Ethnomethodology

Definition

Ethnomethodology is a term, literally meaning "people's methods," invented by Harold Garfinkel to describe a branch of sociology which he initiated. In its origins the subject was based on a critique of mainstream sociology.

The methods in question belong to ordinary people, not to researchers. Ethnomethodology studies the procedures members of a society use to produce and recognize social order as an ongoing accomplishment, moment by moment. The object of study is the work of making a situation intelligible, which participants perform continuously and almost entirely without noticing.

Garfinkel coined the word around 1954 while analyzing tape recordings of jury deliberations at the University of Chicago. He observed that jurors were not applying legal rules so much as reasoning about what would count as adequate grounds for a verdict, and doing so competently without any formal training. The parallel to existing terms such as ethnobotany and ethnomedicine, which name a people's own knowledge of a domain, supplied the construction.

Critique of mainstream sociology

Garfinkel's objection was that mainstream sociology treated people as what he called cultural dopes. In that picture, a person absorbs the norms of their society and then acts them out, so their behavior can be predicted from the norms without asking what the person was thinking. Talcott Parsons, under whom Garfinkel studied at Harvard, built the most influential version of this. Garfinkel's response was that people are not doing that. They are constantly working out what a situation calls for, and that work is the thing sociology should be studying rather than the thing it explains away.

"Cultural dope" is Garfinkel's own phrase, from Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), and "dope" there means a person acting mechanically rather than an insult to anyone's intelligence.

Ethnomethodology reverses the priority. Social structure is not a framework that produces behavior, it is the visible result of members' continuous practical work. Norms do not determine action, they are resources people invoke, cite, and argue over in the course of making their conduct accountable.

The critique extends to the sociologist's own methods. Coding a questionnaire, categorizing an interview, and deciding what an observation is an instance of are all acts of practical reasoning of the same kind ethnomethodology studies. Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks argued that professional sociology therefore cannot stand outside its subject matter.

Core concepts

Indexicality. Expressions such as "here," "now," "this one," and "that guy" have no determinate sense apart from the occasion of their use. Garfinkel's argument is that this applies to all expressions rather than to a special class of them. Meaning is always completed by circumstance, and participants repair the shortfall as a matter of routine.

Reflexivity. Accounts of a setting are part of the setting they describe. A meeting is constituted by people treating it as a meeting, referring to it as one, and orienting to it as one. Description and constitution are the same act.

Accountability. Conduct is organized so as to be observable and reportable. People do not merely act, they act in ways that display what they are doing to anyone competent to look, which is what makes shared understanding possible without telepathy.

The documentary method of interpretation. Borrowed from Karl Mannheim. Particulars are read as instances of an underlying pattern, and the pattern is in turn inferred from the particulars. The circularity is not a flaw in the reasoning, it is how the reasoning works.

Et cetera clause. No rule specifies all conditions of its own application. Participants fill the remainder as they go, and treat the filling as unremarkable.

Breaching experiments

Breaching was Garfinkel's best-known procedure, designed to make background expectancies visible by disrupting them. Students were sent home to behave as boarders in their own families, addressing parents formally and asking permission for routine acts. Others responded to greetings by demanding clarification, asking what specifically was meant by "how are you." Others moved progressively closer to a conversational partner or bargained over the fixed prices in a store.

When breaching was used, participants became confused, then anxious, then angry, and moved quickly to restore the frame by finding an explanation for the breacher's conduct. What the experiments demonstrate is the size and rigidity of the shared background that ordinary interaction depends on, and the amount of active work devoted to keeping it intact.

The experiments also raise ethical objections that would face difficulty under contemporary review, since subjects were deceived and distressed without consent.

Conversation analysis

The most productive line of work to come out of ethnomethodology. Harvey Sacks, working with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, applied the program to recorded talk, treating conversation as a machinery with describable structure rather than as an expression of intent.

The turn-taking paper of 1974 by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson set out a system that allocates turns locally, one at a time, and accounts for the observation that overlap in ordinary conversation is brief and gaps are short. Related findings include adjacency pairs, where a question makes an answer conditionally relevant; preference organization, where dispreferred responses such as refusals are delayed, hedged, and accounted for while acceptances come immediately; and repair, the ordered set of procedures for handling trouble in hearing, speaking, or understanding.

Jefferson's transcription notation, which records overlap, timed silences to the tenth of a second, in-breaths, and stretched sounds, remains the field standard.

Studies of work

Garfinkel's later program directed attention to the practical reasoning specific to particular occupations, on the argument that what makes a discipline work cannot be found in its formal accounts of itself. Studies covered laboratory science, mathematical proving, air traffic control, and the coordination of urban traffic.

Lucy Suchman's Plans and Situated Actions (1987), written at Xerox PARC, brought this into interface design. Studying users of a photocopier's expert help system, Suchman argued that plans are resources for action rather than controlling structures, and that the machine's model of the user could not accommodate the situated improvisation that operating it actually required. The book reshaped how human-computer interaction understood the relationship between design intent and use.

Workplace studies in this tradition, including Christian Heath and Paul Luff's work on the London Underground control rooms, established ethnomethodological observation as a method for computer-supported cooperative work.

Related Reading

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
• Interaction Ritual : Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior
• Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings
• Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience
• Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
• Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative
• Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Designing Interactions
• Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches

Key texts

• Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall, 1967.
• Sacks, Harvey. Lectures on Conversation. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Blackwell, 1992.
• Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. "A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation." Language 50, no. 4 (1974): 696-735.
• Suchman, Lucy. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
• Heritage, John. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Polity Press, 1984.