Ethnomethodology
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Ethnomethodology (literally, 'the study of a people's (folk) methods') is a sociological discipline which focuses on the ways in which people make sense of their world, display this understanding to others, and produce the mutually shared social order in which they live. The term was initially coined by Harold Garfinkel in the 1960s.
Ethnomethodology is distinct from traditional sociology, and does not seek to compete with it, or provide remedies for any of its practices.
Two central differences between traditional sociology and ethnomethodology are:
(1) While traditional sociology usually offers an analysis of society which takes the facticity of the social order for granted, ethnomethodology is concerned with the "how" (the methods) by which that social order is produced, and shared.
(2) While traditional sociology usually provides descriptions of social settings which compete with the actual descriptions offered by the individuals who are party to those settings, ethnomethodology seeks to describe the practices (the methods) these individuals use in their actual descriptions of those settings.
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[edit] History and Influence
The approach was developed by Harold Garfinkel, based on his artful analysis of traditional sociological theory (primarily: Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons), traditional sociological concerns (the Hobbesian "problem of order"), and the phenomenologies of Aron Gurwitsch, Alfred Schutz, and Edmund Husserl.
Ethnomethodology has had a significant impact on social scientific inquiry.
For instance, ethnomethodology has always focused on the ways in which words are dependent for their meaning on the context in which they are used [they are 'indexical']. This has led to insights into the question of the objectivity of the social sciences, and the difficulty in establishing a description of human behavior which has an objective status outside the context of any particular descriptive formulation.
Ethnomethodology has had an impact on linguistics and particularly on pragmatics, spawning a whole new discipline of Conversation Analysis.
Ethnomethodological studies of work have played a significant role in the field of human-computer interaction, improving design by providing engineers with descriptions of the practices of users.
Ethnomethodology has also influenced the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge by providing a research approach that describes the social practices("methods")of its research subjects without the commonly accepted practice of evaluating the validity of those practices from an imposed normative standpoint. This has proved to be useful to researchers studying social order in laboratory settings who wished to understand how scientists actually conducted their experiments without either endorsing or criticising their activities utilizing traditional scientific criteria.
[edit] Varieties of ethnomethodology
According to George Psathas, five types of ethnomethodological study can be identified. These may be characterised as
1. The organization of practical actions and practical reasoning. Including the earliest studies, such as those in Garfinkel's seminal Studies in Ethnomethodology.
2. The organization of talk-in-interaction. More recently known as conversation analysis, Harvey Sacks established this approach in collaboration with his colleagues Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson.
3. Talk-in-interaction within institutional or organizational settings. While early studies focused on talk abstracted from the context in which it was produced (usually using tape recordings of telephone conversations) this approach seeks to identify interactional structures that are specific to particular settings.
4. The study of work. 'Work' is used here to refer to any social activity. The analytic interest is in how that work is accomplished within the setting in which it is performed.
5. The haecceity of work. Just what makes an activity what it is? E.g. what makes a test a test, a competition a competition, or a definition a definition?
[edit] Some leading policies and methods
- Ethnomethodological Indifference
- This is the policy of deliberate agnosticism, or indifference, towards the dictates, prejudices, methods and practices of sociological analysis as traditionally conceived (examples: theories of "deviance", analysis of behavior as rule governed, role theory, institutional (de)formations, theories of social stratification, etc.). Dictates and prejudices which serve to pre-structure traditional social scientific investigations independently of the subject matter taken as a topic of study, or the investigatory setting being subjected to scrutiny.
The policy of Ethnomethodological Indifference is specifically not to be conceived as indifference to the problem of social order taken as an individual or group (member's) concern.
- First Time Through
- This is the practice of describing any social activity, regardless of its routine or mundane appearance, as if it were happening for the very first time. This in an attempt to reveal how the observer of the activity assembles, or, "constitutes", the activity for the purposes of formulating any particular description.
The point of the exercise is to make available and underline the complexities of sociological analysis and description. Particularly the indexical and reflexive properties of the actors', or observer's, own descriptions of what is taking place in any given situation.
Such an activity will also reveal the observer's inescapable reliance on the Documentary Method of Interpretation (aka Hermeneutic Circle) as the defining "methodology" of social understanding for both lay persons and social scientists.
- Breaching Experiment
- A method for revealing, or exposing, the common work that is performed by members of particular social groups in maintaining a clearly recognizable and shared social order.
An extreme example: driving the wrong way down a busy one-way street can reveal myriads of useful insights into the patterned social practices, and moral order, of the community of automobile drivers... and police.
The point of such an exercise is to demonstrate that gaining insight into the work involved in maintaining any given social order can often, best be revealed by breaching that social order and observing the results of that breach.
- Sacks' Gloss
- A question about an aspect of the social order that recommends, as a method of answering it, that the researcher should seek out members of society who, in their daily lives, are responsible for the maintenance of that aspect of the social order. Sacks' original question concerned objects in public places and how it was possible to see that such objects did or did not belong to somebody. He found his answer in the activities of police officers who had to decide whether cars were abandoned.
Recommendation: If you want to understand how a particular social order is maintained, or a particular social activity is accomplished, go to the source: the actual people who do the actual work of maintaining and constructing those social structures.
- Durkheim's Aphorism
- Durkheim famously recommended that we "treat social facts as things." This is usually taken to mean that we should assume the objectivity of social facts as a principal of study (thus providing the basis of sociology as a science). Garfinkel's alternative reading of Durkheim is that we should treat the objectivity of social facts as an achievement of society's members, and make the achievement process itself the focus of study.
For Ethnomethodology the topic of study is the social practices of real social actors in real social settings, and the methods by which those actors produce and maintain a shared sense of social order.
[edit] References
- Garfinkel, Harold. 1984. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Malden MA: Polity Press/Blackwell Publishing. (ISBN 0-7456-0005-0) (first published in 1967)
- Garfinkel, Harold. (Hrsg.) 1986. Ethnomethodological Studies of Work, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (ISBN 0-7100-9664-X)
- Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology's Program. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. (ISBN 0-7425-1642-3)
- Gurwitsch, Aron, The Field of Consciousness, Duquesne University Press, 1964 [out-of-print].
- Gurwitsch, Aron, "Outlines of a Theory of 'Essentially Occasional Expressions'", in, Marginal Consciousness, Duquesne University Press, 1985 [out-of-print].
- Psathas, G. (1995) ‘‘Talk and Social Structure’ and ‘Studies of Work’’, in Human Studies, 18: 139-155.
- "Lectures on Conversation" by Harvey Sacks 1992 (two volumes) Backwell, Oxford.
- Heritage, J. 1984. "Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology", Cambridge:Polity. (ISBN 0-7456-0060-3)
- Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge UP. 2000.
- Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers V.I: The Problem of Social Reality, Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1962.
- Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern UP, 1970.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Ethno/CA News A primary source for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis information and resources.
- Paul ten Have, The notion of member is the heart of the matter: on the role of membership knowledge in ethnomethodological inquiry. Forum: Qualitative Social Research 3(3), September 2002.
