Ethnomethodology

Conceptual Overview

EM initially emerged in the field of sociology and was pioneered by Harold Garfinkel. Garfinkel substituted the prevalent concern in sociology to account for work and organization through generic representational theorizing—modeling, developing coding or classification schemes, specifying ideal types, administering compliance documents such as questionnaires, and so forth. EM suspends the use of social science accounting practices and replaces them with a concern to unpack the accounting practices that are endogenous, or internal to work and organization, and which are, as such, a natural feature of it. Garfinkel's seminal insight is that work and organization possess their own natural accountability and that the use of extraneous accounting practices obscures this.

The core notion of “accountability” extends in EM beyond its ordinary meaning to draw attention to the ways in which members make sense of work. Extending the philosophical insights of the later Wittgenstein, EM suggests that sensemaking is embodied (in conversation and gesture), material (tied to equipment, artifacts, and technologies), situated (in time, place, and physical environments), and achieved in concert (interactionally and collaboratively). EM takes it that the ways in which members make sense of work in the course of its production, make it accountable and intelligible to one another as it unfolds and are identical to the work practices they devise and exploit to accomplish and organize work. Thus, in accomplishing work practice, members “reflexively,” at the same time, construct the organization of work.

This view of work and organization suspends the logic of exteriority that populates organizational theories. The logic of exteriority essentially construes of organization as a container that in diverse ways specified by the social sciences, and detailed in this encyclopedia and a veritable host of academic texts as well, shapes, constrains, and coordinates the actions of individuals within. EM offers the alternate view that organization might instead be understood as a practical ordering of and arrangement to interaction. EM holds that just what the practical order and arrangement of interaction consists of in any organizational setting, and just how that order and arrangement are interactionally produced, is to be found concretely in the natural and reflexive accountability of members' work practices.

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