Waiting and Unemployment.

Waiting, a phenomenon that is essentially neutral is a form of intentionality, which can bestow striking qualities to the act. Waiting is a temporal experience most often characterized by its directedness toward the future. In this article, on the other hand, the author intend to examine the question of whether or not it is possible in the social sciences to develop a social theory that is neither immediately taken from our prescientific, everyday conception of social action in relation to social institutions, nor is just an ideology, nor the immediate reflection of the social philosophy of one of the many trends in contemporary philosophy. In order to be able to formulate the problem more carefully the author shall limit his reflections to sociology, although in his opinion much of what will be argued for will apply to the other social sciences, also. Those who adhere to the belief in the possibility of a genuinely scientific social science do not deny that one encounters certain problems in the realm of the social sciences that are not met in the natural sciences.