Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Ethnomethodology Program: Legacies and Prospects Douglas W. Maynard full chapter instant download
The Ethnomethodology Program: Legacies and Prospects Douglas W. Maynard full chapter instant download
The Ethnomethodology Program: Legacies and Prospects Douglas W. Maynard full chapter instant download
https://ebookmass.com/product/how-to-measure-anything-in-
cybersecurity-risk-douglas-w-hubbard/
https://ebookmass.com/product/2021-international-building-code-
illustrated-handbook-1st-edition-douglas-w-thornburg/
https://ebookmass.com/product/2021-international-building-code-
illustrated-handbook-1st-edition-douglas-w-thornburg-2/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-economics-of-john-maynard-
keynes-fabio-terra/
Scientism: prospects and problems De Ridder
https://ebookmass.com/product/scientism-prospects-and-problems-
de-ridder/
https://ebookmass.com/product/brooklyn-legacies-triss-stein-2/
https://ebookmass.com/product/alien-legacies-nathan-abrams/
https://ebookmass.com/product/brooklyn-legacies-triss-stein/
https://ebookmass.com/product/ideology-and-mass-killing-the-
radicalized-security-politics-of-genocides-and-deadly-atrocities-
maynard/
The Ethnomethodology Program
F O U N DAT IO N S O F H UM A N I N T E R AC T IO N
General Editor: N.J. Enfield, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Radboud University, Nijmegen, and the University of Sydney
This series promotes new interdisciplinary research on the elements of human sociality,
in particular as they relate to the activity and experience of communicative interaction
and human relationships. Books in this series explore the foundations of human
interaction from a wide range of perspectives, using multiple theoretical and
methodological tools. A premise of the series is that a proper understanding of
human sociality is only possible if we take a truly interdisciplinary approach.
Relationship Thinking
N.J. Enfield
Talking About Troubles in Conversation
Gail Jefferson
Edited by Paul Drew, John Heritage, Gene Lerner, and Anita Pomerantz
The Instruction of Imagination
Daniel Dor
How Traditions Live and Die
Olivier Morin
The Origins of Fairness
Nicolas Baumard
Requesting Responsibility
Jörg Zinken
Accountability in Social Interaction
Jeffrey Robinson
Intercorporeality
Edited by Christian Meyer, Jürgen Streeck, J. Scott Jordan
Repairing the Broken Surface of Talk
Gail Jefferson
Edited by Jörg Bergmann and Paul Drew
The Normative Animal?
Neil Roughley and Kurt Bayertz
When Conversation Lapses
Elliott M. Hoey
Communicating & Relating
Robert B. Arundale
Asking and Telling in Conversation
Anita Pomerantz
Face-to-Face Dialogue
Janet Beavin Bavelas
The Book of Answers
Tanya Stivers
The Ethnomethodology
Program
Legacies and Prospects
Edited by
D OU G L A S W. M AY NA R D
J O H N H E R I TAG E
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190854409.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Contributors ix
PA RT I : A N T E C E D E N T S A N D T H E O RY
PA RT I I : E M P I R IC A L I M PAC T
PA RT I I I : G R OW T H P O I N T S
Notes 477
Name Index 495
Subject Index 503
Acknowledgments
This book emerged as a result of a gathering at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) to celebrate Harold Garfinkel’s life and work, and to take stock of his research
endeavors, their influence, and their contemporary development. We are grateful to the
organizers of this meeting, including Emanuel Schegloff and Stefan Timmermans, for
assembling a group of scholars who have been influenced by Garfinkel and his ethno-
methodological inquiries, and to UCLA and the Department of Sociology for facilitating
and hosting the meeting.
The present volume arose from our collective belief that the meeting contained too
much of value to be consigned to the vagaries of collective memory, and that instead
it could form a nucleus for a wider and more integrated consideration of Garfinkel’s
initiatives and their consequences. We are grateful to Meredith Keffer, Acquisitions
Editor and Macey Fairchild, Project Editor, at Oxford University Press, and Preetham Raj,
Project Manager, at Newgen Knowledge Works, for expertly shepherding the manuscript
through the production process. Keith Cox handled the responsibilities of assembling
the chapters and graphics for submission to Oxford University Press, and Lucas Wiscons
facilitated the enhancement of graphic images for several of the chapters. We also thank
Keith Cox and Lucas Wiscons for their prompt and skillful assembly of the subject and
name indexes.
Contributors
Steven E. Clayman
Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Harold Garfinkel
Formerly Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Charles Goodwin
Formerly Professor of Communication, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Christian Greiffenhagen
Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Christian Heath
Professor of Work and Organisation, King’s College, London, England
John Heritage
Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Nikki Jones
Department of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Lillian Jungleib
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Eric Livingston
Faculty of Medicine and Health; School of Psychology, University of New England,
Armidale, Australia
Paul Luff
Professor in Organisations and Technology, King’s College, London, England
Michael E. Lynch
Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Michael Mair
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, England
Douglas W. Maynard
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. USA
Lorenza Mondada
Professor for French and General Linguistics, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
x Contributors
Geoffrey Raymond
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Kristen Schilt
Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Wes W. Sharrock
Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, Manchester, England
Philippe Sormani
Senior FNS Researcher, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Iddo Tavory
Department of Sociology, New York University, New York, NY, USA
Jason J. Turowetz
Garfinkel Archive, Newburyport, MA, USA; University of Siegen, Siegen, GE
Darin Weinberg
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England
Don Zimmerman
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
1
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies
and Prospects
John Heritage and Douglas W. Maynard
The first development was, of course, the one pioneered by Parsons himself
(1951). The second, with its focus on the structuring of experience as the foun-
dation of social organization, would occupy Garfinkel over the next 50 years and
beyond. It would lead to a variety of quasi-experimental “breaching” studies,
to explorations of the ineluctable contextuality of human reasoning, action,
and language use, to a re-specification of the role of norms in social action, to
studies of the embodied management of courses of action ranging from the most
mundane of everyday activities to fundamental scientific experiments, and to
investigations of singular events such as moments of scientific discovery. In the
process, Garfinkel engaged with topics in social science—the theory of action,
2 The Ethnomethodology Program
Garfinkel’s Development
Harold Garfinkel was born in 1917 into a large Jewish community in Newark,
New Jersey. The initial plan was for him to join the small furniture business
owned by his father, and to this end he enrolled at the University of Newark (now
part of Rutgers University) for training in business and accounting. During
this period, Garfinkel developed a strong interest in sociology and, having
graduated in 1939, proceeded to become a graduate student in the Sociology
Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Garfinkel
2002a; Rawls 2002 and Chapter 3 in this volume). The graduate students he
joined at North Carolina had Weberian interests, drawing on Znaniecki’s work
on Social Actions (1936), and Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action (1937).
From the philosophy department, Garfinkel was exposed to phenomenological
texts, including those by Husserl (Garfinkel 2002b). The sociology department
was headed by the redoubtable Howard Odum, a scholar and administrator of
immense energy, the founder of the journal Social Forces, and a past president
of the American Sociological Association (1930). Odum was strongly committed
to the study of African American culture in the South, and to racial progress
(Vance and Jocher 1955), and this interest was shared by Garfinkel, whose two
earliest publications addressed issues of racism and racial injustice (Rawls,
Chapter 3 in this volume).
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies and Prospects 3
attention to and respect for the overarching demands of justice (Garfinkel 1949).
However, for the B-B cases, although degrees of guilt also emerged, they were not
constructed within an overall orientation to justice as a fundamental or sacred
goal. Neither did motives, circumstances, and identities, if known or understood
at all, carry much weight. The stance of the court in dealing with B-B defendants
was pragmatic, rather than principled. Whereas numbers of B-B cases with first-
degree indictments were reduced to second degree or less, the B-B cases did not
“earn” or deserve such outcomes. Manslaughter was determined to be the most
fitting description of the crime, because it disdainfully allowed “that homicide
was committed, but that the homicide involved Negroes” (Garfinkel 1949).
Taken together, the “Color Trouble” and homicide studies focused on so-
cial justice issues while embodying an analytic framework that centered
on presuppositions involved in the construal of actors and actions in social
encounters. Garfinkel would continue this approach in his preliminary PhD
studies on racial and other minorities at Harvard (Rawls and Turowetz 2019a;
Turowetz and Rawls 2020), in an essay on degradation ceremonies (Garfinkel
1956), and most tellingly in his analysis of Agnes, a transsexual who provided
him with an occasion for a radical rethinking of gender (Garfinkel 1967b; Schilt,
Chapter 8 in this volume). In addition, Garfinkel’s investigation of race-differen-
tial patterns of homicide convictions foreshadowed the critique of excessive reli-
ance on official statistics that emerged in the 1960s. The study presciently took up
a phenomenological critique of the statistical positivism that was then advancing
to ascendency in postwar American sociology (Calhoun 2008; Rawls 2018).
Harvard
The integration of a set of common value patterns with the internalized need-
disposition structure of the constituent personalities is the core phenomenon
of the dynamics of social systems. That the stability of any social system except
the most evanescent interaction process is dependent on a degree of such in-
tegration may be said to be the fundamental dynamic theorem of sociology.
(1951:42)
social situations and the continually dynamic contexts of interaction, the ways
in which norms might be appropriately applied to such contexts, and communi-
cation about all of these were all questions about social order that were ontolog-
ically prior to the Hobbesian motivational concerns, which indeed presupposed
all of them. Answering Georg Simmel’s (1910) famous question “How is society
possible?” could not truly be achieved without addressing them.
The intellectual dialogue with Parsons continued into the 1960s in lectures,
meetings, and successive revisions of the Parsons Primer (Garfinkel [1962] 2019;
Rawls and Turowetz 2019a). Rather as Schütz ([1932] 1967) undertook to re-
construct the methodological foundations of Max Weber’s social theory in terms
of meaning construction, Garfinkel’s dissertation attempted the same task for
Parsonian social systems theory. The plausibility of the undertaking rested on
their common commitment to the theoretical centrality of social interaction.
However, Parsons, whose work focused on the motivation of action and the
Hobbesian problem of order, was content with top-down generalizations about
normative values. Garfinkel’s focus from the North Carolina days, by contrast,
was on social experience, and the knitting of that experience through the process
of interaction into constructed and reconstructed orders of meaning that can en-
dure across time and place.
Garfinkel’s (1952) dissertation elaborated a comparison of the handling of
“pre-theoretical” problems by Parsons and Schütz (abridged as Chapter 2 of
this volume), exploring the epistemological and methodological implications of
the notion that the human world is constructed within social interaction, and
only there. The thesis itself was “concerned with the conditions under which a
person makes continuous sense of the world around him” (Garfinkel 1952:1).
The procedure he used to address this question involved the manipulation of
“incongruous” understandings of events by experimental subjects. The results
of the study are briefly reported in Garfinkel (1967e:58–67). Having worked as
an experimenter on the “Information Apperception Test” at Harvard (Rawls,
Chapter 3 in this volume), Garfinkel was experienced in working with incon-
gruity scenarios. It was a technique that he would also continue to exploit in the
ensuing decade at UCLA.
Garfinkel’s primary theoretical resource, both in the dissertation and sub-
sequently, was Alfred Schütz. Arriving in New York in 1940 as a refugee from
Hitler’s Germany, Schütz devoted himself to theoretical research that stressed the
social constitution of experience and knowledge. Drawing on Husserl, Schütz
argued that human experience is constituted within pragmatic presuppositions
that he termed the “epoché of the natural attitude.” Within this attitude of eve-
ryday life, persons assume that the world will be the same today as it was yes-
terday, and that ordinary practices of living will work in the same ways and with
Ethnomethodology’s Legacies and Prospects 7
the same effects as they have done previously. The knowledge that actors draw
upon, Schütz averred, is socially presupposed, approximate, and held in typified
forms that are adaptable, and adapted, to circumstances. Significantly, there is
little convergence between this type of recipe knowledge and the rationality of
scientific knowledge. Indeed, Schütz held that the scientific attitude and the nat-
ural attitude are distinct from one another, and the knowledge stemming from
them is not easily compatible. A person may be “rational” in the common-sense
world, but this rationality is pragmatic and not to be confused with scientific ra-
tionality (Garfinkel 1967f; Schütz 1962).
In the context of social interaction, Schütz argued that despite the fact that
actors’ orientations to the world are unavoidably perspectival, they will none-
theless continue to assume what he termed the “general thesis of reciprocal
perspectives” (Schütz 1962:12; Garfinkel 1967e:55–57). The maintenance of this
assumption, Schütz argued, involves no “guarantees”: instead, it depends solely
and entirely on the efforts of the actors themselves. Many of Garfinkel’s early ex-
perimental procedures, or what he called “demonstrations,” were designed to
undermine these reciprocities, and to reveal the associated collapse of intersub-
jectivity that resulted. The demonstrations showed that the management of the
reciprocities is deeply embedded in the moral order, and that they are funda-
mental features of the “trust” conditions (Garfinkel 1963) on which all human
intersubjectivity is fundamentally based. Trust, in Garfinkel’s rendering, consists
in an actor’s assuming the general thesis, assuming that others adhere to it as
well, and assuming that others take for granted the actor’s own adherence to the
thesis.
. . . like “fact” and “fancy” and “opinion” and “my opinion” and “your opinion”
and “what we’re entitled to say” and “what the evidence shows” and “what can
be demonstrated” and “what actually was said” as compared with “what only
you think he said” or “what he seemed to have said.” You have these notions
of evidence and demonstration and of matters of relevance, of true and false,
of public and private, of methodic procedure, and the rest. At the same time
8 The Ethnomethodology Program
the whole thing was handled by all those concerned as part of the same set-
ting in which they were used by the members, by these jurors, to get the
work of deliberations done. That work for them was deadly serious. (Hill and
Crittenden 1968:7; reprinted in Garfinkel 1974:16)
The methods of reasoning that Garfinkel encountered in the jury project could
not remotely be handled through the Parsonian tenets of social action. Instead,
Garfinkel advocated a form of analysis—ethnomethodology—to investigate
“people’s methods” (Lynch 2007) for jointly determining, in the case of jurors,
facts, evidence, etc., in ways that were publicly accountable. In other contexts,
the methods of reasoning would be different. The term “ethnomethodology” was
intended as a cognate of extant anthropological terms such as “ethnobotany” or
“ethnomedicine,” that focused on the knowledge practices deployed in distinc-
tive sociocultural contexts.
In the process of developing ethnomethodology, Garfinkel initiated huge the-
oretical innovations: that rules and norms could neither determine nor explain
behavior without reference to the details of their situated application; that there
are no guarantees of mutual understandings among persons, nor could such
understandings be achieved except through the practices of situated interac-
tion; and that social reasoning is multitudinous and cannot be reduced to logical
structures. Above all, and notwithstanding his advertised interest in sense-
making, Garfinkel insisted on an anti-cognitivist approach to the topic. Social
sense-making cannot conceivably be reduced to psychological processes, and
shared understanding cannot be understood as the projection of cognitive prop-
erties. Ethnomethodology would focus on the “witnessable order” (Livingston
2008). And it would address the shared social methods that social actors together
use to perceive, recognize, and act upon everyday circumstances, and to do so
in a common, socially shared fashion that is itself recognizable and accountable.
Etelka oli iloinen, että András sattui olemaan poissa kotoa. Hän oli
ratsastanut päivän koittaessa Zárdaan, ja äiti halusi puristaa
poikansa lujasti syliinsä silloin kun hän ilmoittaisi pojalleen nuo
suuret uutiset — tuon hänen mielettömimpien toivojensa
toteutumisen.
»András, seuratkoon siitä sitten joko hyvää tahi pahaa, ovat toivosi
nyt kumminkin toteutuneet. Kreivi on pyytänyt sinua tulemaan
kartanoon, että voisit kunnioittaa naista, josta on tuleva puolisosi».
JALOSUKUINEN NEITO.
Aamu oli yhtä levoton kuin yökin, sillä suurimman osan siitä olivat
Bideskuty ja kreivitär Irma valvoneet ajatellen, mitä seuraava
tapahtumista rikas päivä toisi mukanaan.
Silloin Jánko avasi sen, ja aivan hänen takanaan seisoi tuo pitkä
talonpoikaiskosija maalauksellisessa komeassa kansallispuvussaan
näkyen selvästi tammioven tummaa taustaa vastaan. Hänen
tavatonta pituuttaan, leveitä voimakkaita hartioitaan ja hänen
olemuksensa arvokkaisuutta näyttivät vielä lisäävän tuo suuri
lammasnahkaviitta, jonka Etelka oli koruompeluksin ja merkein
kaunisti koristellut, ja joka ulottui hänen olkapäitään nilkkoihin asti,
suurilla hopeasoljilla kaunistettu leveä vyö, valkoiset leveät
pellavahihat ja housut, jotka olivat oikeat erikoisen hienouden ja
hienon koruompeluksen mestariteokset. Hänen kasvonsa olivat
hyvin kalpeat ja hänen tummat, tuliset ja magnetisoivat silmänsä
tutkivat heti huoneen jokaisen kolkan, kunnes ne huomasivat tuon
ikkunan vieressä istuvan olennon. Hän näytti olevan aivan
huumautunut, kun hän lumottuna käveli huoneeseen ja kumartui
suutelemaan kreivitär Irman kättä jonka tämä armollisesti oli
alentunut ojentamaan hänelle.
UNELMA.
Etelka tiesi, ettei hän saisi nähdä poikaansa sinä iltana, mutta
huolimatta siitä ei hän voinut nukkua, vaan istui ikkunan luona
ristissä käsin ja katseli levottomasti tasangolle. Kun ensimmäiset
kultaiset juovat rikkoivat taivaan pimeyden, kuuli hän Csillagin tutun
kavioiden kapseen. Silloin sammutti hän kynttilät ollen tyytyväinen,
että hänen poikansa oli turvassa, ja tietäen hyvin, että András halusi
nyt olla yksinään. Hän kuunteli poikansa askelia, jotka olivat kevyet
ja joustavat, ja katseli pihalle, kun András kävellen suorana vei
Csillagin talliin. Mennessään puutarhan poikki, pysähtyi hän jälleen
tuon rakastamansa ruusupuun luo, jonka viheriöiden oksien välistä
näkyi yksi ainoa punainen nuppu. Etelka muisti nyt, että hänkin
aikaisemmin päivällä oli huomannut tuon aukeamaisillaan olevan
kukan, jonka András nyt nopeasti ja riemuiten taittoi vieden sen
mukanaan huoneeseensa.
XXIII
Kreivitär Irma oli kuullut nuo sanat ja hetki oli tuntunut hänestä
sanomattoman katkeralta. Hän ei ollut kumminkaan papin
arvokkaisuuden vuoksi voinut moittia tätä hävittömästä puheesta.
Puhua nyt »suuresta onnesta» silloin kun vanhempain sydän oli
murtua häpeästä ja katumuksesta, ja lörpötellä »arvokkaasta
rakkaudesta» silloin kun tytön äiti vaivasi aivojaan, miten hän
parhaiten voisi nöyryyttää tuon »todellakin hyvän miehen»
kaikenlaisilla halveksimisilla.