This volume has been developed through a research symposium held in October 1997 under the sponsorship of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. and Florida Atlantic University. Besides its chief purposes of advancing research on as well as in the spirit of the work of Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) and of laying foundations for the upcoming Schutz centennial year, it is also a "medical checkup," one might say, concerning the state of research on the work of Schutz as well as research influenced by him a decade after some similar assessments, i. e. , Alfred Schutz: Neue Beitriige zur Rezeption seines Werkes, ed. Elisabeth List and Ilja Srubar (Amsterdam: Rodolphi, 1988) and Worldly Phenomenology: The Continuing Influence of Alfred Schutz on North American Human Science, ed. Lester Embree (Washington, D. C. : Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1988). Much has changed during the past decade. First of all, a considerable quantity of new primary source material has become available, beginning with Alfred Schutz, Col/ectedPapers, Vol. IV, edd.
Helmut Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten (DordrechtIBostoniLondon: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), but also including "Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of Interpretative Social Science: An Ineditum of Alfred Schutz from Spring 1953," Husserl Studies, vol. 14, pp. 123-149, 1977, "The Sociology of Language" (1958), edited from his course notes by Fred Kersten, and "T. S.