The term ethnomethodology was coined by Harold Garfinkel, whose Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) set the directions for a unique field of sociological investigation. As the word ethnomethodology implies, it is the study of ‘people’s methods’. It is partly akin to the anthropological ethnosciences (the study of folk systems of measurement, botanical classification, colour categories, astronomy and music), but its domain—everyday methods for producing social order—is more inclusive. In most cases, ethnomethodologists study commonplace activities in their own native societies. When they study exotic or specialized domains of practice they attempt to master the relevant linguistic and embodied competencies, preparatory to explicating their endogenous organization.
Ethnomethodology is defined not only by its subject matter, but also by a distinctive, and often controversial, conception of social order. From Talcott Parsons (1937), Garfinkel inherited a general sociological orientation to social action and social structure, but he radically transformed the theoretical problem of order into a descriptive orientation to the quotidian production of social order. Garfinkel’s solution was not framed as a coherent theoretical answer to the foundational question of how order is created out of disorder; instead, it pointed to how the relentless, ad hoc production of ordinary social activities obviates any need for a formal theoretical solution. The idea was to identify and describe the diverse language games through which social order is performed on the street. This proposal borrowed liberally from existential phenomenology and Wittgenstein’s later writings, but above all it was developed through Garfinkel’s and his students’ detailed investigations of everyday activities.
In addition to studying ordinary practical and communicative actions—for example, conversation, wayfinding, driving in traffic—ethnomethodologists investigate the embodied, communicative performance of social and natural scientific methods (Garfinkel et al. 1981). In line with the effort to describe the accomplishment of social order, ethnomethodologists try to detail the production of natural order without suggesting that scientific facts necessarily become any less factual for being so described. Unlike social constructivists, they do not frame the ‘construction of facts’ in causal or quasi-causal terms, and generally they do not attempt sceptically to undermine the objectivity of science and mathematics (Lynch 1993). Instead, they endeavour to show what can be meant, under different circumstances of enquiry and for all practical purposes, by fact, artefact, discovery, objectivity and the like. The policy with regard to such topics is one of ‘indifference’ rather than scepticism (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970).
Ethnomethodology is not itself a social science method. Leading figures in the field have repeatedly emphasized that there is no obligatory set of methods, and no prohibition against using any research procedure whatsoever, if it is adequate to the particular phenomena under study. Nevertheless, ethnomethodologists tend to use particular research techniques. Especially in the associated programme of conversation analysis, practitioners typically analyse audio and videotapes of conversations, meetings, interrogations, and continuous sequences of embodied action. These data are understood less as empirical evidence about an external world than as intelligible constituents of a life-world inhabited by participants and analysts alike. As the late Harvey Sacks, the founder of conversation analysis, noted, the ‘single virtue’ of tape-recorded materials is that they provide detailed records of activities, which permit extended and repeated study in a community of investigators (Sacks 1984:26). Accordingly, rather than representing facts in an invisible, pre-theoretical domain of natural order, the data act as strong reminders of commonplace scenes of action, which touch off, supplement and sometimes challenge the analyst’s reflections about the genealogy of social order. The point of such investigations is to recover—through a kind of technical anamnesis—the ‘oriented to’ sense of spontaneously produced communicative actions.
Ethnomethodology’s scientific status remains doubtful and contentious. Although ethnomethodologists attempt rigorously to describe actual, singular occasions of conduct, they do not develop causal theories or explanatory models. To an extent, the results of ethnomethodological study can be likened to manuals of instruction that describe how the language games under study are performed. When done well, such praxiological descriptions delve into non-obvious properties of situated conduct that elude general cognitive schemes and rule-governed models. For that reason, ethnomethodology’s long-term promise is not limited to its contribution to the knowledge base of the social science disciplines. It also can contribute to a variety of other academic and non-academic efforts to document the diverse tacit knowledges—the mundane, but virtually impossible to codify, competencies—that are part of innumerable organizations of practice.
Michael Lynch
Brunel University
References
Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Garfinkel, H. and Sacks, H. (1970) ‘On formal structures of practical actions’, in J.G.McKinney and E.A.Tiryakian (eds) Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Development, New York.
Garfinkel, H., Lynch, M. and Livingston, E. (1981) ‘The work of a discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11.
Lynch, M. (1993) Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science, New York.
Parsons, T. (1937) The Structure of Social Action, New York.
Sacks, H. (1984) ‘Notes on methodology’, in J.M.Atkinson and J.C.Heritage (eds) Structures of Social Action: Studies on Conversation Analysis, Cambridge, UK.
Further reading
Button, G. (ed.) (1991) Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences, Cambridge, UK.
Fehr, B.J., Stetson, J. and Mizukawa Y. (1990) ‘A bibliography for ethnomethodology’, in J.Coulter (ed.) Ethnomethodological Sociology, London.
Heritage, J. (1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Oxford.
Maynard, D. and Clayman S. (1991) ‘The diversity of ethnomethodology’, Annual Review of Sociology 17.
Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation, Oxford.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A. and Jefferson, G. (1974) ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation’, Language 50(4).
Sharrock, W. (1989) ‘Ethnomethodology’, British Journal of Sociology 40.
