Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
An area of research in interpretative sociology initiated by H.Garfinkel concerned with the analysis of formal properties of practical reasoning. It investigates the activities whereby members of a sociocultural community produce and manage settings for their everyday lives. These activities are considered to be identical to those which members use to make settings ‘accountable’ (i.e. observable, reportable, and interpretable for themselves and others). Ethnomethodology assumes that members make sense out of their actions by interpreting them against a background of underlying patterns, i.e. they take certain shared commonsense knowledge for granted. One way of finding out about such tacit knowledge that members rely on are ‘quasi-experiments’ designed to disrupt those patterns and induce a break in the subject’s background expectancies. For instance, some students were asked to have an acquaintance explain the meaning of an utterance: Subject (waving cheerfully to experimenter): How are you? —Experimenter: How am I with regard to what? My health, my finances, my school work, my peace of mind, my…? Subject (red in the face and suddenly out of control): Look, I was just trying to be polite. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are (Garfinkel 1967). Following Schuetz (1961–2), Garfinkel proposes a number of strategies that members use to make sense out of their actions, such as the retrospective and prospective interpretation of activities (see also Cicourel 1973). For an interpretation of Garfinkel’s approach, see Heritage (1984). One branch of research developed from ethnomethodology is conversation analysis.
References
Button, G. (ed.) 1991. Ethnomethodology and the human sciences. Cambridge.
Cicourel, A. 1973. Cognitive sociology. Harmondsworth.
Flynn, P.J. 1991. The ethnomethodological movement: sociosemiotic interpretations. Berlin and New York.
Garfinkel, H.
1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Heritage, J. 1984. Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge.
Hill, R. and K.Stones Crittenden (eds) 1968. Proceedings of the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology. Purdue, IN.
Maynard, D. and S.Clayman. 1991. The diversity of ethnomethodology. Annual Review of Sociology 17. 385–418.
Psathas, G. (ed.) 1979. Everyday language studies in ethnomethodology. New York.
Schuetz, A. 1961–2. Collected papers, 2 vols. The Hague.
Turner, R. (ed.) 1974. Ethnomethodology. Harmondsworth.
Watson, G. and R.M.Seiler (eds) 1991. Text in context: contributions in ethnomethodology. New York.
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