of common-sense knowledge.
- Dramaturgy of everyday life
- Goffman analyses face-to-face interaction as a theatrical performance in which people manage impressions through front-stage and back-stage behaviour.
History
Distinct disciplinary traditions converged on the everyday in the mid-twentieth century: Western Marxism through Lefebvre, phenomenology and ethnomethodology through Schutz and his successors, and micro-sociology through Goffman's dramaturgical model (1959). Cultural studies, synthesised in introductions such as Highmore's (2002), later wove these into a distinctive cultural theory of the everyday.
Debates
- Structure versus interaction
- Whether everyday life is best explained through large-scale structures and ideology, as in Lefebvre, or through the micro-level analysis of situated interaction, as in Goffman and phenomenology.
Key figures
- Henri Lefebvre
- Alfred Schutz
- Erving Goffman
- Ben Highmore
Related topics
Seminal works
- goffman1959
- schutz1973
- lefebvre1991
- highmore2002
Frequently asked questions
- Is 'everyday life' a single, unified theory?
- No. It is better understood as a meeting point for several traditions — Marxist, phenomenological, sociological — each of which conceptualises the ordinary differently. Their tensions are part of what makes everyday-life studies a lively field.