Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology, literally “the study of ethnomethods” or “members' methods,” derives from a collection of investigations conducted by University of California, Los Angeles, sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s and 1960s, published in 1967 under the title Studies in Ethnomethodology, which is universally taken to be ethnomethodology's foundational text. The term “ethnomethodology,” coined by Garfinkel in tandem with his readings of the ethnoscience literature in anthropology, names investigations into an empirical domain of concrete social practices essential to, and productive of, the perceived stability of everyday practical action and practical reasoning. Accordingly, ethnomethodologists are directed to a specific topic or subject area: empirical practices whereby people find themselves in orderly, everyday, and familiar social circumstances in whose terms they can regularly display ordinary social competence. Generally, these practices are considered to be invariant and common to all societal members, including professional social scientists.

For nearly 40 years, Garfinkel's work has inspired generations of diverse ethnomethodological research around the world, with special concentrations at various campuses of the University of California (Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego), University of Manchester, Boston University, University of Wisconsin, University of London, and the Palo Alto Research Center (California). Ethnomethodology has influenced virtually every substantive area of sociology, as well as cognate disciplines such as communications, education, medicine, law, and cognitive science. As of 2002, the number of ethnomethodological publications—individual and collected articles, books, and other monographs—is reasonably estimated at well over 2,000.

Ethnomethodologists differ widely with respect to the significance of their studies for social theory and theorizing. Some have written that no theory at all is necessary to link the disparate studies, either to inform the basis of the studies or to summarize them on behalf of wider, overarching principles; some of these commentators come close to saying that ethnomethodology is atheoretical. Although Studies in Ethnomethodology is freighted heavily with citations to social phenomenologist Alfred Schütz (and indebtedness to Aron Gurwitsch and Edmund Husserl), Garfinkel [Page 253]himself has sometimes suggested that in their empirical concreteness, ethnomethodological studies speak for themselves, recommending that students and readers go directly “to the studies.” Some, however, have more fully developed the phenomenological themes, drawing especially on Gurwitsch's notion of “functional significance” in Gestalt contextures to describe how people collaboratively assemble perceptual fields experienced as stable, connected, and internally consistent. Others have drawn upon historicism in Karl Marx and Max Weber as partial rationales for ethnomethodological studies, carefully distinguishing such theorizing from the types of theory the studies themselves lead to, for example, the turntaking model in conversation analysis. Still others have argued that ethnomethodology goes directly to the heart of classical theoretical issues, notably those of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. Most recently, Garfinkel (2002) has written that ethnomethodology is a fulfillment of Durkheim's mandate to examine “social facts” and that it studies “the phenomena of ordinary society that Durkheim was talking about” (pp. 92–3), characterizing his own early studies as “working out Durkheim's aphorism” from the start.

These debates notwithstanding, ethnomethodologists are in general agreement in rejecting comparisons between their program and other contemporary developments, such as symbolic interactionism (or social psychology generally), cognitive psychology, “microsociology,” dramaturgical sociology, most phenomenological sociology, individualistic or subjectivist sociologies, postmodernism, or any but the most highly qualified readings of the term social constructionism. Most definitely, ethnomethodology is not a research method, its practitioners having engaged in a wide variety of methods in their studies, and ought not to be confused with a generic commitment to “qualitative” sociology.

...