Ethnomethodology Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Ethnomethodology (EM) is the study of people’s methods of producing and reproducing recognizable orders and phenomena in social life. This program gained significant attention in sociology following the publication of Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethno-methodology in 1967 (see Garfinkel & Rawls 2010 [1967]). The prefix “ethno-” refers to ”social members” or ”members of a local social scene”; ”method” refers to the procedures and actions people take to accomplish certain ends; the suffix ”-ology” means ”the study of.” Together, ethnomethodology can be simply understood as ”the study of the methods people use for producing recognizable social orders” (Rawls 2002: 6).

EM researchers have utilized different kinds of data, including organizational documents, personal interviews, participant observation, ethnography, and audio or video recordings of events and interactions. One historical connection between EM and classical sociology is EM’s orientation toward specifying how people enact social things (or Durkheimian ”social facts”) that put social orders into work. The procedures by which people’s methodical practices constitute social orders are extremely subtle and complex, involving the dynamic deployment of language, categories, institutions, communicative acts, ideas, rituals, and laws in local settings. While such processes are pervasive, they are often unintelligible and unclear even to the people who take part in, and are influenced by, them every day and every moment.

Therefore, many EM practitioners are involved in creating accounts about such processes, rendering them discoverable and intelligible to readers. Some EM researchers draw on first-person accounts from people engaging in normatively exceptional activities while others partake in them and ”become” the social members that they study. Some EM investigators study mundane, routine practices – such as ordinary people walking on a crowded street, teachers conducting lessons, scientists representing their findings – to unearth the social processes that are normally taken for granted or taken as legitimate. A well-known strategy is the use of conversation analysis, the practitioners of which use audio- or video-tape data to go into incredible details to describe turn taking, utterance paring, nonverbal acts, and other local social actions employed by people on a moment-to-moment basis in talk-in-interaction. Another widely known strategy is the breaching method, the practitioners of which actively disrupt social scenes in order to demonstrate their (re)assembling processes, or the methods of (re)assembly.

Despite the diversity of approaches, enthomethodologists generally share several methodological commitments in common. First of all, EM investigators take seriously the role of human agency in producing social orders and phenomena. All social realities – including those that are seemingly mundane, extraordinary, or chaotic – are treated as the results of reflexive, artful practices done by people in interaction.

Secondly, because it is ingrained in the EM program that human agency is important and each phenomenon is unique, most ethnomethodologists do not seek to theorize the relationships between generic causes and generic social phenomena, as practiced in variable-based research. Instead, EM investigations create accounts for different states of affairs by exhibiting the complexity and fineness of social orders’ constitution processes, demonstrating the methodical procedures involved.

Thirdly, EM investigators dedicate their attention to the issue of practice. This focus is distinct from some other approaches (e.g., phenomenology) that place emphasis on meaning or the mind, which embed a different philosophy about the manners by which the social world is ordered. ”Meaning” would be analyzed as local, meaning-making practices in EM.

Ethnomethodology has been a diverse enterprise since its inception and has been selectively appropriated and applied into different disciplines and programs of study. It has noticeably contributed to path-breaking works in the studies of classroom processes, legal processes, the medical profession, workplace and organizations, gender, science and technology, discourse, social cognition and behavior, esoteric experience, and everyday life. Additionally, ethnomethodology has made important contributions to theoretical debates in philosophy and sociology surrounding the topics of justice, social order, knowledge/epistemology, reflexivity, and agency-structure relations.

Bibliography:

Garfinkel, H. & Rawls, A. (2010) [1967] Studies in Ethnomethodology: Expanded and Updated Edition. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO.
Maynard, D. W. & Clayman, S. E. (1991) The diversity of ethnomethodology. Annual Review of Sociology 17: 385-418.
Rawls, A. (2002) Editor’s introduction. In: Garfinkel, H. (ed.), Ethnomethodology s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Roman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD, pp. 1-64.