Ethnomethodology (literally, 'the study of a people's (folk) methods') is a
sociological discipline which examines the ways in which people make sense of their world, display this understanding to others, and produce the mutually shared social order in which they live. The term was initially coined by
Harold Garfinkel in the 1960s.
Ethnomethodology is distinct from traditional sociology, and does not seek to compete with it, or provide remedies for any of its practices.
Two central differences between traditional sociology and Ethnomethodology are:
(1) While traditional sociology usually offers an analysis of society which takes the facticity of the social order for granted, Ethnomethodology is concerned with the "how" (the methods) by which that social order is produced, and shared.
(2) While traditional sociology usually provides descriptions of social settings which compete with the actual descriptions offered by the individuals who are party to those settings, Ethnomethodology seeks to describe the practices (the methods) these individuals use in their actual descriptions of those settings.
The approach was developed by
Harold Garfinkel, based on his artful analysis of traditional sociological theory (primarily: Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons), traditional sociological concerns (the Hobbesian "problem of order"), and the phenomenologies of Aron Gurwitsch, Alfred Schutz, and Edmund Husserl.
Ethnomethodology has had a significant impact on social scientific inquiry.
For instance, Ethnomethodology has always focused on the ways in which words are dependent for their meaning on the context in which they are used [they are
'indexical']. This has led to insights into the question of the objectivity of the social sciences, and the difficulty in establishing a description of human behavior which has an objective status outside the context of any particular descriptive formulation.
Ethnomethodology has had an impact on
linguistics and particularly on
pragmatics, spawning a whole new discipline of
Conversation Analysis.
Ethnomethodological studies of work have played a significant role in the field of
human-computer interaction, improving design by providing engineers with descriptions of the practices of users.
Ethnomethodology has also influenced the
Sociology of Scientific Knowledge by providing a research approach that describes the social practices ("methods") of its research subjects without the commonly accepted practice of evaluating the validity of those practices from an imposed normative standpoint. This has proved to be useful to researchers studying social order in laboratory settings who wished to understand how scientists actually conducted their experiments without either endorsing or criticizing their activities utilizing traditional scientific criteria.
Varieties of Ethnomethodology
According to George Psathas, five types of ethnomethodological study can be identified. These may be characterised as
1. The organization of practical actions and practical reasoning. Including the earliest studies, such as those in Garfinkel's seminal Studies in Ethnomethodology.
2. The organization of talk-in-interaction. More recently known as
conversation analysis, Harvey Sacks established this approach in collaboration with his colleagues Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson.
3. Talk-in-interaction within institutional or organizational settings. While early studies focused on talk abstracted from the context in which it was produced (usually using tape recordings of telephone conversations) this approach seeks to identify interactional structures that are specific to particular settings.
4. The study of work. 'Work' is used here to refer to any social activity. The analytic interest is in how that work is accomplished within the setting in which it is performed.
5. The haecceity of work. Just what makes an activity what it is? E.g. what makes a test a test, a competition a competition, or a definition a definition?
Some Leading Policies and Methods
Ethnomethodological Indifference
This is the policy of deliberate agnosticism, or indifference, towards the dictates, prejudices, methods and practices of sociological analysis as traditionally conceived (examples: theories of "deviance", analysis of behavior as rule governed, role theory, institutional (de)formations, theories of social stratification, etc.). Dictates and prejudices which serve to pre-structure traditional social scientific investigations independently of the subject matter taken as a topic of study, or the investigatory setting being subjected to scrutiny.
The policy of Ethnomethodological Indifference is specifically not to be conceived as indifference to the problem of social order taken as an individual or group (member's) concern.
First Time Through
This is the practice of describing any social activity, regardless of its routine or mundane appearance, as if it were happening for the very first time. This in an attempt to reveal how the observer of the activity assembles, or, "constitutes", the activity for the purposes of formulating any particular description.
The point of the exercise is to make available and underline the complexities of sociological analysis and description. Particularly the indexical and reflexive properties of the actors', or observer's, own descriptions of what is taking place in any given situation.
Such an activity will also reveal the observer's inescapable reliance on the Documentary Method of Interpretation (aka Hermeneutic Circle) as the defining "methodology" of social understanding for both lay persons and social scientists.
Breaching Experiment
A method for revealing, or exposing, the common work that is performed by members of particular social groups in maintaining a clearly recognizable and shared social order.
An extreme example: driving the wrong way down a busy one-way street can reveal myriads of useful insights into the patterned social practices, and moral order, of the community of automobile drivers... and police.
The point of such an exercise is to demonstrate that gaining insight into the work involved in maintaining any given social order can often, best be revealed by breaching that social order and observing the results of that breach - especially those activities related to the reassembly of that social order, and the normalization of that social setting.
Sacks' Gloss
A question about an aspect of the social order that recommends, as a method of answering it, that the researcher should seek out members of society who, in their daily lives, are responsible for the maintenance of that aspect of the social order. Sacks' original question concerned objects in public places and how it was possible to see that such objects did or did not belong to somebody. He found his answer in the activities of police officers who had to decide whether cars were abandoned.
Recommendation: If you want to understand how a particular social order is maintained, or a particular social activity is accomplished, go to the source: the actual people who do the actual work of maintaining and constructing those social structures.
Durkheim's Aphorism
Durkheim famously recommended that we "treat social facts as things." This is usually taken to mean that we should assume the objectivity of social facts as a principal of study (thus providing the basis of sociology as a science). Garfinkel's alternative reading of Durkheim is that we should treat the objectivity of social facts as an achievement of society's members, and make the achievement process itself the focus of study.
For Ethnomethodology the topic of study is the social practices of real social actors in real social settings, and the methods by which those actors produce and maintain a shared sense of social order.
Ethnography (ἔθνος ethnos = people and γράφειν graphein = writing) is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of
qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on
fieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a
holistic research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. The genre has both formal and historical connections to
travel writing and colonial office reports. Several academic traditions, in particular the constructivist and
relativist paradigms, employ ethnographic research as a crucial research method. Many cultural anthropologists consider ethnography the essence of the discipline.
Cultural and social anthropologyCultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research and their canonical texts are mostly ethnographies: e.g. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) by Bronisław Malinowski, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead, The Nuer (1940) by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, or Naven (1958) by Gregory Bateson. Cultural & social anthropologists today place such a high value on actually doing ethnographic research that ethnology—the comparative synthesis of ethnographic information—is rarely the foundation for a career. Within cultural anthropology, there are several sub-genres of ethnography. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, anthropologists began writing "confessional" ethnographies that intentionally exposed the nature of ethnographic research. Famous examples include Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss, The High Valley by Kenneth Read, and The Savage and the Innocent by David Maybury-Lewis, as well as the mildly fictionalized Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (Laura Bohannan). Later "reflexive" ethnographies refined the technique to translate cultural differences by representing their effects on the ethnographer. Famous examples include "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight" by Clifford Geertz, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco by Paul Rabinow, The Headman and I by Jean-Paul Dumont, and Tuhami by Vincent Crapanzano. In the 1980s, the rhetoric of ethnography was subjected to intense scrutiny within the discipline, under the general influence of literary theory and post-colonial/post-structuralist thought. "Experimental" ethnographies that reveal the ferment of the discipline include Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig, Debating Muslims by Michael F. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, A Space on the Side of the Road by Kathleen Stewart, and Advocacy after Bhopal by Kim Fortun.
Cultural anthropologists, such as Clifford Geertz and Xavier Andrade, study and interpret cultural diversity through ethnography based on field work. It provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Ethnographers are participant observers. They take part in events they study because it helps with understanding local behavior and thought.
Other related fieldsPsychology, economics, sociology and cultural studies also produce ethnography. Urban sociology and the Chicago School in particular are associated with ethnographic research, although some of the most well-known examples (including Street Corner Society by William Foote Whyte and Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Caton) were influenced by an anthropologist, Lloyd Warner, who happened to be in the sociology department at Chicago, and by sociologist Robert Park whose earlier career had included journalism. Symbolic interactionism developed from the same tradition and yielded several excellent sociological ethnographies, including Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine, which documents the early history of fantasy role-playing games. But even though many sub-fields and theoretical perspectives within sociology use ethnographic methods, ethnography is not the sine qua non of the discipline, as it is in cultural anthropology.
Education, Ethnomusicology, Performance Studies, Folklore, and Linguistics are others fields which have made extensive use of ethnography. The American anthropologist George Spindler (Stanford University) was a pioneer in applying ethnographic methodology to the classroom. James Spradley is another well-known ethnographer, especially for his book, The Ethnographic Interview, published in 1979.
Ethnographic methods have been used to study business settings. Groups of workers, managers and so on are different social categories participating in common social systems. Each group shows different characteristic attitudes, behavior patterns and values.
Increasingly, universities (such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) are using ethnographic methods as a technique to encourage undergraduate research in the humanities. For example, the Ethnography of the University (EOTU) program sponsors undergraduate research on UIUC and archives it in web-accessible form for the UIUC community. EOTU also functions as a learning group for students, staff, and faculty interested in what it means to conduct research on universities as institutions.
Anthropologists like Daniel Miller and Mary Douglas have used ethnographic data to answer academic questions about consumers and consumption. Businesses, too, have found ethnographers helpful for understanding how people use products and services, as indicated in the increasing use of ethnographic methods to understand consumers and consumption, or for new product development (sometimes called 'design ethnography'). The recent Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC) conference is evidence of this. Ethnographers' systematic and holistic approach to real-life experience is valued by product developers, who use the method to understand unstated desires or cultural practices that surround products. Where focus groups fail to inform marketers about what people really do, ethnography links what people say to what they actually do—avoiding the pitfalls that come from relying only on self-reported, focus-group data.
TechniquesDirect, first-hand observation of daily behavior. This can include participant observation. Conversation with different levels of formality. This can involve small talk to long interviews. The genealogical method. This is a set of procedures by which ethnographers discover and record connections of kinship, descent and marriage using diagrams and symbols. Detailed work with key consultants about particular areas of community life. In-depth interviewing. Discovery of local beliefs and perceptions. Problem-oriented research. Longitudinal research. This is continuous long-term study of an area or site. Team research. Case studies Not all of these techniques are used by ethnographers, but interviews and participant observation are the most widely used.
The Ethnography of communication (EOC) is the a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. Unlike ethnography proper, though, it takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive. According to Deborah Cameron (2001), EOC can be thought of as the application of ethnographic methods to the communication patterns of a group. Littlejohn & Foss (2005) recall that Dell Hymes suggests that “cultures communicate in different ways, but all forms of communication require a shared code, communicators who know and use the code, a channel, a setting, a message form, a topic, and an event created by transmission of the message (p. 312).”
So, EOC can be used as a means by which to study the interactions among members of various cultures: being able to discern which communication acts and/or codes are important to different groups, what types of meanings groups apply to different communication events, and how group members learn these codes provides insight into particular communities. This additional insight may be used to enhance communication with group members, make sense of group members’ decisions, and distinguish groups from one another, among other things.
HistoryOriginally coined "Ethnography of speaking" in Dell Hymes eponymous 1962 paper, it was redefined in his 1964 paper, Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of Communication to accommodate for the non-vocal and non-verbal characteristics of communication.
Notable studiesSeveral research studies have used ethnography of communication as a methodological tool when conducting empirical research. A couple examples of this work include: Philipsen’s (1975) study which examined the ways in which blue-collar men living near Chicago communicated or did not communicate based on communication context; and Katriel’s (1990) study of Israeli communication acts involving griping and joking about national and public problems. These studies not only identify communication acts, codes, rules, functions, and norms, but they also offer different ways in which the method can be applied.
