Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is the sociological tradition founded by Harold Garfinkel, a doctoral student supervised by Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) at Harvard University in the 1940s. Garfinkel taught in the sociology department of the University of California at Los Angeles between 1954 and 1987, and he remains active as an emeritus professor. After stimulating much debate and controversy as a rigorously empirical, and yet antipositivist “alternate” discipline, ethnomethodology has been influential in contemporary sociology. The key theoretical ideas were developed through empirical studies of legal settings, although relatively few law and society researchers have engaged with these in a thoroughgoing manner.

Garfinkel became interested in the taken-forgranted communicative and interpretive skills and the commonsense knowledge employed by jurors in reaching decisions, while listening to the taped deliberations on the 1984 Wichita Jury Project. Ethnomethodology examines the methods people use in interpreting events and objects in the world around them and making their own actions “accountable.” Key terms such as accountability, “indexicality,” and reflexivity (the idea that order and meaning are locally produced) were developed during Garfinkel's 1997 ethnography of the Los Angeles Coroner's Office. This study also has implications for how one understands official statistics, and scholars sometimes represent ethnomethodology as promoting relativism. In fact, the objective of most studies is to appreciate the objectivity of institutions such as law, experienced as a constraining, Durkheimian “social fact,” by examining the methods through which this objectivity is produced.

The most productive subtradition has been conversation analysis, which focuses on language use through the close study of tape-recorded interaction. Garfinkel has, however, also emphasized the importance of ethnography, and from the late 1970s in studying scientific laboratories and other workplaces he has encouraged students to examine the “haecceities” of day-to-day practice (the practical content of work as it is experienced “in vivo”) through obtaining a competence in different technical disciplines. Empirical studies that pursue this agenda in law are David Sudnow's ethnography of a public defender's office, Stacy Burns's study of pedagogy in a law school, and Max Travers's study of radical legal practice. Each addresses the relationship between law-in-the-books and law-in-action by explicating the methods used in, for example, teaching “loss of use” damages, or persuading a client to plead guilty in a particular occupational setting.