Defining Ethnomethodology

• Ethnomethodology is the study of common-sense knowledge and the procedures ordinary members of society use to make sense of and act in their circumstances (Heritage, 1984; Linstead, 2006).

• Founded by Harold Garfinkel, who, like Durkheim, sees social facts as fundamental, but Garfinkel’s social facts differ from Durkheim’s.

• Durkheim’s social facts are external and coercive; ethnomethodology views social facts as accomplishments of members—produced through members’ methodological activities.

• Garfinkel describes social facts as society’s locally produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing practical achievements, created by members’ work with no evasion or postponement (Garfinkel, 1991).

• Ethnomethodology focuses on the organization of everyday life or “immortal, ordinary society” (Garfinkel, 1988) and the “extraordinary organization of the ordinary” (Pollner, 1987).

• Ethnomethodology is neither macrosociology (like Durkheim’s social facts) nor microsociology, rejecting the view of actors as “judgmental dopes” but also not assuming people are constantly reflexive or calculative (Heritage, 1984).

• Most action is considered routine and relatively unreflective, following Alfred Schutz.

• Focus is on members, not individuals; members are seen as membership activities, the artful practices producing both large-scale structures and small-scale interactional structures (Hilbert, 1992).

• Ethnomethodologists seek a new way to access the traditional sociological concern with objective structures, both micro and macro (Maynard and Clayman, 1991).

• A key concept is that ethnomethods are “reflexively accountable”; accounts are how actors explain, describe, criticize, and idealize specific situations (Bittner, 1973; Orbuch, 1997).

• Accounting is the process of offering accounts to make sense of the world; ethnomethodologists analyze both the content and practices of accounting, especially in conversations.

• Example: A student explaining to a professor why she missed an exam is offering an account; ethnomethodologists study how such accounts are offered, accepted, or rejected (Sharrock and Anderson, 1986).

• They adopt “ethnomethodological indifference,” meaning they do not judge accounts but analyze how they function in practical action.

• Ethnomethodologists also study the accounts of sociologists themselves, showing that sociological reports are also forms of accounts, thus disenchanting sociology as just another commonsense interpretive activity.

• Accounts are reflexive: they contribute to the very state of affairs they describe; describing social life changes social life itself.

• Sociologists, in studying and reporting social life, also change it as subjects alter behavior due to scrutiny and descriptions of their behavior.

HAROLD GARFINKEL

• Harold Garfinkel was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 29, 1917; his father was a small businessman selling household goods on the installment plan to immigrant families.

• Although his father wanted him to learn a trade, Garfinkel desired to go to college and took business courses at the then-unaccredited University of Newark.

• These courses, taught by Columbia graduate students, were both highly theoretical and lacked practical experience, influencing Garfinkel’s later theoretical orientation and focus on “accounts.”

• An important influence was an accounting course on the “theory of accounts,” centered on making columns and figures accountable to superiors (Rawls, 2000).

• Garfinkel also encountered other Jewish students at Newark who later became social scientists.

• After graduating in 1939, he spent a summer in a Quaker work camp in rural Georgia and then entered the University of North Carolina sociology program with a fellowship.

• His thesis adviser was Guy Johnson, whose interest in race relations led Garfinkel to write his master’s thesis on interracial homicide.

• He was exposed to social theory, especially phenomenology and Talcott Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action (1937).

• Unlike most students drawn to statistics and scientific sociology, Garfinkel was attracted to theory, particularly Florian Znaniecki’s work on social action and the actor’s point of view.

• Drafted in 1942, Garfinkel served in the Air Force, training troops in tank warfare on a Miami Beach golf course without actual tanks, using only pictures from Life magazine.

• This experience highlighted practical problems of adequate description and accountability in action, influencing his later views.

• After WWII, Garfinkel studied at Harvard under Talcott Parsons, who valued abstract generalizations, while Garfinkel focused on detailed description.

• Garfinkel debated the merits of abstract theorizing versus empirical detail within sociology but increasingly prioritized empirical demonstration of his theoretical approach.

• While a student at Harvard, he taught at Princeton for two years, then held a position at Ohio State working on a project studying leadership on airplanes and submarines, which ended due to funding cuts.

• He then joined a project on jury research in Wichita, Kansas, where he coined the term ethnomethodology in 1954 to describe his interest in jury deliberations and social life.

• In fall 1954, Garfinkel accepted a position at UCLA, where he worked until retirement in 1987.

• He introduced ethnomethodology in his seminars and mentored students who spread the approach widely.

• Notable students influenced by Garfinkel include Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, who developed conversation analysis, currently the most important branch of ethnomethodology.

The Diversification of Ethnomethodology

• Ethnomethodology was “invented” by Harold Garfinkel starting in the late 1940s and was first systematized with the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967).

• Over the years, ethnomethodology has grown enormously and expanded in multiple directions.

• By the late 1970s, Don Zimmerman observed that ethnomethodology included several varieties which were sometimes distinct and even incompatible lines of inquiry (1978:6).

• Ten years later, Paul Atkinson (1988) noted a lack of coherence in ethnomethodology and argued that some ethnomethodologists had strayed too far from its underlying premises.

• Despite these issues, ethnomethodology remains a very vibrant sociological theory.

• Ethnomethodology is expected to continue to diversify and face “growing pains” due to its focus on the infinite variety of everyday life.

• The future will likely see many more studies, increased diversification, and further challenges within the field.

Studies of Institutional Settings

• Maynard and Clayman (1991) identify several varieties of work in ethnomethodology, with two being particularly notable.

• The first type involves ethnomethodological studies of institutional settings.

• Early studies by Garfinkel and associates focused on casual, noninstitutionalized settings such as the home.

• Later, ethnomethodology shifted to studying everyday practices in various institutional settings like courtrooms, medical settings (Ten Have, 1995), and police departments.

• Since the early 1990s, such studies have increased significantly (Perakyla, 2007).

• The goal of these studies is to understand how people perform their official tasks and, in doing so, constitute the institution where these tasks take place.

• Conventional sociology explains institutional behavior through structure, formal rules, and official procedures.

• Ethnomethodologists argue that these external constraints are inadequate to fully explain what happens in institutions.

• People are not determined by external forces; rather, they use these forces to accomplish tasks and actively create the institution.

• People employ practical procedures to not only manage daily life but also to manufacture the institution’s outputs.

• For example, police crime rates are not just the outcome of following rules but depend on professionals’ interpretive work to classify cases, such as deciding if victims count as homicides.

• This interpretive record keeping is itself a practical activity worthy of study.

Conversation Analysis

• The second variety of ethnomethodology is conversation analysis (Rawls, 2005a; Schegloff, 2001).

• The goal of conversation analysis is the detailed understanding of the fundamental structures of conversational interaction (Zimmerman, 1988:429).

• Conversation is defined as an interactional activity exhibiting stable, orderly properties that are analyzable achievements of the conversants (Zimmerman, 1988:406).

• Rules and procedures exist for conversations but do not determine content; instead, they are used to accomplish a conversation.

• Conversation analysis focuses on constraints internal to the conversation itself, not external forces.

• Conversations are viewed as internally, sequentially ordered.

• Zimmerman’s five basic principles of conversation analysis:

  1. Requires collection and analysis of highly detailed conversational data, including words, hesitations, cut-offs, restarts, silences, breathing noises, throat clearings, sniffles, laughter, prosody, and nonverbal behaviors from video recordings (Zimmerman, 1988:413).

  2. Even the finest conversational details are an orderly accomplishment by the social actors themselves (Zimmerman, 1988:415).

  3. Interaction and conversation have stable, orderly properties achieved by the actors, treated as autonomous and separable from cognitive processes and larger contexts.

  4. The fundamental framework of conversation is sequential organization (Zimmerman, 1988:422).

  5. Conversational interaction is managed on a turn-by-turn or local basis (Zimmerman, 1988:423).

• Conversation is both context-shaped (influenced by previous turns) and context-renewing (current turn shapes future context) (Heritage, 1984).

• Methodologically, conversation analysts study naturally occurring conversations using audiotape or videotape to capture details from the everyday world rather than researcher-imposed data.

• This method allows researchers to examine and reexamine conversations in minute detail, enabling highly detailed analyses.

• Conversation analysis assumes that conversations are the foundation of other interpersonal relations (David Gibson, 2000).

• Conversations are the most pervasive form of interaction and provide the fullest matrix of socially organized communicative practices (Heritage and Atkinson, 1984:13).

• The core of ethnomethodology lies not in theory but in empirical studies; theoretical knowledge is derived from these studies.