Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology's Interest

To understand ethnomethodological studies, one must realize their specific interest. This differs so much from the taken-for-granted interests in the other human sciences that reading such studies without understanding what drives them only leads to confusion. What is basically at stake is the local achievement of accountability. The general idea is that in anything they do, people (as members of society) design their actions in ways such that their meanings are made available to other members. The empirical interest, then, is to explicate how this is achieved—how the sense of actions, their accountability, is made observable in situ.

Consider a simple action such as greeting. There is an enormous range of activities, such as gestures and sayings, that can be done to “do a greeting.” The way it is concretely done can be taken by recipients or others as somehow significant, say as warm or routine or reluctant. Timing in relation to other events and the fit in the situation will be essential. Any deviation from “greeting as usual” can be consequential for the relationship in which it occurs. For instance, a slow greeter can be held accountable: “Are you angry?” When less simple actions are studied, such as in the work of airline pilots to be considered later in this entry, similar interests will be pursued—the selection [Page 294]of concrete modes of doing things, their fit in the local situation, their routine character or deviations from routines, timing, previous actions, later uptake, and so on.

For ethnomethodologists, specifying a culture's repertoire for doing particular actions is not enough. They want to know more about the circumstances and the concrete details of the local application of a culture's possibilities. Furthermore, they are not particularly interested in some of the aspects that many others in the social sciences want to know about, such as frequency distributions in terms of external variables, or various mental attributes, such as cognitions or attitudes that are often proposed to “underlie” specific actions.

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