Experiental Knowledge: Alfred Schutz Should Be There

In a conversation with Professor James March on his papers on experiential knowledge, we pointed out that his bibliographical references do not mention the works of Alfred Schutz. Jim March immediately answered “Yes, Alfred Schutz should be there”. Inspired by the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the interpretative sociology of Max Weber, Alfred Schutz (1899 1959) worked on the foundations of sociology from the point of view of personal experience, life stories and the content of our consciousness. Husserl’s method was based on the phenomenology of eidetic intuition, which tries to overcome the classical difficulties about the formation and definition of concepts, and on the epoche of natural attitude, related to the critical suspension of beliefs in philosophy and the suspension of doubts in common sense situations. Schutz focussed on the characteristics of the mental constructs, on the justification of interpretative method in social sciences and on the horizons of our life worlds. He did not explicitly work on the concept of learning, but his studies on our mental constructs, experience, knowledge at hand and purposes at hand involve a radical theory of experiential learning, in which all kinds of learning are experiential. The aim of the paper is to make explicit some implications of Schutz’s works on learning, or, in other words, to unveil his theory of experiential learning. Pointing out their similarities and differences, it will compare the works of Schutz with the works of James March, which we take as an example of the approaches based on conceptual frames, mathematical models and empirical data, and which focus on management learning. It will also emphasize the problems created in experiential learning by the idea that giving meanings to objects, events and intentional actions is a form of producing knowledge.