Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology

John Heritage

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745600611, 9780745600604
• eBook ISBN: 9780745667195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The writings of Harold Garfinkel have had a major impact on the social sciences and linguistics. This book offers a systematic and innovative analysis of his theories and of the ethnomethodological movement which he has inspired.

It is the only full-length study focused on the writings of Harold Garfinkel and will be essential reading for all those concerned with understanding and evaluating one of the most radically original social scientists of recent times.

CHAPTER I

Introduction

In studying a man’s empirical work the questions asked will not merely be, what opinions did he hold about certain concrete phenomena, nor even, what has he in general contributed to our ‘knowledge’ of these phenomena? The primary questions will, rather, be, what theoretical reasons did he have for being interested in these particular problems rather than others, and what did the results of his investigation contribute to the solution of his theoretical problems?

Parsons, The Structure of Social Action

Any attempt to give an account of Garfinkel’s work and the subsequent development of the ethnomethodological movement which he founded is immediately confronted with two formidable obstacles. There is, firstly, the character of the work itself. Garfinkel’s entire published output has appeared in essay form and on a diversity of substantive topics. An essay on rationality rubs shoulders with an analysis of studies of intake decisions at a psychiatric clinic. Accounts of jury deliberations, the behaviour of a person seeking a sex-change operation, interpersonal conduct in a range of extraordinary, yet quasi-natural, experiments all jostle for attention, each in its own terms, seeming to lack any connecting theme. These studies are discussed in a difficult prose style in which dense thickets of words seem to resist the reader’s best endeavours, only to yield, at the last, forceful and unexpected insights which somehow remain obstinately open-ended and difficult to place.

Then again there is the curious ‘off-stage’ role of theory. Although the writings convey an immediate sense of theoretical power, the theory itself is nowhere systematically stated, let alone used to integrate the various studies. Programmatic statements crop up, but they are formidably abstract and remain largely detached from traditional sociological reference points. The reader is thus confronted by a series of essays which, in their singularity and lack of compromise with conventional sociological sensibilities, both invite an engagement of an absolute kind whilst simultaneously resisting the assimilation of their perspectives and subject matter to any extant sociological framework. In both style and content the work is self-consciously revolutionary, demanding the abandonment of a range of widely held sociological assumptions before its message can be perceived fully.

The second obstacle lies in the reception accorded to Garfinkel’s work during the past decade. The publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology in 1967 coincided with a period of widespread dissatisfaction with the prevailing orthodoxies of sociological theory and methodology. Parsonian systems theory, with its analytic subordination of the actor to an environment of functional requirements, had lost its appeal in a decade of libertarian social movements and political protest. These latter found theoretical expression within sociology in an upsurge of interest in frameworks which stressed the analytic primacy of the actor’s point of view and the social construction of reality. A related critique, which spread into social psychology, stressed the weaknesses of social science methodologies which were based on a view of social actors as simply the passive bearers of sociological and psychological attributes. Common to both critiques was a renewed stress on the role of human agency in social life, a novel emphasis on the cognitive bases of action and a focus on the situation of action as a means of resolving previously intractable research dilemmas.

In this context a number of ethnomethodological tenets, pillaged from their carefully constructed frameworks, seemed to speak directly to the mood of the moment. The enduring ethnomethodological emphasis on the local, moment-by-moment determination of meaning in social contexts appeared, in itself, an important prophylactic against the mystifying consequences of ‘grand theorizing’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’, while the collateral focus on the contingency of meaning resonated happily with the humanistic overtones of theories which stressed the interpreted and constructed nature of social reality. By the same token, the ethnomethodological vocabulary of ‘accounts’ and ‘accountability’ seemed to many to give straightforward access to that most elusive phenomenon, the actor’s definition of the situation. The dramatic oversimplifications embodied in these borrowings were facilitated during this period by the apparent alignment of several of the more significant empirical studies – such as Cicourel’s and Kitsuse’s The Educational Decision Makers (1963) and Cicourel’s The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice (1968) – with the more readily understandable sociological approaches prominent at the time. The net result was an assimilation of a range of perspectives – symbolic interaction, labelling theory, the phenomenological analyses of Berger and Luckmann, and ethnomethodology – into a single category: the ‘sociology of everyday life’. In this process, Garfinkel’s fundamental and enduring analytical achievements were lost from sight at the very moment at which ‘ethnomethodology’ became a household word in sociology.

Unlike such famous contemporaries as Foucault or Habermas, Garfinkel’s significance as a sociologist does not arise from the encyclopaedic range of his investigations nor from any attempt at large-scale theoretical synthesis. Rather it derives from his sustained attack on a narrow range of problems which have preoccupied him throughout an intellectual career spanning nearly forty years. These problems – the theory of action, the nature of intersubjectivity and the social constitution of knowledge – have been central areas of investigation throughout the history of the discipline and, in their various aspects, have persistently concerned its most distinguished practitioners. The positions adopted on these topics have been among the most distinctive hallmarks of the major schools of sociological theory. They are universally acknowledged as fundamental to the discipline.

Garfinkel’s contribution has been a strikingly original re-analysis of these problems and a highly integrated treatment of their various implications for the conceptualization and analysis of fundamental aspects of social organization. This analysis, which has been widely influential across a range of social science disciplines, has emerged in a succession of papers in which Garfinkel has repeatedly returned to, and reworked, the foundational issues which have concerned him. Like Husserl, Garfinkel has consistently sought to be a ‘true beginner’ and he has never attempted to follow Weber or Parsons in building outwards from his analysis of social action towards a large-scale systematic theory of social structure. Instead, he has persistently worked to secure and deepen the analyses of foundational social processes which he began as a doctoral student at Harvard in 1946.

By the mid-1950s, Garfinkel had coined the term which would subsequently make him famous. ‘Ethnomethodology’ was originally designed simply as a label to capture a range of phenomena associated with the use of mundane knowledge and reasoning procedures by ordinary members of society. The term, Garfinkel relates (Garfinkel 1974: 16), occurred to him as he was writing up a study of jury deliberations. The jurors, he found, were preoccupied with a variety of ‘methodological’ matters such as the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’, between ‘what we’re entitled to say’, ‘what the evidence shows’ and ‘what can be demonstrated’ (ibid.). The jurors worked with these kinds of distinctions seriously and methodically as part of a deliberative process which all of them knew to be highly consequential and through which they determined the reasonableness of particular evidences, demonstrations, conclusions and, ultimately, verdicts. These distinctions were handled in coherently organized and ‘agree-able’ ways and the jurors assumed and counted upon one another’s abilities to use them, draw appropriate inferences from them and see the sense of them. Although the systematic use of the distinctions was an essential part of the jurors’ tasks, Garfinkel found that the distinctions themselves were not made or employed by using a special ‘juror’s logic’. Quite the contrary, they were overwhelmingly made by reference to common-sense considerations that ‘anyone could see’. As Garfinkel put it, ‘a person is 95 per cent juror before he comes near the court’ (Garfinkel 1967d: 110). The term ‘ethnomethodology’ thus refers to the study of a particular subject matter: the body of common-sense knowledge and the range of procedures and considerations by means of which the ordinary members of society make sense of, find their way about in, and act on the circumstances in which they find themselves. The term was designed to be cognate with a number of related anthropological terms, such as ethnobotany and ethnomedicine, but its scope is not restricted to any particular domain of knowledge. In its open-ended reference to any kind of sense-making procedure, the term represents a signpost to a domain of uncharted dimensions rather than a staking out of a clearly delineated territory.

As the preceding discussion suggests, by the mid-1950s Garfinkel was already working in a terrain which was largely alien to the majority of sociologists. During this period every form of sociology simply took for granted and left out of consideration the key questions of the construction and recognition of social activities by the actors themselves. In this context, it fell to Garfinkel to point out that these questions are analytically primary to any theory of social action and ultimately to any form of sociological investigation. His achievement has been to show that a consideration of these issues can be made an integral part of the theory of action and that they can be addressed as productive research questions in concrete empirical investigations with significant analytic results.

Although these achievements can be simply stated, they are in fact the products of a complex reconceptualization of both the theory of action and the sociology of knowledge aimed at wresting each from its preoccupation with the phenomenon of error. In the theory of action this is manifested in the longstanding distinction between rational and (normatively determined) non-rational action as a fundamental theoretical axis. Garfinkel has consistently opposed the use of this distinction in the analysis of action, arguing that it is an irrelevant and misleading distraction from the most central features of the organization of social activity – its inherent intelligibility and accountability. An emphasis on these latter characteristics, however, places a new weight on the kinds of knowledge that the actor might be viewed as possessing or drawing upon in devising or recognizing conduct; Here the older neo-Kantian sociology of knowledge, with its parallel focus on the distinction between rationally founded knowledge on the one hand and error and ideology on the other, was simply insufficient to carry the burden. Hence Garfinkel drew extensively on Schutz’s writings to develop a sociology of mundane knowledge-in-action and, in accomplishing this, then found it possible to proceed to an adequately grounded analysis of institutionalized conduct.

Finally, in both its positive recommendations for the study of common-sense knowledge and its rejection of analytical frameworks premised on the assumed, in-principle superiority of social science knowledge over its lay equivalents, Garfinkel’s work also issues in a programme of study which focuses on the social constitution of knowledge. Here we encounter the obverse of Garfinkel’s insistence that the analysis of action must take account of the actor’s use of common-sense knowledge, namely, that the social constitution of knowledge cannot be analysed independently of the contexts of institutional activity in which it is generated and maintained. This position is most obviously asserted in Garfinkel’s ‘ “Good” organizational reasons for “bad” clinic records’ (Garfinkel, 1967f) and it has recently found exemplification in a range of detailed studies of organizational knowledge as it is produced and reproduced in the mundane work of scientists and professionals of various kinds (Garfinkel, forthcoming).

The full depth of the theoretical innovations through which Garfinkel has come to stress the profoundly reflexive relations between knowledge and action has tended to remain dimly perceived or badly misconstrued in the reception of his work. The unhappy result of this has been a widespread failure to appreciate the major advances in the analysis of knowledge and action which he has accomplished and which remain, partially submerged, in the particulars of his various studies. Accordingly, I have thought it right to begin this book with a fairly extensive account of the theory of action which Garfinkel encountered as a graduate student in the late 1940s and to discuss at some length his transformation of the main features of this theory. Subsequently, I have used this discussion of action as a basis from which to consider Garfinkel’s analysis of institutionalized conduct and his treatment of the social organization of knowledge. Finally, it has proved valuable, if only as a background, in situating both the development of conversation analysis and of the more recent studies of organizational work which, in their different ways, have been strongly influenced by his teachings.

CHAPTER 2

A Parsonian Backdrop

In most available theories of social action and social structure rational actions are assigned residual status.

Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology

Garfinkel’s career as a theorist effectively began when, in 1946, he enrolled as a doctoral student at Harvard University in the newly formed Department of Social Relations. The department was the recent product of an amalgamation of several social science disciplines (incorporating sociology, social anthropology, and social and clinical psychology) and had been expressly created in order to promote the development of integrated interdisciplinary research. A primary focus was to be social theory and, within five years, a group of faculty members was to produce a first interdisciplinary synthesis, Towards a General Theory of Action, which represented ‘a kind of intellectual stocktaking of what underlay the social relations experiment’ (Parsons 1970: 843).

This novel, even revolutionary, emphasis within the Harvard department on theory and, in particular, the theory of action was due largely to the influence of its first chairman, Talcott Parsons. During the previous decade Parsons had consistently advocated the significance of systematic theory construction in the social sciences in a largely empiricist intellectual climate which stressed the importance of piecemeal empirical research over against the claims of theoretical work. In The Structure of Social Action (1937) Parsons had insisted against this prevailing orthodoxy that theoretical development is the hallmark of science. No discipline, he argued, is simply created as an assemblage of ‘raw facts’. On the contrary, empirical findings and the disciplines which are based on them are always and inevitably the products of theoretical interpretations of available evidence. In this context, the theorist has a vital and essential role to play. It is one of explicitly formulating, clarifying and developing the conceptual frameworks in terms of which evidence is evaluated, interpreted and integrated within a discipline’s corpus of scientific fact.

Parsons coupled these claims with an extensive discussion which introduced American sociologists to a range of European theorists whose work was not widely appreciated at the time. Moreover he presented a powerful case for the latent convergence of the major theorists (Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim and Weber) on a single basic theoretical framework – the ‘voluntaristic theory of action’ – which made the actors’ treatment of their circumstances in terms of subjectively held norms and values central to the analysis of social institutions. The effect of these claims was two-fold. They created a case for the significance of theory which was to become increasingly influential during the post-war period while, additionally, proposing a major site for theoretical development based on the voluntaristic theory itself.

It was these proposals which became central to the early development of the ‘social relations experiment’ at Harvard. The voluntaristic theory provided a coherent and viable focus for the department’s initial endeavours, not least because the theory’s emphasis on the normative aspects of conduct permitted a satisfactory intellectual division of labour among the constituent social science disciplines. Thus, in both its constitution and its objectives, the Department of Social Relations represented a radical departure from prevailing patterns of research in American sociology. Its novel and distinctive institutionalization of theoretical work as a legitimate form of sociological research in its own right proved a powerful attraction for a new post-war generation of graduate students and it was to this department, during its most richly innovative period, that Garfinkel came to participate in what Parsons later recalled (Parsons, 1970: 843) as a ‘golden age’ of graduate studies at Harvard.

Yet, although written under the supervision of Parsons and extensively occupied with his thought, the theoretical viewpoint of Garfinkel’s dissertation was not derived from the ‘structural functionalist’ conceptual system then emerging through a stream of publications from the department. Instead, Garfinkel sought to dig still deeper into basic problems in the theory of action which had been raised, but incompletely dealt with, in The Structure of Social Action. In particular, he was dissatisfied with – and sought to remedy – the sketchy treatment of the actor’s knowledge and understanding within the voluntaristic theory. Garfinkel summarized the differences between Parsons’ achievements and his own interests in the opening paragraph of his dissertation:

At least two important theoretical developments stem from the researches of Max Weber. One development, already well worked, seeks to arrive at a generalized social system by uniting a theory that treats the structuring of experience with another theory designed to answer the question, ‘What is man?’ Speaking loosely, a synthesis is attempted between the facts of social structure and the facts of personality. The other development, not yet adequately exploited, seeks a generalized social system built solely from the analysis of experience structures. (Garfinkel, 1952: 1)

The objective of the dissertation was ‘to go as far as possible in exploring a theoretical vocabulary to transform [the second development] into a working scheme for the experimental investigation of the sociological phenomenon of social order’ (ibid.). From the outset therefore, Garfinkel was in search of a theoretical framework which would directly catch at the procedures by which actors analyse their circumstances and devise and carry out courses of action. Such a framework would, in turn, result in an account of social activity which was more directly based on an analysis of the organization of experience itself. While the theoretical vocabulary to be used in this task was to be drawn from the phenomenological writings of Schutz and Gurwitsch, it would be used to analyse classical problems in the theory of action and to propose entirely novel avenues towards their solution. The differences between Parsons and his student would ultimately crystallize around the question of whether the actor’s point of view, and its role in the organization of action, should be analysed and treated by means which were intrinsic to, or external to, the structure of the actor’s experience. Although the distinction might seem to be a slender one, it entailed a transformation in the analysis of action no less complete in its consequences than the previous shift – from the utilitarian to the voluntaristic framework – canvassed by Parsons himself.

THE ACTION FRAME OF REFERENCE

One of the central claims of The Structure of Social Action is that all of the various social sciences essentially deal with systems of social action. The basic units of such systems, Parsons argued, are ‘unit acts’ which, in turn, are composed of the following irreducible elements:

(1) An actor, the agent of the act.

(2) An ‘end’, a future state of affairs which the actor seeks to bring about by the act.

(3) A current situation within which the actor acts and which he or she seeks to transform by his or her action. The situation is analysable into two kinds of elements: the conditions of action over which the act...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Parsonian Backdrop
• 3 The Phenomenological Input
• 4 The Morality of Cognition
• 5 Actions, Rules and Contexts
• 6 Accounts and Accountings
• 7 Maintaining Institutional Realities
• 8 Conversation Analysis
• 9 Epilogue: An Uncompleted Quest
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index