Page 57 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

34 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

today and tomorrow. In fact, our forefathers in economics were themselves
philosophers before the field became an academic discipline.
It is in this context that we name the perspective and the tradition from an
old philosophical tradition “Lifeworld,” which is a school of philosophy.
Lifeworld comes from the German die Lebenswelt, with its roots in the 18th
century philosophy of Kant, and later on Husserl, Heidegger, Schutz, and
Gadamer. The theoretical development from this philosophical tradition is
seen in different schools of contemporary social science thought ranging from
phenomenology, hermeneutic, ethnomethodology, linguistics, and symbolic
interactionism. For us, the Lifeworld tradition and its interactionism theoret-
ical development is an approach to theorizing, hypothecating, describing,
understanding, and explaining everyday life. In short, the Lifeworld and
interactionism represent the elements of any natural, physical, or engineering
science. This is discussed in the following paragraphs.
Overall, the Lifeworld school of thought is placed in the paradigmatic
world of science as the “subjectivist” perspective. Lifeworld is the individual
whose thoughts and daily interactions between people and larger groups are
essential in understanding social reality, everyday life, and social construction
with the world. Today in Europe, much of the discussion focuses on phe-
nomenology and “social constructionism,” which we view as part of the
Lifeworld tradition. In the following discussion, we also apply more US-based
theories (particularly interactionism and Chomsky’s linguistics) in the tradi-
tion of sociology and philosophy to economics, thus creating the science of
qualitative economics.
This discussion takes a different philosophical paradigm and applies it to
the creation of the science of economics. We see the parallel in linguistics
today with the need to understand the meaning behind ideas, words, sentences,
and meanings by following the scientific method. Linguistics is remarkably
similar to economics in its need to become a science. The field needs to define
and explain the definition(s) behind numbers and statistics. Finally, linguists
like any science, offers hypothesis testing along with universal rules and
formalism in predicting future action and interactions.
The philosophical roots of the Lifeworld tradition are primarily European.
Lifeworld can be traced to set the stage for the interactionism subjectivist
theoretical perspective exemplified by Herbert Blumer, the 20th century
American sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Blumer and his
mentor George Herbert Mead, the early 20th century philosopher at the
University of Chicago, are the American roots for a Lifeworld tradition.
We take the subjectivist approach as practiced in interactionism for
describing and analyzing business. What is even more significant, however, is
the application of linguists combined with symbolic interactionism and phe-
nomenology. As a science, this perspective provides theoretical and analytical
constructions that are appropriate to the science of economics. When such