Define stocks of knowledge, recipes, and typifications drawing upon your own life for concrete examples. Be sure to explain how these concepts differ between different individuals.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Stocks of knowledge (Erfahrung) provide actors with rules for interpreting interactions, social relationships, organizations, institutions, and the physical world. Schutz (1970:98) also refers to stocks of knowledge as “cookery-book knowledge.” Just as a cookbook has recipes and lists of ingredients and formulas for making something to eat, so, too, we all have a “cookbook” of recipes, or implicit instructions, for accomplishing everyday life. Indeed, according to Schutz (1970:99), most of our daily activities, from rising to going to bed, “are performed by following recipes reduced to automatic habits or unquestioned platitudes.” Although Schutz sometimes uses the terms “recipe” and “typification” interchangeably, typification is the process of constructing personal “ideal-types” based on the typical function of people or things rather than their unique features. Schutz’s conceptualization of typification is more individualistic and interactive than the collectivistic sociological notion of “stereotype.” While stereotypes are, by definition, pregiven and somewhat stagnant or fixed, building on Weber’s notion of “ideal-type,” Schutz emphasizes that typification is a process through which actors isolate the generic characteristics that are relevant for their particular interactive goal. In sum, the language we learn and the social structures within which we live provide us with a stockpile of typifications and recipes that make the world both intelligible and manageable. This does not mean, however, that specific elements of the cultural realm are the same for every person. Rather, stocks of knowledge are “biographically articulated”; every individual has a unique stock of knowledge because no two individuals have the same biographical or subjective experience.