Everyday Life

Reconstruction of Social Knowledge

Jack D Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138523142
• eBook ISBN: 9781351327305
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Interest in the ethnomethodology and other phenomenological sociologies grew very rapidly among students and professionals in social science during the latter part of the twentieth century. The growth of this interest was handicapped by the lack of clear, systematic, and comprehensive treatments of their basic ideas and research findings. This book provides the first genuinely intelligible and reasonably systematic presentation of this perspective and contributed to the restructuring of empirical knowledge upon solid foundations. It remains important to those who would understood these areas of the social sciences and their potential to contribute to understanding of social life. These original essays, all of which share ideas about the scientific inadequacies of conventional sociologies and the fundamental importance of these new approaches, were contributed by many of the best young research workers and theorists of this approach in 1970, when the book was originally published. They are critical, theoretical, and empirical, and provide the first understandable presentation of this new mode of thought, its distinctions from old points of view, the range of problems that concern its practitioners, and the kinds of results that can be achieved. The book's clarity and systematic treatment of important research topics make it suitable for courses in sociological theory and research, the history of social thought, and related subjects. In addition, this volume can be used in courses specifically dealing with ethnomethodology, in graduate seminars dealing with these issues, and in academic work based on this orientation.

PART ONE

Absolutist Sociologies and Phenomenological Sociologies

CHAPTER ONE

Understanding Everyday Life

All of sociology necessarily begins with the understanding of everyday life, and all of sociology is directed either to increasing our understanding of everyday life or, more practically, to improving our everyday lives. Yet, until quite recently, few sociologists realized that the understanding of everyday life must be the foundation of all sociological research and theory; and fewer still acted in accord with this crucial fact. The reasons for this were grounded in the complex web of background assumptions of the traditional sociological enterprise, which in turn were grounded in the background assumptions of classical science and of the official organizations of control in Western societies.

In recent years the rapidly growing research and analysis of everyday life have begun to transform the nature of the entire sociological enterprise. It is my primary purpose here to show why this transformation has been necessary and just what radical changes have, as a consequence, been made in the traditional sociological perspective on man and society.

Understanding Everyday Life as the Foundation of All Sociology

For several fundamental reasons, sociology, like all disciplines that purport to be theoretical and applied sciences of human action, necessarily begins and ends with the understanding of everyday life. Most important, even when sociologists have overtly opposed their work to the homilies of everyday common sense, they have covertly used commonsense understandings of everyday life to provide the fundamental data—the social meanings—of their research and theory, for the simple reason that there is no other way to “get at” the social meanings involved in social actions.

There was a time when many social scientists, including some who thought of themselves as sociologists, proposed to study and explain human actions entirely in terms of externally perceived events. But these halcyon days of the social mechanists are long since dead. Today there are few social scientists, other than the Skinnerians who have shown great wisdom in restricting their behavioristic research to the humble pigeon, who would try to describe or explain human actions without making some fundamental reference to what Collingwood called the inside, or the internal state, of the actor. The academic psychologists, still experiencing the nineteenth-century fears of the “unscientific subjectivism” of “mental states,” have introduced various intervening variables, or organismic states, as a way of obliquely considering the internal states of the actor. But these psychologists’ neo-mechanistic approach to the “internal states” has been so useless in explaining human social action that it has forced them to largely restrict their research and theories to the docile white rat, which has been purposefully bred to fit the theoretical presuppositions lying behind the maze. Sociologists, being unalterably stuck with human social actors, have felt forced to give ever greater consideration to the internal (symbolic) states of their actors. However much some sociologists today may be constrained in their thinking by the tatters and remnants of nineteenth-century positivism, there is no doubt that almost all of them agree that social actions are meaningful actions, that is, that they must be studied and explained in terms of their situations and their meanings to the actors themselves. The disputes over the kinds of meanings involved and the ways in which they are to be determined are fundamental, but there is now little dispute among sociologists over the proposition that social meanings are in some way the fundamental determinants of social actions.

A basic question for all sociologists becomes that of how these social meanings are to be determined: how are we to truthfully and reliably get at this fundamental data of all our sociological research and theory? The only truthful answer is that in some way we must rely upon our understandings of everyday life, gained through direct observations of that life and always involving the use of our own common-sense understandings derived from our direct involvements in it.

The only major source of disagreement with this proposition today comes from the dwindling ranks of those sociologists who are still committed to the Durkheimian (sociologistic) adage that the social must be explained socially. This adage has traditionally been interpreted as an attack on the supposed reductionism of social psychologists and, more recently, has been turned against those who argue for the primacy of understanding everyday life in all sociological theory. These arguments today are normally presented as defenses of macrosociology, structuralism, social systems analysis, comparative analysis, and the statistical-hypothetical analysis of social rates, all of which are often seen by their proponents as independent of, or even in opposition to, microsociology, situationalism, or reductionism.

All of these arguments against the basic proposition that all of the science of sociology necessarily begins with the understanding of everyday life share one simple but fundamental failure. They have all failed to follow their empirical evidence (or what they purport to be empirical evidence) back to its actual source. Whenever we do this, we find that there is only one source of empirical evidence for all of sociology (once we agree that social meanings are necessarily a form of evidence we are going to use in our theories). And that source is our understanding of everyday life. A brief examination of the original source of the major forms of empirical evidence used in the macroanalyses will easily demonstrate this.

1) Perhaps the oldest source of pseudoempirical evidence concerning social meanings used by the macroanalysts (and, unfortunately, by some systems analysts and behaviorists) is the presumed social omniscience of the analysts themselves. This is the evidence on social meanings that the analyst provides “from his own mind.” (In this instance they are using what used to be pejoratively called armchair sociology.) That is, the analyst provides the social meanings he needs to construct or test his theory from his own mind, without any reference to concrete instances of empirical observations. But this implicit assumption of sociological omniscience, which I have analyzed more thoroughly in American Social Order,¹ is obviously contrary to the basic rules of positivistic science, so the macroanalysts who have used this source have always devised means of hiding the subjective source of such evidence. These means always involve constructing the appearance of empirical observation. A classical example was Durkheim’s (1951) use of what Peristiany so rightly called petitio princippi to make his imputations of social meanings (such as the meanings of education to Jews) appear to be derived from some previous scientific observations of those meanings, whereas in fact any previous observations could only have been the sociologist’s own common-sense experience of that realm of everyday life. (Durkheim’s everyday experience with Jews and education would be a good example.)² Once we penetrate these rhetorically constructed appearances and recognize that the macroanalyst is really drawing on his own mind for the social meanings he is using to explain the actions of his social actors, it is easy to see that his own understanding of everyday life, derived from his common-sense experience, is the only source of his evidence on social meanings.

2) A third form of “evidence” commonly used by macroanalysts to provide the social meanings for their analyses is that of social rates, such as statistical rates of suicide, delinquency, and divorce. These social rates are commonly presented as derived independently of any understanding of everyday life and, in fact, are often used by the macroanalysts to “demonstrate the fallacies of common-sense understandings of everyday life.” Durkheim’s use of the “official social rates of suicide” is a classic example, but one could easily note many other works that share this approach.³

The social rates are taken by these macroanalysts to be products of the operation of the society as a whole. The rates are supposed to be the probabilistic outputs of the normal operation of the “social system,” in a manner directly analogous to the way in which a closed system of gases produces a temperature reading on a thermometer. The social rate, then, is to be a direct representation of the state of the whole system at any given time. The macroanalyst, therefore, believes that he can use these rates to analyze the socially meaningful states of the whole system. But there are two fallacies in this argument.

First, the macroanalyst has been seduced by the appearance of “thing-like fact” given by numbers. As long as we merely take numbers at face value, as reproduced in official reports, they do indeed look like “hard facts” representing the overall workings of the social system; but it has never been good scientific practice to take any information at face value, and certainly not information constructed in secret by bureaucrats. (We can hardly imagine Galileo or Newton working with astronomical data published in the official records of court astrologists. In fact, it was in good part precisely because they were able to use the new evidence provided by Tycho Brahe and by the telescope, rather than the ancient evidence that had supported the heliocentric theories, that they developed their radically different theories.) Once we follow the “disembodied numbers” back to their sources to see how they were arrived at and what, therefore, they actually represent, we find that they are based on the most subjective of all possible forms of activity. This is especially true in the case of suicide statistics, which are the result of coroners’ evaluations of the “intentions” of the actors involved,⁴ but it is also true of all forms of moral statistics constructed by officials. We find, therefore, that the numbers that appear to be hard facts about the social system states are in fact based on officials’ common-sense understandings of everyday life. The macroanalyst has merely replaced his own common-sense understandings of everyday life with those of unknown officials.

Second, even if this were not the case, the macroanalyst could not validly infer the social meanings of such social rates without in some way making use of his, or someone’s, understandings of everyday life. He would have nothing but numbers of events, which must themselves be defined in terms of understandings of everyday events if he is ever to relate his analyses to everyday events. The social meanings of those events would still have to be provided. When we look, for example, at how Durkheim provided those social meanings, we find that ad hoc procedures were used to arbitrarily apply common-sense understandings of everyday life to those social rates, though these common-sense understandings were sometimes presented in the guise of theory.⁵

3) A third form of macroanalysis by which the sociologist often purports to avoid or supercede understandings of everyday life is found in surveys, especially the now omnipresent questionnaire survey. The survey, which involves the use of some random or stratified sampling of the whole society or social subgroup, is supposed to provide scientific data about the overall state of the system. But the case for surveys, especially questionnaire surveys, as a form of macrodata independent of understanding of everyday life is very weak. Though these understandings are normally left quite implicit, unexamined, and commonsensical, they are based in several ways on understandings of everyday life. First, as in the case of all other macroanalyses, the theoretical questions or hypotheses to which the surveys are directed are in fact derived from very old common-sense understandings of everyday life. Second, the basic idea of surveys developed from such common-sense questionings as those found in the work of public hygienists and reporters doing interviews. Third, surveys presuppose an adequate common-sense understanding of everyday life that will enable the analyst to competently interact with the members of the society to get valid (truthful) responses from them. More specifically, as Cicourel (1964) and Churchill⁶ have argued, questionnaire surveys assume a competent use of the language, a vastly complex common-sense understanding of how to ask questions, how to detect lying, how to interpret answers, and so on. Fourth, the analysis of survey results through coding, factor analysis, and so on, depends implicitly on the use of common-sense understandings of everyday life to provide the real (underlying) meanings of the subjects’ responses.

4) The fourth commonly used argument of the macroanalysts, the argument that there exist higher levels of order in social phenomena, is probably the most frequently used today and is certainly the most subtle. This is the argument used by many comparative theorists and institutionalists to try to free themselves from the prior analysis of everyday life. They use this argument to justify their going directly to an analysis of the society as a whole or the institutional groups as a whole, rather than starting with an analysis of the lower-level orderings found in everyday life and proceeding to an analysis of higher levels of social ordering only when they have solved the problems of the lower levels.

There are two fundamental parts to this argument: (1) while it may in fact be the case that all higher levels of orderings of social phenomena are ultimately determined by lower levels of orderings, the higher levels have their own interdependencies, so that they can be considered independent of the lower levels in this sense; and (2), at the least, it is possible to study and analyze the higher levels independently of the lower levels. Macroanalysts have often argued that there is an analogy between ways in which natural scientists can study and analyze molecular interactions (higher levels of order) independently of atomic interactions (lower levels of order) and atomic interactions independently of the interactions of subatomic particles (an even lower level of order).

The traditional form of this argument, contained in the adage that one must study the social socially, committed the fallacy of social realism found in Durkheim’s early works, including the early editions of Suicide,⁷ and go back to much earlier forms of social organicism, especially to Rousseau’s idea of collective conscience. The hypothesis of social realism involves the fallacy of treating society as if it is somehow a separate level of existence, outside of the hearts and minds of live-and-breathing human beings; and constitutes the most extreme form of the absolutist perspective on society.⁸ There are few comparativists or institutionalists today who would accept this social realism. Instead, most would agree with comparativists such as Levy (1952), who has argued that these theories are merely directed at different levels of analysis or generality and that the higher levels of order (or patterning) are analytical distinctions, not concrete distinctions, as the social realists believed. (Analogously, no natural scientist would argue that the molecules exist outside of and independently of their atomic and subatomic constituents, an argument that Lacombe (1926) long ago made against Durkheim’s social realism.)

In this more sophisticated form of the argument, the macroanalysts who believe they can study and analyze whole societies or whole (institutional) groups independently of any understandings of everyday common-sense life are simply arguing that they can analyze the society or institutional group without having to make use of any understanding of everyday life. But, even if it made sense to argue that one could analyze the larger patterns of social life without first adequately understanding the smaller (everyday life) patterns, it still would not make sense to argue that one could validly and reliably determine what those larger patterns are without in some way making use of prior determinations of the nature of everyday communications in that society or group. This is true for the simple reason that there is no way of getting at the social meanings from which one either implictly or explicitly infers the larger patterns except through some form of communication with the members of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE: ABSOLUTIST SOCIOLOGIES AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOCIOLOGIES
• PART TWO: CONSTRUCTING SITUATIONAL MEANINGS: LANGUAGE, MEANING AND ACTION
• PART THREE: RULES, SITUATED MEANINGS, AND 219 ORGANIZED ACTIVITIES
• PART FOUR: SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM AND ETHNOMETHODOLOGY
• PART FIVE: SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND TRUTH
• References
• Index