More Studies in Ethnomethodology

Kenneth Liberman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438446202
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2015 Distinguished Book Award presented by the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section of the American Sociological Association Winner of the 2015 Distinguished Book Award presented by the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Section of the American Sociological Association Pioneered by Harold Garfinkel in the 1950s and '60s, ethnomethodology is a sociological approach rooted in phenomenology that is concerned with investigating the unspoken rules according to which people understand and create order in unstructured situations. Based on more than thirty years of teaching ethnomethodology, Kenneth Liberman—himself a student of Garfinkel's—provides an up-to-date introduction through a series of classroom-based studies. Each chapter focuses on a routine experience in which people collaborate to make sense of and coordinate an unscripted activity: organizing the coherence of the rules of a game, describing the objective taste of a cup of gourmet coffee, making sense of intercultural conversation, reading a vague map, and finding order amidst chaotic traffic flow. Detailed descriptions of the kinds of ironies that naturally arise in these and other ordinary affairs breathe new life into phenomenological theorizing and sociological understanding.

ONE

THE LOCAL ORDERLINESS OF CROSSING KINCAID

A new colleague of mine at the University of Oregon stepped out of the elevator at the eighth floor and confessed in the hallway, “It seems to be a real confusion there in front of the bookstore—I try to avoid crossing there if I can.” About the same time, another colleague reported, “As a driver I find it frustrating at that intersection because so many kids just seem to walk without paying any attention.” The reader can catch a glimpse of what this pedestrian and driver mean by examining Photo 1.1.

Photo 1.1. UO Bookstore

There does appear to be a good deal of chaos reigning at the corner of Kincaid Street and 13th Street, where the majority of the University of Oregon's students, faculty, and staff enter and depart the campus each morning, evening, and whenever they need to visit the UO Bookstore, a bank, or one of the many restaurants and shops next to campus. Pedestrians jaywalk back and forth all day long, paying little attention to the endless stream of vehicular traffic that dead-ends at the campus and that is composed of cars, buses, ambulances, taxis, delivery vans of every size, et cetera. As these two antagonists vie with each other, cyclists and skateboarders weave their ways in between them, determined never to stop and with little regard for the one-way traffic lanes that were intended to render their movements predictable.

Persons new to crossing Kincaid occasionally suggest that “something should be done” about the chaos there. But as a matter of social organization, there is nothing at the corner of 13th and Kincaid that requires fixing. What is more, it is likely that no repair is possible. There may be some disorder, but the disorder there is durable, not amenable to remedy, reproduced all day long, and probably essential for the ability of the great many pedestrians and drivers who cross there to do so in an efficient and safe manner. Crossing Kincaid is a locally produced procedure that relies heavily upon the natural and learned expertise of the crossers who pay intricate attention to the task. Novices and experts concert themselves—experts teaching experts along with the novices—to ensure that the maximum number of crossers can be accommodated at all times. At first sight, the busiest crossing at the entrance to the UO campus may look like confusion, but despite hundreds of ticketable offenses per hour the people who staff those crossings know how to figure things out for themselves; moreover, what they are doing there is far too complicated for any set of traffic rules to handle or improve. For the most part—for the vast majority of tens of thousands of daily crossings—pedestrians and motorized traffic work well together in coordinating a local orderliness, and their crossings are efficient and orderly.

It is not just that the majority of crossers know how to cross well—it is that they are experts. There are many venues in our everyday lives where objective rules or laws can contribute to the orderliness of the social interaction. In addition to rules, the locally concerted practices of the persons who staff those occasions contribute to the orderliness. In most cases the locally concerted practices are more important than the rules, and even in those situations where the rules and regulations seem to be more important, it is probably the locally concerted practices that are doing the heavy lifting. Perhaps there is a place where rules and locally concerted practices meet regularly, or it may be that rules have their origins in locally concerted practices, or that rules are one of the locally concerted practices. But it is for certain that crossing Kincaid is one phenomenon of local order where the concerted practices are what is vital for the organization of affairs onthe-ground; however, these local procedures escape detection by most of the widely applied methods of professional scientific inquiry, methods that would include surveys, interviews, questionnaires, “content analysis,” document coding, and historical research.

THE HISTORY OF CROSSING KINCAID

The crossings at Kincaid are a well studied phenomenon. The first study that my students and I could locate was a 1952 survey of “the problem” there, which led to a decision to close off most vehicular traffic to the portion of 13th Street that runs through campus. This inaugurated the situation where the traffic on 13th Street dead-ends at the campus and must turn left toward the major thoroughfares or right toward the parking district, a decision that forces the flow of traffic to slow down, hesitate, and become congested just where the majority of the University of Oregon's students enter and exit the campus on foot, by bicycle, and by skateboard. In 1955, the student newspaper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, featured an article, “How to Cross a Street,” that offered advice to students for making the crossing. This led the City of Eugene to formally acknowledge persistence of a “problem” there in 1956, when they requested an Oregon Highway Department study. Alarmed by the perceived threat of the vehicular congestion to some of the state's brightest youth and following accepted general practice at the time, the authorities provided additional protection for the students by installing stop signs for all vehicles and by clearly marking the pedestrian crossings.

This remedy did not change very much at 13th and Kincaid, and there were calls over the succeeding decade for further studies of “the problem.” However, in 1973 a city report concluded, “The students already know how to cross…. So wasting money on a survey is pointless.” In that same year, use of the “Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices” (MUTCD) was applied to traffic statewide. MUTCD was a remarkable piece of governmental policy in that it recommended experimentation as the driver of changes to traffic design rather than rational theorizing in the abstract, thereby acknowledging that at most of the locations where traffic flow is problematic there will be too much going on for rational prediction to be reliable. All applications for a change in traffic design were required to be accompanied by a successful experiment that employs the changes being proposed. Since most of the problems at localities with heavy congestion are resolved by local orderlinesses that are autochthonous, solutions can only be discovered and not simply applied in reliance upon one or another theory of traffic flow; the legal authorities in the State of Oregon came to recognize that it was problematic to manage the local orderlinesses with objective one-size-fits-all regulations and that even survey methods of field research may not be able to locate or accurately describe the local orderliness that is taking place, an admission that it is likely most mainstream scientific researchers would be unwilling to make.

Memos in the late 1970s began to entertain the notion that rather than the students of Oregon needing protection from the motorists, it was the motorists who required protection from the students. The problem the city was facing was that as the city and the university grew in size, the stalled traffic on 13th Street was getting backed up across the intersections one and two blocks west of the dead-end of 13th Street at Kincaid. Some of this traffic found itself stuck in the middle of these two intersections during red lights, freezing in place the city's cross-traffic at two vital north-south arteries there. Something had to be done to speed up the flow of vehicular traffic through 13th Street; simply put, the student pedestrians had become too successful at crossing Kincaid. So in 1988, the city removed two of the traffic control mechanisms that had been benefiting the pedestrians—the white crosswalk markings across Kincaid at the north corner of 13th and the stop sign that was restricting the flow of vehicles traveling east one-way on 13th. The resulting situation is depicted by this photograph of the situation today (Photo 1.2).

Photo 1.2

At the place where the pedestrian is crossing, there is no crosswalk; and the car attempting to turn from 13th Street onto Kincaid Street has the right-of-way, there being no stop sign requiring it to wait for competing traffic. Apart from continuous repaving of the area, made necessary by the heavy traffic there, the two white lines that are visible mark off a one-way bicycle lane (more imaginary than real for everyone concerned) from the bus lane to the right of the lines (lower left of Photo 1.2) and the vehicular lane to the left of the bicycle traffic flow (above the lines in the photo). Across the way, at the middle left of the picture, are cyclists who are riding across Kincaid into campus along 13th. While ordinary vehicles are prohibited from entering the campus (delivery and maintenance vans may enter), cyclists are allowed free access. Waiting at the south side of 13th (on Kincaid) for the cyclists to cross are cars on Kincaid who must stop at the posted stop sign on Kincaid. A quick glance at Photo 1.1 will clearly reveal the stop sign there and also the very largely drawn pedestrian crossing intended to attract the majority of pedestrian crossings; however, fewer pedestrians cross there than cross at the north side of 13th where there is no pedestrian crossing, and even the jaywalkers regularly outnumber the pedestrians who cross at the designated pedestrian crosswalk. Traffic flow is one-way on 13th Street, except for a very small one-way bicycle lane between the parked cars and the Bookstore, which runs in the opposite direction to the west along 13th. Traffic on Kincaid north of 13th is one-way going north, and the traffic on Kincaid south of 13th is two-way. While the traffic on 13th east of Kincaid is restricted to all but authorized vehicles, there is usually a steady flow of cyclists and skateboarders in both directions. In all locations, the pedestrians have the strength of numbers. The University of Oregon bookstore on the corner (see Photo 1.1), dominates the scene and receives a good percentage of the foot traffic.

Nothing that the city could do to enforce traffic law there could improve upon the pedestrians' and motorists' indigenous capabilities to manage their own affairs, and every time the city has tried to do to improve the flow of vehicles at 13th Street and Kincaid by enforcing the traffic laws the traffic jams only worsened. The city's traffic police told us that it was current city policy not to enforce city traffic regulations there and to keep away from the site (except for some daily observations on foot). They explained that when they do not enforce traffic rules the problems seem to resolve themselves! Something the people crossing there are doing manages to provide sufficient organization of the crossings and passings-through. With the added advantage of having no stop sign to impede the flow of traffic where 13th Street traffic meets Kincaid, the traffic flow along 13th was no longer backing up, while a maximum number of nonvehicular crossers could still get across safely. The solution rests in not enforcing traffic regulations.

So the question I posed to my students was “Why?” What is it that the people crossing Kincaid were doing that solved the problem without recourse to supervision and enforcement? More than that, supervision and enforcement only slows things down. Who are these people? They are bus drivers, skateboarders, bicyclists riding outside of the bike lanes, bicyclists riding in the bike lanes but in the wrong direction, especially bicyclists who will not stop under nearly any circumstances, pedestrians who keep stepping into the same bike lanes while staring at their iPods, other pedestrians jaywalking, still other pedestrians waiting dutifully and sometimes perplexed at the curb, a stroller who wears flip-flops in the winter rain and drinks his coffee as he casually seizes a right-of-way that is not lawfully his (and in the face of which the motorists sit frozen), law-abiding motorists who come to a stop at the corner where there is no stop sign, mothers with baby carriages using the carriage to help block vehicular access to the lane, and so on. The coherence of these people occupied with concerting their crossings is a unique kind of coherence. It is not just that there are one or two methods for crossing Kincaid, there are numerous local systems operating together, predictably and repeatedly. It is not the confusion that is amazing, it is the orderliness of the streaming flows of participants. To better understand the orderliness there, my students and I—armed with video cameras—recorded some 20 hours of crossings, divided up into teams, and analyzed the data carefully, crossing by crossing, on a digital video platform.

Generally speaking, human affairs proceed better when they are orderly; and laws, regulations, and local rules can assist in achieving an organization that provides efficiency, predictability, and safety. But not always. My students and I discovered that sometimes a local orderliness will proceed more effectively when rules are not adhered to slavishly; and there are common situations where the smooth functioning of affairs—a government office, a queue for service, an international crisis—makes it necessary not to follow rules. It is not as if rules exist so that God can be happy. Rules exist to facilitate a local orderliness, and wherever the local orderliness can be better served by not following rules, the rules may not be enforced. The key insight here would be that orderliness itself has precedence over rules.

LOCAL METHODS

Pedestrians dominate the crossings here, but cars, cyclists, and skateboarders also have their methods. Photo 1.3 displays an occasion in which both the car and the two cyclists failed to stop at their designated stop signs; however, if they concert their movements across the intersection, all of them can cross without stopping. It is all a matter of pacing: on this occasion, the car sped up and cyclists slowed down. The car sped up not only to be able to move out of the cyclists' way more quickly; the driver was also interested in displaying a certain inevitability to the car's crossing, an inevitability which thereby became more public and more compelling. The cyclists, who are more vulnerable to the rain, were primarily concerned with not stopping their bicycles' momentum, and slowing was an acceptable method for them to concert their crossing. It was no problem, despite two ticketable traffic violations.

Photo 1.3

The chaos at Kincaid is exacerbated by the wrong-way traffic of cyclists (Photo 1.4.) and skateboarders (Photo 1.5).

Photo 1.4. Wrong-Way Cyclist

Here the helmeted cyclist is traveling the wrong way against the designated flow of traffic in the one-way bike lane (the car is traveling in the correct one-way direction for its lane). Below (Photo 1.5), the skateboarder ...