JS: Lect 4: Ethnomethodology II
HAROLD GARFINKEL (1967)
CHAPTER 3: COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE OF SOCIAL STRUCTURES: THE
DOCUMENTARY METHOD OF INTERPRETATION IN LAY AND PROFESSIONAL FACT
FINDING, pp.76-103
“Ethnomethodological studies analyze everyday activities as members methods for
making those same activities visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes,
i.e., ‘accountable’, as organizations of commonplace everyday activities” (1967, p.vii).
“Sociologically speaking, ‘common culture’ refers to the socially sanctioned grounds of
inference and action that people use in their everyday affairs and which they assume that
others use in the same way... The discovery of common culture consists of the discovery
from within the society by social scientists of the existence of common sense knowledge
of social structures... [The research] is directed to a description of the work whereby
decisions of meaning and fact are managed, and how a body of [seemingly] factual
knowledge of social structures is assembled in common sense situations of choice.
(pp.76-77).
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“There are innumerable situations of sociological inquiry in which the investigator – whether he be a
professional sociologist or a person undertaking an inquiry about social structures in the interests of
managing his practical everyday affairs – can assign witnessed actual appearances to the status of an
event of conduct only by imputing biography and prospects to the appearances. This he does by
embedding the appearances in his presupposed knowledge of social structures. This it frequently happens
that in order for the investigator to decide what he is now looking at he must wait for future
developments, only to find that these futures in turn are informed by their history and future” (p.77).
“It therefore occurs that the investigator frequently must elect among alternative courses of interpretation
and inquiry to the end of deciding matters of fact, hypothesis, conjecture, fancy, and the rest, despite the
fact that in the calculable sense of the term ‘know’, he does not and cannot ‘know’ what he is doing prior
to or while he is doing it” (pp.77-78).
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“How is it done by an investigator that from replies to a questionnaire he finds the
respondent’s ‘attitude’; that via interviews with office personnel he reports their
‘bureaucratically organized activities’.... [etc.]. What is the work whereby the investigator
sets the observed occurrence and the intended occurrence into a correspondence of
meaning, such that the investigator finds it reasonable to treat witnessed actual
appearances as evidences of the event he means to be studying?” (p.79).
“To answer these questions it is necessary to detail the work of the documentary method.
To this end a demonstration of the documentary method was designed to exaggerate the
features of this method in use and to catch the work of ‘fact production’ in flight” (p.79).
But what is the ‘documentary method’?:
“The method consists of taking an actual appearance as ‘the document of’, as ‘pointing
to’, as ‘standing on behalf of’ a presupposed underlying pattern. Not only is the
underlying patten derived from its documentary evidences, but the individual
documentary evidences, in their turn, are interpreted on the basis of ‘what is known’
about the underlying pattern” (p.78).
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Experiment:
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Ten undergraduates
Dept of Psychiatry - to explore alternative “ways of giving people advice about their personal
problems”
First discuss background, and then ask ten questions, to receive a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.
After each answer, to remove wall plug, and record some comments on it.
Final comments...
(Example transcript)
Nine findings:
Finding 1. (p.89): “Typically the subjects heard the experimenter’s answers as answers-to-the questions.
Perceptually, the experimenter’s answers were motivated by the questions.”
And one cannot say here ‘Of course they were’, because the simple fact to bear in mind is that the
‘answers’ were not in fact answers to the questions. People had been ‘set up’ to deal creatively and
artfully (Garfinkel would say) with these random utterances - and they do so! People begin to create a set
of ‘meanings’ which will ‘make sense’ of what the experimenter (or pseudo-advisor) says. These
‘meanings’ acquire their content, not from any information provided within the advisor’s replies, but from
something much more complex - from, what for the moment, we can just call the background in terms of
which people routinely make sense of one another’s actions in their society.
Finding 2. (p.89): “All [subjects] reported ‘the advice they had been given’ and addressed their
appreciation and criticism to that advice.”
In other words, although the ‘advisor’ had said only ‘yes’ or ‘no’, subjects had ‘lent’ or ‘given’ those
answers a meaning which were not within the answers themselves - “I felt his answers were helpful..,”
“The conversation and the answers given I believe had a lot of meaning to me” - The subjects ‘gave to’,
‘lent to’, ‘made for’ the responses of the advisor a meaning in terms of their own conceptions. Subjects
then, in attempted to sustain a meaningful social relationship, then responded to that meaning (which they
themselves had created).
Finding 3. (p.89): “Over the course of the exchange the assumption seemed to operate that there was an
answer to be obtained, and that if the answer was not obvious, that its meaning could be determined by
active search, one part of which involved asking another question so as to discover what the advisor ‘had
in mind’.”
When a person embarks upon a social transaction, the general ‘theme’ of the engagement - in this case:
advice-giving - is established by the making of certain initial commitments, which continue to determine
how each step in the interaction should be interpreted throughout its whole course. The overall meaning
of the transaction is sustained by the actor’s (the student’s) capacity to continue to interpret each of the
‘advisor’s’ responses as relevant to that meaning - even when they are not! In this finding Garfinkel
begins to display the extent to which an everyday social exchange relies upon factors which are far
removed from the current situation, but are ‘brought in’ from the background to ‘fill it in’, and to supply it
with a sense of continuity.
Finding 4. (p.90): “The identical utterance was capable of answering several different questions
simultaneously, and of constituting an answer to a compound question that in terms of the strict logic of
propositions did not permit a single yes or no [answer].”
People are not logical in much of their social transactions; this does not mean, however, that they are
unconcerned with rationality in their everyday behaviour. Clearly, individuals attempt to find support for
the particular position they have adopted: calling on evidence; giving reasons; etc. But the fact is, being
rational in day-to-day discourse is not the same as strictly scientific discourse (see Garfinkel, 1967, Ch.8 discussed in next lecture - where he shows ‘experimentally’ how attempts to speak scientifically, destroy
to possibility of everyday communication).
Finding 5. (p.91): “More subjects entertained the possibility of a trick than tested this possibility. All
suspicious subjects were reluctant to act under the belief that there was a trick involved. Suspicions were
reduced if the advisor’s answers made ‘good sense’. Suspicions were least likely to continue if the
answers accorded with the subject’s previous thought about the matter and with his preferred decisions.”
One of the major features of social behaviour is the extent to which people are unwilling to call into
question what is going on; rather than questioning it, people tend to wait to see whether ‘they can work it
out’ in the normal course of the interaction. Many rules operate in social exchange, says Garfinkel, not
because they have withstood the test of time, but the opposite: they simply have not been tested. “Indeed,”
he says (p.70), “the more important the rule, the greater is the likelihood that knowledge is based upon
avoided tests” - e.g., the attribution of meaning to people’s statements - tests which would reveal
uncertainties and ambiguities in some of our basic assumptions.
Finding 6. (p.91): “Throughout there was a concern and search for pattern. Pattern was likely to be seen in
the first evidence of the ‘advice’.”
It seems inconceivable that “there is no order in the universe” (Eco). People seem to come into social
relationships with a pre-established sense of pattern, of events as fitting into a whole in relation to one
another.
He points out that when subjects were told that they had received no advice at all, just random
answers, meaningless in themselves, they found it difficult to cope with that fact; they could make little
sense of it. At best they shifted their interpretation of the counsellor’s comments from ‘advice giving’ to
‘deceit’. While the subjects had been naive, they had accepted the ‘advice’ as advice. It was not the
character of the ‘advice’ itself which determined whether it was accepted as advice. Some other condition
or background factor determined that.
So, suggests Garkinkel, the character of the advice being received is not a function of the advice
being given; rather, it is a conceptualization of the advice by the recipient, and as such, the recipient needs
to ‘check it out’ to see if they have conceptualized it aright. The random responses, seen as an event,
provide what Garfinkel calls the documentation for an already established pattern or theme.
Finding 7. (p.92) “ Subjects assigned to the advisor, as his advice, the thought formulated in the subject’s
questions. For example, when a subject asked ‘Should I come to school every night after supper to do my
studying?’ and the experimenter said “My answer is no?’, the subject in his comments said “he said I
shouldn’t come to school and study’. This was very common.”
This observation has a great number of implications; it suggests among other things:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Messages that carry no meaning in themselves can, within the process of communication, work to
contribute towards the ‘making’ of a meaning (indexical vs. objective expressions);
a message does not exist as an isolated event and can be given no meaning as such on its own (an
event signifies in terms of its ‘place’ or ‘position’ within a whole background schemes of things a form of life);
understanding the significance of a message within a group (by an outside observer) calls for a
comprehensive knowledge of the social and cultural backgrounds of the group members,
including knowledge of how those backgrounds are brought to bear in the interpretation of
messages;
the meaning of a message for sender and receiver cannot be the same i) unless the backgrounds of
both are the same, and ii) the receiver takes the trouble to establish the sameness of meaning what are the criteria of this?
distortion is a common occurrence in communication.
It is a maxim of social psychology that the individual and society are two sides of the same coin.
Garfinkel reaffirms this, but not in terms of people possessing shared values or shared beliefs, but in
terms of them possessing shared “means’, shared methods, i.e., ways of ‘making sense’ of occurrences in
their form of life. Especially in Garfinkel’s view, individuals may be unique individuals. For people
involved in social acts may shape and influence the situation which is also shaping and influencing them;
the common systems for the use of signs does not limit them to a single, common, point of view. When
subjects were told, after the ‘counselling’ session that they had contributed a great deal to the ‘advice’
they had received, they were amazed.
Finding 8. (pp.92-93): “Subjects made specific reference to various social structures in deciding the
sensible and warranted character of the advisor’s advice... References the subject supplied were to social
structures which [the subject] treated as actually of potentially known in common with the adviser. And
then, not to any social structures known in common, but to normatively valued social structures which the
subject accepted as the conditions that his decisions, with respect to his own... grasp of his circumstances
and the adviser’s advice, had to satisfy. These social structures consisted of normative features seen from
within which, for the subject, were definitive of his membership of the various collectivities that were
referred to.”
In other words, when the subject says “I happen to be of the Jewish faith and I have been dating a Gentile
girl..’ he knows that various directives are associated with the social institutions involved, and that his
own action has to be a particular instance of these directions. The subject is trying to define for himself a
new ‘Jewish-Gentile institution’ and attempting to establish the reality of that institution in his
conversation with the adviser. Thus the conversation takes the form of a game in which one player (the
subject) is uncertain of the rules, and seems to be testing out the other (the adviser) to discover what they
are - the subject uses the experimenter ass the already briefed upholder of the rules.
This is a conception of people as creative agents who fashion between themselves the central
institutional structures within which they see themselves as significantly involved - institutions fashioned
for the moment only - but which are none the less used as a context for rendering their own behaviour
meaningful.
Finding 9. (p.94): “Through the work of documenting - i.e., by searching for and determining pattern, by
treating the adviser’s answers as motivated by the intended sense of the question, by waiting for later
answers to clarify the sense of the previous ones, by finding answers to unasked questions - the
perceivedly normal values of what was being advised were established, tested, reviewed, retained,
restored; in word, managed. It is misleading therefore to think of the documentary method as a procedure
whereby a propositions are accorded membership of a scientific corpus. Rather the documentary method
developed the advice so as to be continually ‘membershipping’ it.
In the course of the conversations and other kinds of social exchange, people behave in terms of, i.e., use
as resources, social norms and manners (some of which are improvised for the immediate occasion to
hand). But people do not respond in a simple mechanical manner to pre-given socio-cultural norms, nor
do they merely express pre-established personality characteristics. Individuals, from an
ethnomethodological perspective, are continually in need of other people as agents through which they
can continuously confirm their own uncertain and anxious sense of what and who they are within the
community.