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ethnomethodology

Making News, indexical, bracketing, Visualizing Deviance, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Literary Methods and Sociological Theory

A branch of sociology that analyzes the rules and practices that ordinary people use to create meanings and situations (Garfinkel, 1967), ethnomethodology arose in reaction to earlier sociological theories, notably those based on the premises that social structures cause behavior or on the functionalist model. Ethnomethodology also challenges the symbolic‐interactionist paradigm in which stimulus causes meaning and meaning causes response: the stimulus of A's behavior is interpreted by B, who then responds to A in accordance with that interpretation. Ethnomethodology assumes that the process by which A and B attach meaning to their surroundings occurs first. Before there is a stimulus to interpret, A and B have a repertoire of background understandings, of potential accounts of what might happen, on which they draw to determine whether anything is happening, and if so what. Reporters, within this perspective, do not respond to events by classifying them and writing articles in terms of these classifications, as Gaye Tuchman proposed in Making News (1978); rather, they produce news events from their daily practices and their largely implicit preconceptions of what constitutes a good story (Ericson, Baranek, and Chan, 1987; Smith, 1981).

From an ethnomethodological perspective, seemingly pedestrian everyday tasks become complex accomplishments, involving a sustained effort to create, maintain, and sometimes redefine one's particular understanding of a situation and one's role in it. Britons who visited a doctor's waiting room in the 1950s, for example, shared a powerful conviction that they were part of an orderly queue. No one received priority on the basis of socially superior position or medical emergency; it was taken for granted that such persons would never seek care in this way. Time of arrival was the sole criterion for priority; yet those waiting chose their seats at various points around the room in order to sit close to friends and relatives and not too close to strangers. No one left their chosen seat until the receptionist called, “Next, please.” Seating position thus gave no clue to all‐important priority in the queue. As a patient, one had to discover and respect those who had priority by remembering which seats were occupied when one arrived or by negotiating with anyone who might misconstrue or threaten one's perceived position in the queue.

The strategy of ethnomethodology is to study such practical reasoning—the ways in which people create accounts of their location and activity and attach meanings to them, drawing on their repertoire of background understandings. For example, Garfinkel (1967) reported on long accounts by a transsexual of the steps she took during adolescence to maintain the popular belief that she was a woman. Similarly, Dorothy Smith (1978) examined a woman's reports of how she gradually reached the conclusion that her roommate was mentally ill; Smith showed that this report came to exclude other possible explanations of her companion's ways. Ethomethodologists of music examine how performers decide what constitutes good playing and how they interact to produce it (Weeks, 1990). Conversational analysts seek to uncover the rules by which group members decide when and how to jump in, to draw to a close, to cover an awkward silence, or to respond to what is seen as a gaffe or an argument. In the long run, they hope to ascertain how far certain practices are universal and how far they are cultural or even context specific.

Ethnomethodology has close affinities with semantic analysis in seeking to understand the richness and polyvalence of signs. It studies how far a structure of commonsense knowledge and a pattern of practical reasoning underlie signs, enabling members of a community to translate back and forth between long private narratives and brief public summaries or between the rich, privately known, variable detail of (say) a bridge hand and a single, publicly known, highly standardized bid. Both ethnomethodology and semiotics search for general rules of reasoning that link a simple, deep, hidden structure of language rules to a complex surface of observational dialogues and gestures.

Harold Garfinkel initially demonstrated through breaching experiments that interaction was rule governed at the individual level. His strategy was to illuminate the rules that subjects took for granted by showing the effects of deliberately breaking them. His experimenters would suddenly, in mid‐conversation, reply, “What do you mean, ‘How are you feeling?’ Do you mean physical or mental?” or “I really don't know what you mean.” Their subjects, especially those who were close friends or family members, were angered by the accusation that their competence in everyday communication could no longer be trusted; the conversations quickly broke down. Garfinkel also conducted experiments in which a putative advice giver responded to the subject's questions with random, stark yeses or noes. Subjects devoted great ingenuity in making sense of these oracular remarks, and Garfinkel deduced a second general rule of conversation: participants strive to find a comprehensible pattern in one another's words and actions. He was able to confirm, in other experiments, his students' ability to reproduce a brief conversation and then to spell out a much fuller account that it indexed.

Garfinkel struggled with the problem of how to talk about these results. Sometimes, he invented elements of a metalanguage, jargon like indexical (context dependent) and bracketing (holding in abeyance). At others, he preferred a hyphenated string of evocative words, referring for example to “members' methods for making their activities visibly‐rational‐and‐reportable‐for‐all‐practical‐purposes.” Garfinkel treats meaning as neither objective nor purely subjective but as intersubjective and defined by the boundaries of shared background knowledge. This, in turn, is not a fixed corpus that could be catalogued but one that evolves as situations and, more broadly, everyday life are negotiated among participants; nor is there a fixed vocabulary through which it is expressed. If there is a set of relative constants on which a structuralist semantics can be built, it is in the rules for conversation on which Garfinkel's experiments focused. An evaluation of his ideas should therefore center on these rules.

Let us focus on their object: simply put, they are rules for continued interaction. When trust was removed by breaching behavior, interaction abruptly came to an angry halt. Conversely, while trust endured, participants made sustained efforts to prolong the interaction, even when faced with apparently nonsensical answers. The experimental controls were not, of course, so tight that one could claim with assurance that trust in the other person's communicative competence was a necessary or a sufficient condition of continuing interactions or that one could generalize these results to larger groups. The second rule was not a condition of interaction but a demonstration of bulldoglike human trust in the communicative competence of the other, at least in certain circumstances. In general, subjects' reactions to an incomprehensible experimenter might be much less consistent than Garfinkel found; psychologists are finding increasingly that some students “see through” their experiments. The second rule, then, is not a separate condition for continued interaction. Further, it is difficult to see how this theory and these experiments can generate a fuller set of rules for continued conversations. Similarly, much more work is necessary before we have more than a commonsense understanding of commonsense knowledge.

There are a number of questions that ethnomethology needs to address more fully in order to understand such phenomena as dialogues of the deaf. If we assume that when conversations are continued there must be some rules that are common to the participants, what is the relationship between a continued and a successful conversation? Can a conversation continue when the participants are only partially following the same rules? How does a conversation continue if one person changes the rules—and, indeed, what would constitute a change of rules? Can there be ruleless conversations, or is every snatch of talk necessarily bound by some rules? If one person manipulates the rules, what higher‐order rules can be invoked as rules for breaking the rules, for faking conformity, for playing with the rules? Can unconventional rules gain acceptance? Finally, what is the relationship between continuing and successful interaction as perceived by the participants?

Although in some ways Garfinkel rebelled strongly against the systems theory of his mentor Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), conceptions of structure and value consensus still underlie his work. While he stresses that conversations depend on unexplicated assumptions and the willingness of participants to pretend and behave “as if,” his work's focus on rules and the attainment of consensus rather than, say, power and the imposition of the interests of the dominant party, keep it within the functionalist tradition. The main theoretical value of his work has been in offering a radical challenge to the notion that overriding social structures are real entities that change extremely slowly and can therefore be taken as social facts when studying face‐to‐face interaction. His work thus challenges the structuralism of many Marxists and some feminists, who take the structures of class and patriarchy for granted rather than assuming that they are re‐created and freshly threatened daily in the little interactions of everyday life.

The theoretical contribution of ethnomethodology has thus been largely iconoclastic, though it has been an important influence on efforts to redirect social research in a number of areas, including the work of Dorothy Smith on theorizing women's everyday lives and work in the social construction of science. Smith and her students have followed Garfinkel's approach but not his experimental strategy in exploring how women and men in their daily activities construct versions of social reality: how teachers construct a version of the single parent who is problematic for them (Griffith, 1984), how employment agencies produce immigrant women for employers (Ng, 1986), and how men have constructed a version of sociology from which women's experience was effectively excluded (Smith, 1987).

In the field of science, Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingstone (1981) studied how scientists organize their work to be able to report, for example, that pulsars existed as things prior to their discovery, with the researchers doing nothing more than following proper procedures. Yet such scientists' notebooks indicate that the conclusion resulted from a long, confusing, and at times agonizing discussion. Lynch (1985, 1988) has continued to explore how patterns and irregularities are found in scientific data and then interpreted. More broadly, English researchers have elaborated this contradiction into a conception of two types of scientific discourse, empiricist and the contingent. The former governs scientists' accounts of their own work, the latter their critiques of shortcomings in the work of their rivals.

[See also Conversation; Dialogue; Goffman; and Gossip.]

Bibliography and More Information about ethnomethodology

—Ray Morris

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