Abstract
Ethnomethodology (EM) is a theoretical paradigm created by American sociologist Harold Garfinkel. It is one of the twentieth century schools of sociology strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl’s philosophy of phenomenology. Although EM is similar in certain respects to the various strands of social phenomenology created and influenced by Alfred Schütz and his students, its approach to the empirical study of social action differs in several important ways, with key tenets involving indexical expressions, accountability, and reflexivity. After presenting examples of classic EM research by Garfinkel and his colleagues, and discussing the relationship between EM and the related field of Conversation Analysis, we conclude the chapter with a review of recent and ongoing developments in EM, highlighting its contemporary relevance to studies of social praxis (e.g., culture, morality), embodied action, solitary social action, and the interaction order.
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Notes
- 1.
Husserl was initially a student of mathematics, and his concern for system and certain knowledge reflects this background. Though a “continental” philosopher, his ideas stemmed from some of the same sources (e.g., Frege) that inspired Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and the first generation of “analytic” philosophers in Britain.
- 2.
Heidegger’s view of mind and thinking is thus broadly parallel with that of the classical pragmatists Dewey and Mead.
- 3.
Schütz follows Weber in defining social action in terms of (actual or intended) interaction with other persons. According to Weber, “Social action…can be oriented to the past, present, or future anticipated behavior of others” (Whimster 2004: 327). The stipulation that action is social “only when one’s own behavior is sensibly oriented to that of others” (ibid: 328) implies that conduct oriented to non-human objects is asocial, “a mere event” or occurrence (ibid). As we argue later in the chapter, this conception of the social is unnecessarily narrow, and recent developments in ethnomethodology (anticipated to some degree in the philosophical phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and others) point to “acting alone” (i.e., with non-human entities) as a viable domain for sociological analysis.
- 4.
Both thinkers also drew extensively on empirical psychology to explain the motives shaping social action. Whereas Parsons drew on Freud, Schütz drew on William James and phenomenological psychologists such as Gurwitsch.
- 5.
Other classic studies include Sudnow’s (1965) ethnography of a public defender’s office, in which he documents how a range of criminal acts are (re)-interpreted as “normal crimes” committed in usual ways for reasons typical of a given class of offenders; Cicourel’s (1964) critical analysis of measurement in the social sciences; Pollner’s (1975) explication of “reality disjunctures”; and Harvey Sacks’ (1963) early research on descriptive categories that eventually evolved into conversation analysis, which will be addressed later in the chapter.
- 6.
As Maynard (1986) observed, from its outset, ethnomethodology was regularly characterized in starkly contrasting ways: methodologically, as a method without substance vs. lacking any methodology whatsoever; theoretically, too subjective and embedded in philosophical idealism vs. radically empirical and neo-positivistic; politically conservative (with its seeming avoidance of history and social structure), vs. liberal because of its focus on freedom of action and intention, vs. radical in uncovering the tacit procedures for reproducing reality and its capacity to demystify social reifications, vs. apolitical because any political perspective could “use” it.
- 7.
Garfinkel’s position on this matter recalls Heidegger’s (1996) insistence on the fundamental, radical distinction between beings, or empirical entities and objects in the world, and Being (Dasein), as the irreducible, ineffable background against which beings appear. Any attempt to articulate a formal analytic conception of Being reduces it to a particular being, thereby concealing what it meant to reveal. By the same token, efforts to translate EM into formal analytic terms would reduce it to another branch of FA, and thereby lose the phenomena that are EM’s topics.
- 8.
Some ethnomethodologists have been critical of what they deem CA’s pretensions to formal analysis. Lynch (1997), for example, charges that CA practices a “molecular sociology” that risks losing its phenomena by assimilating them to a uniform analytic apparatus.
- 9.
There are also affinities between the phenomenologist’s method of eidetic reduction—bracketing all assumptions about and knowledge of phenomena in order to analyze just how they present themselves to consciousness—and the disciplined commitment of CA to remaining agnostic about actors’ mental and psychic states and motives in order to attend to the granularity of members’ practices. That is, the analyst tries, to the extent possible, to bracket “commonsensical” intuitions about why members do certain things and to attend instead to how they do what they do—how, that is, they collaboratively produce intelligible, recognizable social phenomena in and through their interactional practices.
- 10.
For a different take for ethnomethodology’s relation to the survey interview—wherein the interview is treated as an interactional domain for investigation along the lines of studies of work, see Maynard and Schaeffer (2000). On ethnomethodological studies of work, see below.
- 11.
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Turowetz, J., Hollander, M.M., Maynard, D.W. (2016). Ethnomethodology and Social Phenomenology. In: Abrutyn, S. (eds) Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_19
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