Abstract
In contrast to Schutz’s approach to social science, Garfinkel presents ethnomethodology as an “alternate technology of social analysis” which seeks to respect the phenomena of order* as produced and achieved order and to show how such phenomena become accessible through the various study policies which it enumerates and delineates. The result is systematic, rigorous, empirical studies of practical action and practical reasoning in and as of the methods actually used, concretely, by members in the course of living their ordinary society.
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References
Alfred Schutz, “Common Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” in Collected Papers Vol. I. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962, 35ff. Hereafter referred to as CP1.
His writings were first collected in the publication, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967. Republished Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984) and have appeared in a number of papers and presentations in subsequent years. This paper draws particularly from the later works (“Respecification: Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. in and as of the Essential Haecceity of Immortal Ordinary Society, (I) - An Announcement of Studies,” in Graham Button, Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 and (with D. Lawrence Wieder) “Two Incommensurable, Asymmetrically Alternative Technologies of Social Analysis,” in Graham Watson and Robert M. Seiler, Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology. Newbury Park and London: Sage Publications, 1992) and the studies of work program, which was first presented with exemplary studies in 1986 (Harold Garfinkel, ed. Ethnomethodological Studies of Work. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986 ).
And, as John Heritage (Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984, 306) says: “as long as the participants in a scene can remain assured that their ordinary trusted methods of common-sense reasoning were adequate to their tasks, they continued to employ them with varying degrees of cognitive discomfort. As soon as the applicability of the methods themselves was threatened, anger and bewilderment immediately made their appearance… (thus showing that) while a shared cognitive order is ultimately based on shared and trusted methods of understanding, the use of the methods is the object of
The studies-of-work program, as described by Heritage (op. cit., 302), involves, then, an effort to “treat as relevant materials for analysis all exhibits of activity which are recognized as belonging to a domain of action by the participants to that domain. These materials are subjected to a rigorous naturalistic description in which the focus is on the production, management and recognition of specific, material competences as they are exhibited in real time and in settings in which their employment is recognizably consequential. Ordinary activities are thus examined for the ways in which they exhibit accountably competent work practice as viewed by practitioners Competences are exclusively treated `from within’ - within scenes of commonplace work activity and by mundanely competent practitioners - for competent occupational practice is recognizably produced only within such scenes and by such persons and not elsewhere…. [W]ork competences are found, not in the privacy of individual consciousness, but as publicly observable courses of specific, local and temporally organized conduct.”
Lynch says that this refers to “the fluency that comes with being able to take one’s mastery for granted” (“Silence in Context: Ethnomethodology and Social Theory,” presented at the conference, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. East and West. Tokyo, Japan, 1997, fn 16).
Ethnomethodological studies are oriented to the examination of “haecceities” by which Garfinkel means “the just here, just now, with just what is at hand, with just who is here, in just the time that just this local gang of us have, in and with just what the local gang of us can make of just the time we need, and therein, in, about, as, and over the course of the in vivo work, achieving and exhibiting everything that those great achievements of comparability, universality, transcendentality of results, indifference of methods to local parties who are using them, for what they consisted of, looked like, the ‘missing what’ of formal analytic studies of practical action.” (Garfinkel and Wieder, “Two Incommensurable,” op. cit., fn. 2, 203).
We ask that order* be read as a proxy for any topic of reason, logic, meaning, proof, uniformity, generalization, universal, comparability, clarity, consistency, coherence, objectivity, objective knowledge, observation, detail, structure, and the rest… EM seeks to respecify them as locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order*… Any and all topics of order* are candidates for EM study and respecification… But with whatever `guise’ of candidacy a topic of order* is presented, it is respecifiable only as discoverably and inspectably the case.“ (Garfinkel and Wieder, ”Two Incommensurate,“ op. cit., fn. 1, 202–203).
See here Garfinkel “Respecification” (op. cit.) for the discussion of Parsons’ plenum and the view that “there is no order in the plenum.” (Parsons’ Structure of Social Action distinguished between the) “concreteness of organizational things on the one hand and real society that methods of constructive analysis could provide on the other…” (p. 14) Parsons’ view was that only the methods of constructive analysis, i.e., social scientific theorizing and research methods could provide for the topics of order.
See especially Coulter, Mind In Action (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989) for an elaboration of this argument. 1tiGarfinkel and Wieder, “Two Incommensurate,” 180.
E. Livingston, The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.
Michael Lynch, Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
Garfinkel and Wieder (“Two Incommensurate,” op. cit., 182) state it as “Just in any actual case a phenomenon of order* already possesses whatever as methods methods could be of [finding it] if [methods for finding it] are at issue. Comparably, a phenomenon of order* already possesses whatever as methods methods could be of [observing], of [recognizing], of [counting], of [collecting], of [topicalizing], of [describing] it, and so on if, and as of the in vivo lived local production and natural accountability of the phenomenon, [observing], [recognizing], [counting], [collecting], [topicalizing], or [describing] it is at issue. 20Garfinkel and Wieder, ”Two Incommensurate,“ op. cit., 184.
As Sacks is quoted as saying: “... I don’t want to write definitions; and I don’t want to consult authorities. Instead, I want to find a work group, somewhere, perhaps in Los Angeles, who, as their day’s work,and because they know it as their day’s work, will be able to teach me what I could be talking about as they know it as the day’s work.” (Garfinkel and Wieder, “Two Incommensurate,” op. cit., 185) ‘This is stated as follows by Garfinkel and Wieder: “[T]he analyst looks to find, as of the haecceities of some local gang’s work affairs, the organizational thing that they are up against and that they can be brought to teach the analyst what he needs to learn and to know from them, with which, by learning from them, to teach them what their affairs consist of as locally produced, locally occasioned, and locally ordered, locally described, locally questionable, counted, recorded, observed phenomena of order*, in and as of their in vivo accountably doable coherent and cogent detail for each another next first time” (“Two Incommensurate,” op. cit., 186).
Harold Garfinkel and H. Sacks, “On Formal Structures of Practical Actions,” in J. C. McKinney and E. A. Tiryakian, eds., Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970, 338–366.
It is a procedure of not needing to consult the corpus of classic methods and findings with which to carry out the tasks of EM research. For the time being, we will carry out the tasks of our research while abstaining from the use of the classic corpus of findings, policies, methods, and the rest. The policy does not advocate the abandonment of established studies. It is a research practice; one does it as an observance, something like driving in traffic effectively and correctly teaches one to observe it as a skill. Administering ethnomethodological indifference is an instructable way to work in such a fashion as specifically and deliberately, over actual exigencies of the research, to pay no ontological judgmental attention to the established corpus of social science.“ It means `withholding the corpus status of formal analytic descriptive facts, avoiding the design and administration of generic representations and their methodized dopes, and in related ways making no use of the methods of constructive analysis” (Garfinkel and Wieder, 1992, “Two Incommensurate,” op. cit., 186–7). As Lynch describes it “The attitude of indifference is not the same as a value-free or value-neutral posture. Contrary to the classic Germanic notion of value freedom, ethnomethodological indifference extends to the conceptions of scientific rationality that social scientists customarily claim as neutral grounds for describing and (re)evaluating the actions observed in a field of conduct. There is nothing heroic about indifference. It does not require an effort to purge the soul of all prejudice, or the performance of a technique that controls or rules out sources of bias. It is not a matter of freeing oneself of mentalities that are inherent in an ordinary situation; instead, it is a matter of explicating such situations with a full attention to their ordinary accountability. In other words, ethnomethodological indifference is not a matter of taking something away,but of not taking up a gratuitous `scientific’ instrument: a social science model, method, or scheme of rationality for observing, analyzing, and evaluating what members already can see and describe as a matter of course. The main difficulty associated with ethnomethodological indifference is convincing sociologists that the questions and topics ethnomethodologists take up are worthy of attention.” “Indifference is a kind of objectivistic attitude, but it is misleading to compare it with the more familiar versions of objectivism. The idea is not to describe social objects as though they were subject to physical laws or governed by mechanisms, but to come to terms with just the sorts of thing they are for those who routinely produce and recognize them. There is no reason not to treat an embodied gesture, a greeting sequence, a traffic jam or a service line as an object, but the difficult task that lies ahead is to discover and describe how this object is produced. The ‘how’ is an achievement in action, of action, and as action” (“Silence in Context,” op. cit., 13–14).
Constructive analysis refers to the program of practical sociological reasoning which undertakes the “elaboration and defense of unified sociological theory, model building, cost-benefit analysis, the use of natural metaphors to collect wider settings under the experience of a locally known setting, the use of laboratory arrangements as experimental schemes of inference, schematic reporting and statistical evaluations of frequency, reproducibility, or effectiveness of natural language practices and of various social arrangements that entail their use, and so on. For convenience, we shall collect such practices of professional sociology’s practical technology with the term ”constructive analysis“ (Harold Garfinkel and H. Sacks, ”On the Formal Structures of Practical Actions,“ in J.C. McKinney and E.A. Tiryakian, eds., Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970, 340).
The ones presented here are drawn from Garfinkel’s earliest formulations in Studies in Ethnomethodology (31–34) and the headings are my paraphrases of his paragraphs. ‘Garfinkel states this as: “No inquiries can be excluded no matter where or when they occur, no matter how vast or trivial their scope, organization, cost, duration, consequences, whatever their successes, whatever their repute, their practitioners, their claims, their philosophies or philosophers. Procedures and results of water witching, divination, mathematics, sociology -whether done by lay persons or professionals—are addressed according to the policy that every feature of sense, of fact, of method, for every particular case of inquiry without exception, is the managed accomplishment of organized settings of practical actions, and that particular determinations in members’ practices and results—from witchcraft to topology—are acquired and assured only through particular, located organizations of artful practices” (Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology,op. cit., 32).
JOThis has been referred to by Pollner as “radical reflexivity,” a dimension of ethnomethodological studies which has more recently received less attention. “[E]thnomethodology is referentially reflexive to the extent it appreciates its own analyses as constitutive and endogenous accomplishments. Referentially reflexive appreciation of constitution is radicalized when the appreciator is included within the scope of reflexivity, i.e., when the formulation of reflexivity—as well as every other feature of analysis—is appreciated as an endogenous achievement.. in differing degrees of radicalism, studies attend to the practices and presuppositions of the researcher as they address those of participants in the settings under consideration” (“Left of Ethnomethodology: The Rise and Decline of Radical Reflexivity,” American Sociological Review 56 (June 1991), 372–373). However, in more recent work, says Pollner, “in contrast to early studies of everyday practices, which encouraged estrangement and distance as a purchase on the taken-forgranted,…a premium (is placed) on familiarity and immersion.… it is argued (that) actual practices cannot be adequately appreciated save through participation in ongoing (activities).” Nevertheless, this may result in a dissolution of the subject/object duality through a merger of subject and object rather than by an “epistemological radicalism.”
See Lynch’s “Alfred Schutz and the Sociology of Science” (in Lester Embree, ed., Worldly Phenomenology: The Continuing Influence of Alfred Schutz on North American Human Science. Washington D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1988, 71–100) for discussion of this and several other aspects of how Schutz’ views of the social scientist’s approach are similar to that of the other sciences.
Although Garfinkel himself does not claim EM to be a science in any conventional sense, I would argue an ethnomethodological sociology or “science” would be one which engages in systematic, rigorous and empirical studies carried out under the auspices of ethnomethodological study policies. However, as Lynch notes, the turn away from theory and method “leaves…a rather empty discipline. Taken to a radical limit, the unique adequacy requirement empties ethnomethodology of every possible general methodological rule, analytic procedure, or evaluative criterion, because all of these become discoverable as endogenous properties of the substantive methods ethnomethodologists study.…Nothing is left for ethnomethodology, because nothing is left over from the ordinary society’s incessant oprations. Any uniquely adequate study will already be incorporated into the methodological program in which it is situated, and it is doubtful that any proceeds will accrue to ethnomethodology” (Lynch, “Silence in Context,” op. cit., 11).
Here a clear distinction between EM and sociology is captured in the words of Graham Button: “sociology does not require reference to the details of accountable action in and as of the embodied practices of particular living breathing human beings–even though it is living breathing human beings who, in the details of what they do, are being sociable–when it considers how to apprehend sociality, or considers of what sociality consists, or attempts to actually describe sociality. Other human sciences proceed likewise, For example, linguistics has often considered `language’ as somehow removed from its actual use by persons. As sociologists have discussed `action’ and `actors’ without reference to the fact that it is people who engage in embodied action in `real time’, so too has linguistics often discussed `language’; without reference to its use by speaking people. Model building in economics shuts out the confusing contingencies of real world irascible transactions. Anthropology has often glossed over the details of circumstantial action through having the occasioned account of the native informant stand as proxy for a society. Psychology would rather construct an experiment to, for example, examine people’s reaction to authority and have subjects `shock’ accomplices `to death’, than enquire into how obedience to authority is relevantly built into their practical everyday lives, where random orders to administer people with electric shocks would be regarded with some skepticism.…The point is that.. when the human sciences examine such issues as method, theory, epistemology and the like, they do so without recourse to the situations and phenomena such matters are to apprehend” (G. Button, “Introduction,” in G. Button, ed., Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 6–7 ).
Zaner considers phenomenology as “one of the systemic disciplines of philosophic concern,… analogous to logic, ethics, aesthetics, or epistemology” whose task is radical criticism. He summarizes phenomenology’s task as the “reflective-descriptive explication, analysis, and assessment of the life of consciousness, and of man generally.” (The Way of Phenomenology New York: Pegasus, 1970, 122). In this respect, the topics of study are limitless, not specifiable in advance, and the `findings’ are as varied as the topics themselves. The “order of inquiry,” as Zaner puts it, “is one which is not imposed from without, but is, rather, derived from and grounded in the materials themselves to be studied” (173).
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Psathas, G. (1999). On the Study of Human Action: Schutz and Garfinkel on Social Science. In: Embree, L. (eds) Schutzian Social Science. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 37. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2944-4_3
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