The Sociology of Everyday Life, or How to Stop Being Fashionable

Abstract

In the first part of the article are presented the most important reasons for the recent increase in interest in the sociology of everyday life. Some of them are related to the situation in which sociology as a whole finds itself today (for example the interest, typical for the sociology of everyday life, in the processes occurring on the micro-level may be treated as the result of the fears of sociologists about the investigation of increasingly hidden macro-structural processes). The fashion for the sociology of everyday life seems also to be a result of the calculation of sociologists; the sociology of everyday life turns out to be a beneficial theoretical research position, allowing compromise between many traditionally opposing theoretical positions (such as actor-structure, the creation and reproduction of rules for collective order etc.). The attraction of the sociology of everyday life is due to the fact that it gives hope for the modernisation of the “tool kit” of sociology and is an attempted remedy for boredom in the “Post-Modern Sociology”, at least in the sense that it again proposes sociologists to focus attention more on similarities than differences. In the second part of the article, the author concentrates on a selection of the problems with which the sociology of everyday life is faced. The most important of them can be summarised by the question: why do we study everyday life? The answer to this question is an attempt to define three different explanatory models according to which everyday practice is seen as (1) a reflection of phenomena and processes which occur at a macrostructural level, or (2) a preview of macrostructural changes or, finally, 3) an autonomic sphere of social life which cannot be treated as an “indicator”.