David Morrison
UCLA Sociology
Field Exam Supplement
9/15/01
Ethnomethodology:
Ethnomethodology is the empirical study of the variety and contextual range of social
processes, artful practices and sense-making procedures - broadly speaking, ‘methods’ through which individuals produce ‘social order’.
Ethnomethodologists have conceptualized ‘social order’ as: (1) Durkheimian
‘recurrent social forms’ which are produced in and through the activities of individuals,
but which nonetheless possess, manifest or display an objectivity independent of actor’s
perceptions - that is to say that these ‘recurrent social forms’ are produced so universally
as to be generally regarded as unworthy of especial notice (or even fall beneath the
perceptual field of distinct reference) by the individuals who are actively, artfully and
nonetheless deliberately engaged in the lived work of their production, they are often
organized in such a way as to obscure the very processes which they manifest and, when
called to the attention of the various social actors working so assiduously to produce
them, maintain them, and organize their activities with regard to them, their manifest
insignificance serves primarily as a testament to the competence of those same social
actors and secondarily as evidence of their indispensability for maintaining the lived
workings of ordinary, immortal society; or (2) ‘Gestalt contexture’ (based on Husserl,
Shutz or Gurwitsch’s phenomenology and having implications for Kuhn’s analysis of
scientific paradigm shift as a ‘one way Gestalt switch’), a fundamentally perceptual
process through which individuals produce orderly properties subjectively as a way of
making coherent sense of the limitless, potentially contradictory and (were it not for their
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sense-making practices) otherwise disparate phenomena in their potential perceptual field
of reference.
To make matters worse for both the consumer and producer of ethnomethodological
theory, this field of academic work embodies these very dualities, contradictions and
uncertainties with regard to its object of study. For example, the two ways of conceptualizing ‘social order’ stated above, as either a phenomenon independent of (and
possibly even antithetical to or incommensurate with) explicit subjective perception,
‘nothing more’ than a perceptual production (there’s no more ‘there’ there, nothing
‘behind’ the perception), or, worse, both - encapsulate the very subject/object dualities,
dialectics and contradictions which some ethnomethodological writings (particularly
Pollner’s Mundane Reason - MR) have been designed to expose, surmount and perhaps
implicitly condemn and/or exalt. That is, ‘mundane reason’ serves as an object,
background assumption, method, resource, alternate, basis and foil for
ethnomethodological researches. You could say ethnomethodologists have an ambivalent
relationship to mundane reason, but that really wouldn’t to it justice. Its a bit like
watching a person contemplate their own limitations, but forced to use those very
limitations in their act of contemplation.
Take common sense knowledge, for example. Individuals not only orient their action
based on the ‘gestalt contexture’ of their own perceptions, but also orient their actions to
the actions of others based on assumptions of commonality in definitions of the situation
and the common stock of knowledge and social meanings encapsulated under the rubric
of ‘common-sense assumptions’: what any adequate practitioner or well-socialized
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member of the society1 can be expected to know, understand and likewise orient their
behavior with regards to. As such, is the stock of common-sense assumptions a subjective
or objective feature of the social world? Is it a process of perception, a basis for
‘recurrent social forms’, or a process of orienting to shared social meanings which is
itself objective, because (following Durkheim’s reasoning in The Rules of Sociological
Method) it is perceived by social actors as separate from themselves, an independently
existing part of the social or natural order. It is what ‘anybody knows’ and ‘everybody
knows that anybody knows’ such that, if you’re asking questions about it you must either
be deranged, mentally disabled, developmentally delayed - or a sociologist.
Should we think of common-sense knowledge as something that spans the
subject/object dichotomy? Ultimately I’m not sure one can answer this question without
stepping back into one of the key assumptions of mundane reason that the question is
designed to address: that an objective order exists which is independent of our own (and
here I mean to reflexively include the ethnomethodologists as well) process by which it is
“observed, measured or explicated [MR: 16]”. Maynard and Clayman (1991) warn
against “a cognitive-interpretive solution to the problem of order, wherein actors produce
patterned courses of action because the share internalized frames of reference and value
systems [387]”. Referring to ‘common sense assumptions which serve as a common
frame of reference for coordinating social action’, runs the risk of resurrecting internal
structures of cognition similar in principle to Parsonian ‘internalized norms of conduct’
1
The phrases ‘adequate practitioner’ and ‘well-socialized member of the society’ are intended to
distinguish the shared social meanings and technical knowledge that arise within discrete and
bounded social groupings operating within the society, from common-knowledge shared by
members of the society at large. I will return to this issue shortly, with a discussion of the
tensions and parallels between EM investigations of scientific communities and ‘immortal
ordinary society’.
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that provide general principles by which social action is coordinated, rather than viewing
the processes by which social order is produced in contingent and contextually specific
ways as a central topic for empirical investigation upon which EM theory should be
informed.
I began this discussion with the question of social order, because that is the basic
question for sociology. Its often been recapitulated as the Hobbesian question, ‘how is
society possible’. I agree with Barbara Rothman’s critique of this formulation as crude in
its assumption of an a priori state of anarchy2. Ethnomethodological (EM) research can
help reformulate this question as: ‘what are the variety of methods through with social
order is produced’. Garfinkel’s starting point for this analysis was to establish empirically
the “central features” of “the familiar common sense world of everyday life”.
Although sociologists take socially structured scenes of everyday life as a point of
departure they rarely see, as a task of sociological inquiry in its own right, the general
question of how any such common sense world is possible. Instead, the possibility of the
everyday world is either settled by theoretical representation of merely assumed [SEM: 36].
The stock of common sense knowledge that adequate practitioner or well socialized
member of the group can be expected to share serves as a basis for coordinating social
action and is thus a key part of the question of social order. The formulation substitutes
the question of how ‘society’ is possible with the more approachable question of how
members of society produce and orient themselves to a common frame of reference. This
does not involve applying Hobbes’ crude assumptions about human nature, because EM
has empirically demonstrated that the methods of order-production are robust and
2
Rothman, Barbara Katz, “Of Maps and Imaginations: Sociology Confronts the Genome”. Social
Problems, 1995, 42, 1, Feb, 1-10. She states that the Hobbesian question is “absurd” and
ultimately male-biased, because it assumes that people ‘sprout up like mushrooms’ into an initial
state of disorder and isolation. She says that any woman who has given birth would not see
individuals as arriving in society, but leaving their own bodies - the point being that our a priori
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pervasive. While EM adapts the question in accordance with its findings, it is important
to note that EM has consistently and explicitly confronted questions of fundamental
concern to sociology as a discipline, from Garfinkel’s statements in this 1967 passage to
recent attempts by Rawls and Hilbert to establish linkages between current EM research
and classical foundations coming from
This fact could be overlooked given EM’s early insistence on approaching
conventional sociology primarily as an object of analysis, rather than as a theoretical
resource. This insistence stemmed in part from Garfinkel’s initial empirical assault on
Parson’s functionalist theory of sociology. In Garfinkel’s separate Studies in
Ethnomethodology (SEM) he demonstrated that Parsons’ functionalist theory advanced
an overly general and homogenous view of society. A simple reading of Durkheim
(particularly Durkheim’s conception of anomie as stemming from excessive
specialization of organically solidaristic societies in DOL) should have corrected the
homogeneity with which Parsons approached issues such as social norms.
Key topics for analysis which derive from EM investigations of social order as an
emergent feature of “actors’ concerted work in making social facts observable and
accountable to one another in their everyday lives [ibid., 387]” are: the relationship
between rules (either formally codified or informally invoked) and individual behavior,
“indexical expressions”, and “et cetera” clauses. All of these concepts in EM are rife with
implications on the relationship between individual behavior and coordinated group
activity. Maynard and Clayman (1991) argued that these concepts do not signal an
emphasis on individual agency and interpretive action, and are not addressed to either
state is permeated by communal social life; in contrast, isolation, disorder, and anomie require
explanation.
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contradict or support the concept of internalized norms for conduct specifying individual
behavior - rather, that these key concepts in EM point to the significance of social context
and the intentions of the actor in fitting their lines of action into the local context to
achieve some practical purpose.
This strikes me as a difficult line to walk between denying an emphasis on individual
agency and interpretive efforts on the one hand, while simultaneously denying that actors
orient their actions based on generalized group expectations of conduct - the thesis that
normative expectations are internalized based on individual location within affiliative
group networks. What’s left in their analysis of indexical expressions and contingency as
key features of social interaction, is the investigation of “how members are from the
outset embedded in contingently accomplished structures of social action consonant with
their acting and reacting to one another in real time [388].” But how would social actors
accomplish this coordination and shared social meaning without some previous stock of
common knowledge which, along with indexical properties specified within the local
history of the emergent interaction, provides the necessary background information to:
specify the meaning of an utterance, inform them of the “background expectancies [SEM:
36]” shared by the other participants within the interaction, and coordinates action into
socially meaningful sets of behaviors?
The point of many of the breaching experiments in SEM was to show the necessity of
“background understandings [49-56]” that participants must bring to the interaction.
Some of these background understandings are shared within the context of previous
interaction between two individuals (as, for example, a description of an interaction
between spouses [25] that draws from both prevalent social meanings and personalized
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knowledge based on shared experience). The violation of the rules of tic-tac-toe shows
that social action in this case is organized into a meaningful set of possible responses,
whose violation disrupts the possibility of continuing within an established mode and
requires some type of reconstructive work for meaningful or orderly social action to
proceed. There is a tension here between contingency, emergent social meaning and
interpretive action, on the one hand, and common sets of expectations towards which
adequate practitioners and fully socialized members can be expected to orient their
actions, on the other.
It seems to me that the following conclusions can be drawn from this discussion:
coordinated action is based in part on common experience, some of this experience can
be assumed to be shared by any competent member of a social group - independently of
prior personal acquaintance, but a greater stock of common knowledge (as between
intimate acquaintances or individuals with a detailed technical training) allows greater
coordination; coordinated action is also a contingent, emergent feature of social
interaction, a shared stock of knowledge can never be complete as individual experience
is never entirely overlapping, therefore individuals must actively work to interpret and
coordinate their actions within an evolving interaction.
This discussion also raises a tension within EM between an initial focus on commonsense assumptions and mundane reason regarded as relatively independent of specific
institutional contexts, and a subsequent growing appreciation and emphasis on the
distinctive features imparted by technical knowledge and institutional affiliation. Two
issues that are implicated in this tension are: EM’s orientation to social groupings as
based either on a shared social identity or on the distinctive characteristics of group
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members (such as a scientific community wherein membership is predicated on the
‘unique adequacy’ of technical expertise); and the relationship between the workings of
mundane reason and scientific rationality.
If we follow Moerman’s (1968) lead, bounded groupings such as ethnicity do exist
within a wider society; but only the sense that members orient themselves and their
actions with regard to such social boundaries. Initial EM investigations were focused on
common-sense reasoning and the workings of everyday social life - with a corresponding
emphasis on the generic characteristics of meaningful social action and the parallels
between common sense assumptions and the forms of reasoning which occur within
particular social contexts. We see here, Garfinkel’s early assertion that jury members
arrive at the proceedings already ‘90% a juror’.
In spite of Maynard and Clayman’s insistence that writers such as Alexander (1987)
who characterize EM as a “ ‘reaction’ against functionalist sociology” are ‘pigeonholing’
EM, I do believe that much of this early focus on parallels between mundane reason and
scientific rationality was intended to counteract the elitism of Parson’s unreflexive
tendency to privilege scientific knowledge (particularly his own theory) over and against
actors’ own accounts of their motivations. What better way to recognize the artfulness of
ordinary social action than to demonstrate its basis for specialized knowledge in specific
institutional contexts?
While they state that Heritage’s writings should “lay these misconceptions to rest”, I
think there’s room for disagreement on the extent of the tension between EM and
functionalism (as a representative of ‘formal analysis) particularly since I recall Heritage
describing the various empirical studies in SEM as a series of “guerilla attacks” against
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key elements of Parson’s functionalist theory (in one of his lectures on EM, given as part
core course for entering sociology graduate students at UCLA). There is an element of
retrospective reconciliation happening within EM now, that I think such statements
exhibit, but which has emerged over time, as EM has renegotiated its position within the
wider sociologic lexicon. Partly this has emerged out of its a reflexive acknowledgement
that some of the early statements have served to privilege EM itself and ironicize the
techniques of ‘formal analysis’ - making EM subject to some of the very critiques it
leveled against previous work. While I believe this is a very healthy tendency, I also
believed it emerged gradually over time.
In Garfinkel and EM, for example, Heritage critiques Parsons for eventual
discounting of the actors’ process of accounting for their own behavior.
Parsons analysis of the ‘actor’s point of view’ was one which was overwhelmingly
geared to developing a causal model of the subjective elements in conduct in which the
actor’s concrete reasoning was treated as epiphenomenal [1984: 21].
I regret that I have not as yet read enough of Parson’s The Structure of Social Action
to speak authoritatively on the topic, so I am deferring to Heritage’s analysis for the time
being. I do however, at this stage, have some questions as to whether Heritage has
rendered an entirely unbiased reading of Parson’s theory of internalized norms. Weber’s
writings on rationality frame all ‘rational’ (or ‘rationalized’) action as based on nonrational value premises. Following Weber, even mystic contemplation can be
rationalized, in that rationalization is the process of subjecting and elaborating
spontaneous (pre-rational) subjective experience into ideological doctrine and formally
specified patterns of action. (Notwithstanding Garfinkel and Ciccourell’s observations
that reified doctrines and praxis can never be fully specified, and always require
individual interpretation and application into each specific case.)
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Parsons’ emphasis on the ‘internalization of social norms’ could be seen as the
process, not through which the subsequent forms of formalized doctrine and praxis are
transmitted, but the socialization of individuals into the prerational value premises upon
which subsequent rational actions are based. It seems to me that both Marx and Weber do
point the way to the possibility of individuals as ‘cultural dopes’ in their ability to accept
pre-rational (not to be confused with irrational) value premises which do not reflect their
own interests. Marx is emphatic on this point. Weber’s comments are even more
pernicious: since all rationalized forms of action and rationalized forms of thought are
based on pre-rational value premises, individuals are readily subject to initial and
continued socialization. Individuals could only resist one form of rationalization with
another, but there is no rational, objective basis for evaluating the efficacy of the initial
(prerational) value premises upon which rational action is based.
A meeting of evolutionary biologists and fundamentalist Christians are distinguished
not only by the scientists’ additional socialization into a rationalized vocabulary of
speciation. These two social groupings are also distinguished by more fundamental value
premises (such as for the empirical basis of claims about the natural world versus the
basis for such claims in a biblical frame of reference).
Clearly there are problems with Parson’s theory of social action. But whether there is
also something worthwhile and important to be found there, ultimately depends on what
stage of the rationalization process Parsons was referring to when he discussed concepts
like ‘the internalization of social norms’ and exactly how sophisticated of a reading of
Weber he had - or to what extent he understood the ultimately non-rational nature of the
value-premises upon which rational action is based.
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Through the rubric of hybrid studies of work, EM investigations have increasingly
emphasized the distinctive features of action within specific institutional contexts, partly
as a result of the immersion of ethnomethodologists like Garfinkel, Lynch, Livingston,
Orr and Suchman into the detailed workings of particular contexts like scientific research
or technical areas of expertise. That is why I have distinguished here between ‘adequate
practitioner’ (members of an scientific or technical elite) and ‘well-socialized member of
the society’. Such elite circles certainly are bounded in more than the sense referred to by
Moerman - they are bounded by an additional stock of knowledge signaling prior training
and additional socialization into an (often highly delineated) community operating within
the wider society. Coordinated action, and technical conversation itself, is impossible
without the additional shared stock of knowledge that ‘adequacy’ implies.
There are two particular reasons why an ethnomethodological focus on science has
been significant. Initially this focus was to demonstrating the linkages between scientific
rationality and common-sense reasoning. Partly as a response to Parson’s elitism, EM
studies established that, rather than standing separate from mundane cognition, common
sense processes have served as a basis for scientific rationality.
Subsequently, there has been increased sensitivity to the distinctiveness of
institutional settings, of which scientific discovery is a specific instance. These studies do
not deny the earlier linkages between scientific rationality and normal forms of problemsolving. They also do not privilege scientific investigation over common-sense reasoning.
But they do point to distinctive contexts of practical reasoning. Also, since practical
reasoning in scientific contexts is the subject of explicit and sustained attention by
practioners to those settings, the work of scientific investigation represents a strategic
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research setting for exploring distinctive features of practical reasoning.
The ethnomethodological focus on therapeutic contexts, is more of a mixed
development, because it stems in large part from the early confluence of
Ethnomethodology with constructivism that I discussed in my previous essay. Much of
the initial focus was cognitive in focus and subjectivist, and could be characterized as
falling under the rubric of ‘sense-making activities’; such as Garfinkel’s early study in
which he asked participants to participant in an ‘experimental therapy’ in which they
were asked to present a personal problem to the therapist, and then interpret the therapists
yes/no answers to their questions. Participants were unaware that the answers were
randomly generated. Their subsequent process of interpreting the answers from within
some intelligible, coherent system of meaning demonstrated some of the key workings of
mundane reason – particularly in line with my comments at the start of this essay that the
production of social order is partly a perceptual process of organizing subjective
experience into an orderly framework.
Early EM work into deviance have emphasized the attribution of deviance through
the social process by which putative instances of deviance are counted (constructed) as
actual instances, for example, through the activities of coroners attributing a death as an
instance of suicide (Atkinson), through the documentary method of compiling
bureaucratic records in clinic contexts (Garfinkel, 1967) or in the use and compilation of
‘official statistics’ in conventional sociologic research (Kitsuse and Ciccourell’s). Given
the current tendency for EM to increasingly disavow constructivist theory as itself
exemplary of formal analysis, it is clear the trend - for both studies within the
ethnographic tradition and coming from conversation analysis - will be increasingly
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explore issues such as the relation between normative expectations and individual
behavior. An example of this is Wieder’s (1974) discussion of the ‘convict code’, not as a
normative constraint restricting individual behavior, but as a discursive resource – which
both staff and residents of a halfway house could invoke achieve practical and socially
meaningful ends within that context. This fits within the general trend, which I have
briefly discussed, of EM investigations to become increasingly sensitive to the
particularities of social action within specific institutional contexts.