Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is the study of how members of society use ordinary, everyday interactions to produce social order. Developed in the 1960s by Harold Garfinkel, ethnomethodology challenged traditional sociological approaches that relied on theoretical constructions to answer the question of how social order is produced. Ethnomethodologists use careful description of naturally occurring interactions to investigate the interpretive and constitutive practices of members of society. This article provides an overview of the ethnomethodology approach, its theoretical foundations, and related research practices.

Keywords Conversation Analysis; Ethnomethodology; Indexicality; Garfinkel, Harold; Membership Categorization Devices; Phenomenology; Reflexivity; Qualitative Research; Sequential Analysis; Unique Adequacy Requirement

Ethnomethodology

Overview

Imagine a large, oval, outdoor room with thousands of benches arranged on tiered steps rising high into the air. In the center of the room is a square, grassy area with lines painted onto it. On a weekend night, thousands of people file into this room wearing brightly colored clothes. They sit on the seats and look down into the grassy field where groups of young men run into one another on purpose and chase a funny-shaped ball. On what seems like an invisible cue, large numbers of people sitting on the benches start stomping their feet and shouting at the top of their lungs. They are shouting the same things. Sometimes, sections of the people stand and sit quickly, followed by people in the next section doing the same thing. The effect is to create a wave-like motion around the ring of seats. There is nothing special about this group of people. Any group of people entering this room when it is being used for this purpose would do the same thing.

For most Americans, the scene above should be readily recognizable as an evening at a football game. Whether one has been to a live event or seen one on television, there is nothing unusual about how football fans conduct themselves. The behaviors they exhibit — shouting, stomping, doing the wave — are perfectly expected and ordinary for the situation. From an ethnomethodological perspective, this is exactly what makes fans at a football game interesting. How is it exactly that thousands and thousands of people, in any given region of the country, who are of different ages, races, genders, etc. come to behave in such a similar manner without any kind of formal training? What are the people doing that cause us to see this situation as part of a game, instead of say, some kind of tribal war party? What are the cues by which people know what to cheer and when? How in fact, does the wave actually happen?

What is Ethnomethodology?

Ethnomethodology (EM) is the study of ordinary action by ordinary members of society. The definition of “ordinary” is anything that is regularly and recurrently done by people with such automaticity that it is given very little thought. Ordinary behaviors such as crossing the street or filing forms, and practical reasoning such as making the decision that a woman carrying a baby is carrying her own child are the ordinary, taken-for-granted practices on which ethnomethodologists focus. But this definition is still too simple; ethnomethodology's goal is more complex. EM studies these ordinary practices in order to discover how members of society create a sense of objective reality. That is, what do people do that creates the social facts we take for granted? For instance, that fans attend a football game is a social fact in American culture. But outside of the football stadium, if we saw the same people in the stadium now walking down the street on their way to work, we would not call them fans. Their identity as a fan is tied to the context of the stadium and to their actions such as cheering and stomping. What we expect them to do as a fan is part of a commonly held construct in this culture about what being a fan is and the behaviors that role entails. But how did this fact come into being and why does it persist?

Ethnomethodology's goal is to explicate the constitution of such social facts. And the way that EM conducts this explication is by observing the interpretive and constructive practices members of society use to create the taken-for-granted order in the world in which they live (Garfinkel, 1967, 2002).

Background

The principles of EM were established in the 1960s and 1970s by the work of American sociologist Howard Garfinkel. Garfinkel began with an assumption that social order exists at a local level in the shared practices that members must use to achieve mutual intelligibility. That is, Garfinkel believes that members of society regularly produce accountable behaviors and practices. Accountable, from his perspective, means being observable and reportable to all who are present; that individuals have to produce accountable behaviors in order to be understood means, to Garfinkel, that the elements of social order are present in the local scenes in which interactions occurred. Therefore, one can study social order at the local level.

Formal Analytic Approach

At the time, this idea was a radical departure from the way classical sociology had typically approached social order (Rawls, 2002). Although sociology had always been concerned with the "objective reality of social facts" (Garfinkel, 2004, p. 65) as outlined by Emile Durkheim, the traditional approach to studying these facts had been to use what Garfinkel termed the "formal analytic approach." The formal analytic approach views the populations who make up the scenes of life as the creators of those scenes. Therefore, traditional sociology looked at individuals as being representative of populations defined by socioeconomic status, gender, race, or other demographic variables. In order to determine the behavior of the populations, the formal analytic approach required that researchers make hypotheses about the population's behavior, and then study large data sets in order to confirm or disconfirm the shared tendencies that individuals from a specific population exhibit.

Examining an individual, or a small number of individuals alone, from this perspective, could not provide an account of social order, because order could only be witnessed when the behavior of populations were examined as a whole. Garfinkel viewed this position — espoused by his teacher and influential sociologist Talcott Parsons — as one that suggested that "there is no order in the plenum" (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 94), meaning that without a theory of how populations behaved, individual behavior appeared disorderly and chaotic (Garfinkel, 2002; Rawls, 2002).

Garfinkel's approach rejected this position. In contrast to Parsons, Garfinkel said that order is achieved over and over again every time individuals interact. To observe this order, he said, one need only observe the scenes where interactions are taking place and ask one basic question: How are the members in the scene producing social order at that moment in that context? In order to find the answer to this question, the researcher must figure out what questions and problems are motivating the members within the particular scene. To do this, one must not identify the members as part of a population outside the scene. Instead, the researcher must begin with the scene and then define who it is that is bringing the scene into being. For example, instead of looking at traffic and asking how men and women drive differently, the ethnomethodologist would ask, what kinds of populations make traffic such as "slow drivers," "bad drivers," "close-in" drivers, etc. (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 93). Furthermore, the researcher does not need to be concerned about the individual's attitudes, values, beliefs, or experiences in order to understand how order is created. The ordinary actions of society are immortal (a metaphor borrowed from Durkheim), meaning that they occur over and over again regardless of who plays the part of the actor in the scene. In this sense, actors are replaceable; should the actor disappear, a new one would step in and produce the same behaviors in the same way that traffic on a highway continues even though individual cars merge on and off the roadway. Thus, Garfinkel's approach to the social world is a qualitative approach that examines in depth the situated procedures that create ordinary life (Garfinkel, 2002).

Phenomenology

The philosophy most often associated with EM is phenomenology. Phenomenology is a philosophy developed by Edmund Husserl and expanded upon by Alfred Schütz and Aron Gurwitsch that says there is an active relationship between human consciousness and one's perceptions of the world. From this perspective, how one perceives the world is shaped by one's experiences in and knowledge of the world. That is, although real and imaginary objects have an ideal form, individuals can only perceive the form from their individual world positions (e.g., imagine a tree that exists as a three-dimensional object but which an observer can only perceive from a particular spatial position such as in front of, behind, in, or next to the tree). Individuals' positions include a temporal (time) position; what one knows about the history of an object influences one's present understanding of it. They also include an understanding of how the perceived object is related to other objects in the world (e.g., how trees are related to birds and other animals, what trees can be used for, etc.). And individuals' positions also includes a mode of attention or intention, meaning the individual approaches the world with a particular purpose and/or attitude (e.g., looking at the tree to determine its health, versus climbing the tree for enjoyment). The body of knowledge and perceptions one has about a particular object comprise the constructs and categorizations or "typifications" that one has for that object.

Phenomenologists believe that individuals rely on these typifications when they interact to help them understand what they see, hear, feel, etc. This they believe is especially true in communication where individuals are said to rely on shared typifications to help them understand others and to convey their own meanings. Phenomenologists like Schütz argued that the focus of investigations for social scientists should be on how individuals come to produce and experience their world through the use of these shared constructs and categories (Garfinkel 2004; Holstein & Gubrium, 1994).

Further Insights

Interaction & Communication

Garfinkel's ideas mirror many of those of the phenomenologists, with some of whom, like Gurwitsch and Schütz, he was a close associate. His early work relies heavily on phenomenological theory to outline his perspective on how communication works. But Garfinkel did not want to be viewed as a phenomenologist, and he rejects a central tenet of Schütz, who focused on the understanding of cognitive constructs as being essential to an understanding of how individuals perceive the world (Garfinkel, 2004; Rawls, 2004). In contrast, Garfinkel said that one's intentions in any given moment determine how one perceives the world in that moment. For instance, he gives the example of an individual who is faced with a diverse array of objects and is asked to choose items from the group as if he/she were a student. In that case, the individual might choose books, pencils, and paper. However, if asked to assume the role of a "proud papa" (Garfinkel, 2004, p. 142), the individual would make different choices.

To Garfinkel, the intentions of an individual are defined by the structural components of the situation in which one is engaging and these intentions shape how one perceives and communicates within the situation. Furthermore, instead of assuming that participants in an interaction rely on shared typifications to understand one another, Garfinkel said that interactants act more as intepretive-researchers. In an interaction, participants develop an understanding of their communicative partners' identity and intentions based on ongoing, local interactions. Individuals continually revise their understanding of what is happening based on the feedback that they receive from their communicative partners. Because the identity which is activitated within the situation is specific to the situation, any cognitive or affective motivation that exists outside of the situation is superfluous to understanding the individual's perceptions, identity, and intentions within the situation (Garfinkel, 2004; Holstein & Gubrium, 1994).

There are two key components of Garfinkel's understanding of situated practices and communication which are also topics of investigation within EM. These are indexicality and reflexivity.

Indexicality

In Garfinkel's view, members of society are constantly negotiating and making sense out of speech that includes both indexical and objective expressions. Indexical expressions are those expressions which depend on context in order to be understood. For instance, the term "you" can only be understood as referring to a particular person when a speaker applies it to a given person during a conversation. Objective expressions are expressions that are context-free; they can be understood similarly in any situation, for example, "chemistry" or "car. " In practice, most expressions, when in use within a given context, become indexical (e.g., "my car," "your chemistry class"). The way that members use indexicality to create and interpret experience is viewed as a practical accomplishment of ordinary life that should be investigated (Garfinkel 1967, 2002).

Reflexivity

Reflexivity refers to the fact that practices that occur within a given situation are both a product of the situation, and they constitute the situation. In other words, you cannot remove an element of the situation and still have the same situation. Reflexive practices are generally invisible to the subjects of the interaction. They are part of the taken-for-granted background of the world that makes up the individual's sense of world order. The fact that they are unnoticeable and ordinary is what makes them interesting for EM, because it is in these areas that order is assumed to exist. As an illustration of this underlying order, consider one of Garfinkel's demonstration problems related to a phone ringing. When a phone rings in your house, you probably assume someone is calling someone who lives in the house. This is a taken-for-granted element of reasoning. But what if the phone were ringing for no one? How would this disrupt your sense of order in the world? Ethnomethodologists attempt to uncover the hidden rules, values, and motives which members of society use to make reference to in order to make their actions and others' actions understandable, rational, and orderly (Garfinkel 1967, 2002, 2004).

Applying EM in a Research Study

While EM does not propose a single method of research, the nature of EM studies requires attention to the role of the researcher and the choice of method which is used to study a given situation. A key requirement for researchers is that they be thoroughly familiar with the situation they plan to study. This is known as the unique adequacy requirement, and it is important, because when individuals interact in a given situation, they assume that their fellow interactants are familiar with the situation. Thus, much of what could be said is left unstated, as interactants rely on their partners to fill in communicative gaps with information gleaned from the situation. For a researcher to fully comprehend the situation as a subject of the study would, he or she must have the same familiarity with the situation (Garfinkel 2002).

In choosing a method of study, researchers must confront two problems related to the taken-for-granted, reflexive nature of their subject. First, researchers must be aware that their presence as researcher and the method they choose to use has the potential to change the situation that they hope to study. For instance, in a situation where a researcher observes an interaction between two individuals, say a teacher and a student discussing a test, the researcher may feel compelled to ask the two subjects about the interaction. Maybe the researcher wants to know what the student was thinking during the interaction or how the teacher felt after the conversation. Unfortunately, however, should the researcher ask these questions, Garfinkel says that no new insight into the situation will be gained, because the questions require the teacher and student to reflect on their interaction using a different intentional state than they used during the interaction. The questions themselves change the situation into a different situation. Because of this potential to change the situation being studied, methods which introduce practices, such as interviews and surveys, are rarely used in EM studies. Instead, researchers rely on observations of natural data that can be collected by video and audio tape, researcher observation in a natural setting, or through the collection of naturally produced texts (ten Have, 2004).

Second, researchers must find ways to make what is usually taken for granted and invisible, visible and to do as much as they can to minimize their own reliance on common-sense reasoning. When Garfinkel first developed his ideas about EM, he produced a series of breaching experiments and tutorial problems which forced his readers and students to disrupt their ordinary ways of thinking (Garfinkel, 1967, 2002). Students were asked to record conversations verbatim and then to describe what they were actually saying or to record and compare the difference between phones that were ringing for themselves and phones that were ringing for no one. This kind of sense-making disruption can also be used within research studies where researchers observe situations where the usual taken-for-order assumptions do not apply (e.g., Garfinkel's [1967] observational study of a transgendered woman) or where researchers put themselves in an awkward or difficult situation and describe the processes they experience in coming to understand the task (ten Have, 2004).

Conversation Analysis

In general then, research within EM is qualitative and focuses on locally produced interpretive practices which members exhibit, usually through their speech and communicative behaviors. One special kind of research that some link closely with EM and some say derived separately but parallel to EM is conversation analysis (CA). Harvey Sacks, who was a contemporary of Garfinkel’s, was the principle founder of the CA method. CA examines talk-in-interaction in order to uncover how talk is organized and how individuals use context within their talk to make sense of the conversation. Two important notions in EM are membership categorization devices (MCD) and sequential analysis, or turn-taking. MCD refers to the way individuals categorize objects in their environment within their speech and then associate those categories with category-bound rules and activities. For instance, going back to the earlier example of fans at a football game, when individuals use the term "fan" in a conversation, the category of fan entails a set of certain behaviors, activities, and contexts which are appropriate for use with the term "fan." MCD offers a way to begin to understand how members of society categorize their social knowledge. Sequential analysis or turn-taking refers to the patterns of communication that individuals exhibit as they move back and forth between participants in conversation. This kind of analysis looks at how individuals produce and negotiate smooth turns in conversation, and therefore create order in their interactions (ten Have, 2004).

Conclusion

In conclusion, this article has examined ethnomethodology as a field that is fundamentally concerned with the production of social order in society. Taking as its object of study the ordinary, everyday actions of members of society, EM attempts to uncover the interpretive and constitutive methods that members use to create their sense of objective reality. In taking this approach, EM has challenged the traditional sociological perspective that order exists as a theoretical conception that can only be accounted for through statistical analysis of large data sets. EM has refuted this approach by emphasizing the importance of careful description of local, naturally occurring practices. In doing so, EM has produced a large number of accounts that serve to reinforce its principle idea that order exists in the world in the ordinary actions that we accomplish every day.

Terms & Concepts

Indexicality: Indexicality refers to the aspect of communication that relies on the situation to produce meaning.

Membership Categorization Devices: Membership categorization devices are categories that individuals use in communication that associate objects with one another and to rules and activities.

Phenomenology: Phenomenology is a philosophy which says that human consciousness actively shapes the way individuals perceive reality.

Reflexivity: Reflexivity refers to how communication is both a product of and produces the situation in which it occurs.

Qualitative Research: Qualitative research is a type of scientific research that focuses on a small number of case studies in order to understand a phenomenon.

Sequential Analysis: Sequential analysis is a conversational analytic approach that examines how individuals accomplish turn-taking in their interactions.

Unique Adequacy Requirement: The unique adequacy requirement describes the requirement of ethnomethodological research that the researcher be thoroughly familiar with the situation he or she is going to study.

Bibliography

Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Garfinkel, H. (2004). Seeing sociologically: The routine grounds of social action. London: Paradigm Publishers.

Holstein, J.A. & Gubrium, J.F. (1994). Phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and interpretive practice. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.). Handbook of qualitative research. London: SAGE Publications.

Koschmann, T. (2012). Early glimmers of the now familiar ethnomethodological themes in Garfinkel's 'The perception of the other'. Human Studies, 35, 479–504. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=72033118

Pollner, M. (2012a). The end(s) of ethnomethodology. American Sociologist, 43, 7–20. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=72033118

Pollner, M. (2012b). Reflections on Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology's program. American Sociologist, 43, 36–54. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=72033120

Rawls, A. W. (2002). Editor's introduction. In H. Garfinkel. (2002). Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Rawls, A. W. (2004). Respecifying the study of social order-Garfinkel's transition from theoretical conceptualization to practices in details. In. H. Garfinkel. (2004) Seeing sociologically: The routine grounds of social action. London: Paradigm Publishers.

ten Have, P. (2004). Understanding qualitative research and ethnomethodology. London: SAGE Publications.

Suggested Reading

Emirbayer, M., & Maynard, D. (2011). Pragmatism and ethnomethodology. Qualitative Sociology, 34, 221–261. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=58502591

Liu, Y. (2012). Ethnomethodology reconsidered: The practical logic of social systems theory. Current Sociology, 60, 581–598. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=79279086

Maynard, D. (2012). An intellectual remembrance of Harold Garfinkel: Imagining the unimaginable, and the concept of the "surveyable society". Human Studies, 35, 209–221. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=77494128

Quéré, L. (2012). Is there any good reason to say goodbye to "ethnomethodology"? Human Studies, 35, 305–325. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=77494125

Rawls, A. (2011). Garfinkel, ethnomethodology and the defining questions of pragmatism. Qualitative Sociology, 34, 277–282. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=58502590

Symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. (2011). Symbolic Interaction, 34, 349–356. Retrieved October 28, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=65923566