Ethnomethodology and everyday practices
Explanation
Ethnomethodology is the sociological current founded by Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011) with his book Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). The name is deliberate: ethno alludes to of ordinary people, methodology to the practical methods people use to make sense of social reality. Ethnomethodology studies how the ordinary members of a society produce daily, with their discrete and often unnoticed practices, the social order we experience as natural.
Garfinkel had been a student of Talcott Parsons at Harvard, but distanced himself from his abstract sociology. Influenced by the phenomenology of Alfred Schütz (who adapted Husserl for the social sciences), Garfinkel insisted that social order is not something given externally that individuals internalise (as Parsons suggested) but something that members continuously accomplish in their concrete interactions. Order is a practical achievement, not an abstract fact.
The famous breaching experiments by Garfinkel and his students dramatically illustrate this thesis. If in an ordinary conversation (where we assume an enormous number of tacit shared presuppositions), someone suddenly literally questions every sentence (what do you mean by 'I'm fine'?), the interaction breaks down, people get exasperated. This shows that everyday common sense is sustained by continuous practices of tacit interpretation. Breaking them reveals how much invisible practical work sustains social naturalness.
Harvey Sacks and his disciples (Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson) developed from ethnomethodology Conversation Analysis (CA): microscopic study of how any ordinary conversation is organised. They discovered principles of great precision: turn-taking, adjacency pairs (question-answer, greeting-greeting), repairs, sequences. Interactional fitting in everyday conversations is of an astonishing sophistication that goes unnoticed by participants themselves.
Ethnomethodological studies have also analysed scientific-technical work (how scientists actually produce facts in laboratories, Bruno Latour drank from this), medical work (diagnoses in consulting rooms), bureaucratic work (how social workers construct cases), police work (how officers identify suspects), legal decision-making (how juries deliberate). Each domain reveals its invisible interactional work.
For the theory of consciousness, ethnomethodology contributes a crucial perspective: everyday social consciousness is not an individual capacity applied to objects, but a continuous, distributed, practical, intersubjective production occurring in the fine texture of concrete interactions. Meaning and intelligibility are not internal properties of private minds but public interactional achievements. This approach has influenced recent philosophy of mind (extended minds, distributed cognition), science and technology studies, discourse analysis, social artificial intelligence. As a display of the concrete work humans perform in each interaction to maintain the order experienced as given world, ethnomethodology remains an indispensable perspective on embodied social consciousness.
Strengths
- Minute attention to the organisation of ordinary experience.
- Rigorous empirical methodology.
- Surprising findings about tacit presuppositions.
- Dialogue with phenomenology and cognitive sciences.
Main critiques
- Microscopy sometimes disconnected from the macro.
- Technical terminology hampers access.
- Risk of relativism.