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Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is an empirical study of folk or ethno methods of practical action and practical reasoning that examines the cultural and linguistic competencies and practices used in everyday life, from quite mundane practices such as forming a line and buying groceries to specialized practices such as forming the social bases of scientific research. Founded by American sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s and 1960s, ethnomethodology soon inspired a variety of scholars and studies that, by the mid-1970s, had established a radically new research program, not only within American sociology but within an ever-increasing international and interdisciplinary context as well.

Influences and Impacts

Ethnomethodology draws from such diverse resources as classical sociological theory, social phenomenology, linguistic phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy, and Gestalt psychology. Influenced especially by the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, Garfinkel and others created a tradition of inquiry that quickly developed beyond the boundaries of phenomenology, while retaining important phenomenological interests and orientations. Schutz extended the sociology of knowledge to include the study of commonsense knowledge, and this became a foundational insight for ethnomethodology as well as for the development of social constructionism by Schutz's students Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The phenomenological technique of suspending or bracketing one's natural experience in order to subject this experience to analytic study also became a crucial move in ethnomethodological studies.

The emphasis on the centrality of language use, interpretation, and communication sets ethnomethodology apart from much conventional sociology. Even in comparison with scholarship in linguistics and communication studies, where issues of language and communication are central, the ethnomethodological understanding of language and communication can still be quite distinctive. Despite its distinctiveness, ethnomethodology's emphasis on social practices and language use is at least generally consistent with broad shifts in contemporary philosophy, social science, and humanities, referred to as the culture turn, the linguistic turn, and the practice turn, that share an emphasis on questions of meaning, interpretation, and agency. Therefore, it is understandable that ethnomethodological insights have been taken up within such traditions as sociological theory, sociological and sociolinguistic ethnographies, various communication studies, pragmatics and discourse analysis, and other specialized subdisciplines or research programs such as social problems analysis and discursive psychology.

Focus on Practical Interaction

Ethnomethodology analyzes methods of practical action and practical reasoning, including language use, as they are observable in social interaction. Ethnomethodology typically examines specific courses of action or talk-in-interaction within specific settings, and it does so in much closer detail than is found in inductive or quantitative analysis. It understands mundane, vernacular methods of practical action and practical reasoning as foundational for social order and social science, deserving of study in their own right. By contrast, other varieties of social science are understood to rely unreflectively on these practical methods, taking them for granted and treating them as uninteresting. Ethnomethodology's focus on people's practical understandings and actions in local contexts is not a variety of individualism or subjectivism, as is sometimes claimed, but rather draws attention to the importance of shared, inter subjective methods for understanding and acting. This approach is not an alternative to the study of social structure but involves an alternative conceptualization of social structure, centered around the insight that the properties, meanings, and relevances of social structure are socially accomplished by people within social interaction.

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