Ethnomethodology’s Program and Practical Inquiry

 

 

 

 

 

Robert T. Craig

 

 

Department of Communication

University of Colorado at Boulder

270 UCB

Boulder, CO 803090-0270

 

Robert.Craig@Colorado.edu

Office phone: (303) 492-6498

Office fax: (303) 492-8411

Home phone: (303) 449-5037

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Running Head: Ethnomethodology

 

 

 

 

Craig, R. T. (in press, 2003). Ethnomethodology’s Program and Practical Inquiry. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 36(4).

 

Ethnomethodology’s Program and Practical Inquiry

 

At the heart of Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism (Garfinkel, 2002) is a great dichotomy between two “incommensurably alternate”[1] approaches to social science upholding radically different versions of Durkheim’s fundamental principle of sociology: the objective reality of social facts. Social facts in both understandings of Durkheim are a distinct kind of phenomenon that exists only by virtue of social interaction. Social facts in both interpretations constitute the fundamental object of study that is sociology’s distinct province as a discipline. The objective reality of social facts is, therefore, fundamental to sociology in each of these two versions—which are, says Garfinkel, “both and simultaneously incommensurably different and unavoidably related” (p. 115).

            Insofar as students of language and social interaction are concerned with social phenomena in any sense, Garfinkel’s dichotomy seemingly presents us with a radical choice: EITHER we fall in with “the worldwide social science movement,” its (mis)reading of Durkheim, and its technical methods of “formal analysis” (FA), OR we join up with ethnomethodology (EM) and its practical program for the genuine discovery of “radical phenomena of order.” Given this dichotomy, most of us out here among “the endless analytic arts and sciences of practical action and practical reason” are implicitly FA-affiliated. This reviewer cannot but address EM as an outsider.

For Garfinkel, there is no possibility of combining the two approaches. They are “unavoidably related” but only as “incommensurable alternates.” Although EM is “affiliated to formal analytic teachings” as an “inescapably accompanying alternate” that “accompanies them everywhere” (p. 94), “their reconciliation is pointless” (p. 193). Garfinkel specifically warns against the notion that EM might be incorporated into FA in order to repair any deficiencies of the latter. He characterizes EM as “the unhappy beneficiary of this liberalism” (p. 175), and claims that EM “has yet to deliver promised repairs to formal analytic social science enterprises without losing its own phenomena” and that EM “does not offer a “remedial expertise” (p. 114).

Garfinkel’s dichotomy does not, however, exhaust the possibilities of social inquiry. At least some interpretive approaches, which he generally dismisses, appear equally incompatible with EM and FA yet open to practical ways of combining the two alternates that he rejects or fails to consider. After some further explication and critique of FA and EM, I sketch a rationale for a dialectical way of combining the two alternates that does not forget their incommensurability but uses it for practical purposes.

FA and EM

Returning briefly to Garfinkel’s dichotomy, Durkheim’s aphorism can be interpreted on the FA side to mean that stable sociological phenomena can only be found by abstraction from aggregate data. Urbanization, for example, is conventionally regarded as an objective sociological phenomenon that can be documented in statistics such as rates of migration and explained in terms of other large-scale social forces. Social status, a variable that describes individuals with reference to their positions within aggregate social structures that can, again, be documented statistically, is another example of an objective social fact in mainstream social science. To cite a less mainstream example more commonly referenced by scholars of language and social interaction, even something like “politeness,” a phenomenon manifested in minute details of language use, is constituted as a social fact in this (FA) Durkheimian sense by arranging those details in formal structures and explaining them with reference to idealized forms of practical reason involving abstractions from social interaction such as social distance, relative power, and culturally normative rankings of face-threatening acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987). These traditional understandings of the objective reality of social facts have been elaborated, according to Garfinkel, by “the worldwide social science movement” in “countless analytic arts and sciences of practical action and practical reason” comprising a vast array of theoretical abstractions, technical methods of formal analysis, and corpora of empirical studies. This is one side of Garfinkel’s great dichotomy. From his point of view, most scholars of language and social interaction are firmly on the FA side. Even some practitioners of conversation analysis (CA), despite the historical roots of CA in EM, may be de facto FA proponents insofar as they have fallen into the use of CA as a technical method of formal analysis.

            “By contrast,” writes Garfinkel, “it is the programmatic task of Ethnomethodological studies to specify the naturally accountable work of making and describing the social facts of immortal, ordinary society. These are the things of social order—the phenomena of ordinary society that Durkheim was talking about” (pp. 92-93). Socially order exists only as it is witnessably displayed and recognized by the participants themselves in each and every concrete occurrence. Falsely assuming that “there is no order in the concreteness of things” (p. 95), FA assumes that social facts can only appear as abstractions from aggregates after filtering out the distracting variability and contingency of particular cases. But, what FA methods filter out, says Garfinkel, is precisely social order itself. Social order is the myriad ways in which participants contingently produce it in each and every concrete case. The only methods that can possibly reveal radical phenomena of social order are the embodied methods by which participants themselves collectively exhibit for each other the accountable orderliness of their actions—for example, in the ways that the lecturer and students in a university lecture hall collectively exhibited in their activities of writing on the chalkboard, entering the hall and finding seats, etc., their awareness as a social fact that “the lecture hasn’t begun” (p. 224). EM investigators do not come to a social scene with a prepared technical apparatus of theoretical categories and methods for collecting data and rendering them into generalizations. EM investigators must instead rely on their ordinary competence as members of society to participate in local situations with alertness to the details of what goes on there, and may need to invest considerable effort to become “vulgarly competent” in the local practices (p. 175). In Garfinkel’s study of a Chemistry lecture, for example, he notes that he and his co-investigator (David Sudnow) were able to witness the lecture as lecturing but not as Chemistry because they did not know Chemistry, which limited their competence as ethnomethodological observers (p. 221). 

            One additional point to highlight is that if EM studies do not produce generalizations in the FA sense, Garfinkel insists, neither do they produce interpretations. “EM,” he writes, “is not in the business of interpreting signs. It is not an interpretive enterprise” (p. 97). Contrary to postmodernist and social constructionist approaches claiming that social order is constituted in language and shaped by interpretation, Garfinkel, while acknowledging that a “thing [a phenomenon of social order] … cannot be specified without language,” goes on to say:

Nevertheless there is nothing in the words. In the words there is nothing of the thing in the procedural coherence of details-in-generality. The thing cannot be specified by coding its properties or by interpreting signed objects. Finally, and to be sure, the identification of generic things is the prize, but that prize is not one of knowledge and beliefs; it is one of recognitions. So generic things cannot be lexical. (p. 140)

That is, if social facts exist only in the embodied details of interaction in concrete occurrences, then verbal specifications of social facts do not constitute them as social facts but can at best serve as aids or “instructions” that for competent observers can index their recognition of generic phenomena in particular cases.

This brief sketch cannot do justice to Garfinkel’s elaborate presentation of EM’s central claims, policies and corpus of studies in his important new book, assembled and edited by Anne Warfield Rawls, his first since Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). To do justice, one must read, and re-read, the book—a challenging task from which Garfinkel’s peculiar style of writing, so mannered that it often verges on self-parody, seems likely to deter many less motivated readers. The difficulty of Garfinkel’s writing indicates the difficulty—indeed, I think, the practical impossibility—of saying anything clear about social interaction without setting aside and forgetting, at least momentarily, much of the contingency and complex reflexivity of social interaction. Whereas Rawls in her lucid Editor’s Introduction is content to remind readers now and then of this dilemma, Garfinkel forces us to struggle with it in sentence after tortuous sentence.

EM and Social Practice

To the extent that I am able to understand Garfinkel’s account of EM, I am not entirely convinced by it. His insistence on the “autochthonous” orderliness of the concrete details of social interaction in each and every case is undoubtedly an important corrective to facile postmodernist and social constructionist claims to the effect that social reality is constructed in discourse. Garfinkel largely ignores or dismisses those approaches, which are hard to place within the FA – EM dichotomy because they tend to question what FA and EM, in radically different ways, according to Garfinkel, both centrally affirm: the objective existence of social facts “prior to and independent of” their discovery by analysts (p. 169). Postmodern interpretive approaches—and my own work is certainly not exempt from this criticism—may tend to overestimate the discursive shaping of social life and the active role of social theory within that process. Nevertheless, I suspect that Garfinkel underestimates the potential for a reflexive interplay between discourse—including even the sorts of “theoretical” discourses fomented by FA—and social practices (Craig, 1999; also see Craig, 1996a, 1996b). Granted, “there is nothing in the words,” but we do things with words, and many of the things we do with words involve planning, instructing, directing, managing, negotiating, reporting, criticizing, or otherwise reflecting on social activities (all of these terms having EM alternates, no doubt). Surely, such reflective talk about social activities can have something to do with what those activities become and how they are conducted, and surely this is somehow exhibited in the conduct of those activities in particular cases (see Craig, 1999 for one such case). Perhaps this is what Garfinkel means by “shop floor specifics of practical theorizing and practical actions” (p. 271) or “shop floor theorizing” (p. 280), concepts briefly mentioned but left unexplained in his recent book. If participants themselves influence social practices by talking about them, social scientists may also do so, whether intentionally or not, indirectly through their contributions to discursive resources available for everyday use. What is at stake, practically speaking, is the potential of a form of social inquiry that would intentionally cultivate social practices (Craig & Tracy, 1995).

Cultivate means improve. Both EM and FA would seem to have limited potential as methods for cultivating social practices. While not denying that EM and FA are radically incommensurable alternate specifications of social action, I argue that a dialectical pairing of EM and FA not only is possible but is potentially more useful than either alternate alone for studies of practical action and practical reason that are pursued with an explicit practical intent.

EM on its own apparently aspires to cultivate nothing beyond the recognition of social facts. EM, as I understand it, is not in the business of criticism or reform of social interaction. EM’s “radical phenomena of order” may be defined as social facts so deeply ingrained in everyday practices—“the most ordinary things in the world” (p. 93)—that there is little we can do, or conceivably would want to do, to change them.  (Try to imagine an argument for the reform of transition relevance places in conversation.)

EM does apparently have a certain potential to influence social practice. Garfinkel refers to a reflexive process in which local participants “can be brought to teach the analyst what he needs to learn and to know from them, with which, by learning from them, to teach them what their affairs consist of …” (p. 182).  Elsewhere, he observes that EM studies “can be made tutorially available … for the work-enhancing edification that the local production staff whose work it describes demands independently of and indifferent to whether staff can prespecify those demands as a condition for making them” (p. 102). Perhaps this means that reports to participants of EM studies of their activities can change their awareness of those activities—hence, their activities—in useful though possibly unanticipated ways. That sounds like a maximally unbiased sort of practical usefulness that EM might have. The only problem with this way of being useful is that it withholds any explicit contribution it might make to participants’ general notions about how the sorts of activities being studied should be conducted. On another level, Garfinkel is uninhibited in telling us how EM’s own activities should be conducted (EM’s central claims and policies), but EM policies do not authorize similarly uninhibited contributions by EM analysts (as EM analysts) to debates over policies that may govern the ordinary social practices that they study.

Many forms of FA also aspire to an unbiased kind of usefulness that only tells us “how it is” in social life. Despite Garfinkel’s well-taken point that these studies entirely ignore the phenomena of social order that EM seeks to discover, the studies can be genuinely useful in local occurrences of “applied social science” that can be interesting objects of EM study in their own right (for example, see Garfinkel’s [1967] EM analysis of a quantitative study of selection criteria in a psychiatric outpatient clinic). Other forms of FA are more explicitly normative in intent. Experts on “dialogue,” for example, may analyze and recommend certain dialogic policies for conducting social interaction. These recommendations can be “useful” in local occurrence of attempts at dialogic communication that EM could “usefully” study from its own alternate approach. The only problem, if we accept Garfinkel’s trenchant critique of FA, is that these normative recommendations are probably formulated in blissful ignorance of the concrete social practices that they aspire to reform, and in any case are incommensurably alternate to those radical social phenomena.[2]

To summarize: FA and EM, I argue, can potentially contribute to the cultivation of social practices in opposite but complementary ways. FA can cultivate conceptually sophisticated talk about policies for the conduct of social activities, while EM can cultivate more discerning awareness of what actually goes on in social interaction. The two approaches inevitably push in opposite directions: FA toward abstraction (theory), EM toward concreteness (practice). As dialectical opposites, they can nevertheless “inform” each other in the following ways: FA can provide EM with heedless abstractions for which to discover incommensurable “EM alternates;” while EM can provide FA with empirically grounded descriptions that can be incorporated into formal analyses, rendering those analyses marginally more relevant (from an FA point of view) to what actually goes on in practice. In conclusion, I will attempt to exhibit the possibility of this dialectical pairing of FA and EM in a short example taken from my own research.

 “The Issue”

One of Garfinkel’s “countless analytic arts and sciences of practical action and practical reason” is the normative theory of argumentation. Argumentation theory develops normative principles and techniques for assessing the “rationality” of practical discourse in formal schemes made up of concepts such as issues, propositions, reasons, evidence, warrants, inductive and deductive patterns of reasoning, formal and informal fallacies, and so on. Argumentation theory is explicitly about the business of improving society by cultivating more rational argumentative practices. I have recently been involved in studies intended to contribute to that effort of cultivation by investigating the practical relevance of some normative concepts of argumentation theory.

My studies of student-led discussions in college “critical thinking” classes (Craig, 1999, 2000; Craig & Tracy, in press) have found that discussion participants sometimes refer to concepts of argumentation theory in metadiscursive devices that contribute in specific ways to the practical work of discussion. One such concept I have studied in some detail is “the issue.” As EM would anticipate, I have found that “the issue” in practical use in actual moments of discussion indexes certain generic social “things” (in roughly Garfinkel’s sense of Durkheim’s sense) that have not yet been conceptualized in normative argumentation theory. Participants sometimes orient to a distinction between the official discussion issue and the issue actually being discussed at the present moment. Sometimes they orient to issues as having “come up” in the discussion, and sometimes they “bring up” issues. Sometimes they differentiate the official or de facto discussion issue from the “real” issue (the underlying, important, or controversial matter that should really be discussed). Participants invoke these distinctions in practical efforts to maintain or shift the topical focus of discussion, for example to “get back to the issue,” “get down to the real issue,” or pursue or decline to pursue an issue that has “come up.”

I would not be so foolish as to claim that I have been “doing EM” in discovering these distinctions, only that I have been groping in rather limited and untutored ways in the general direction of EM. I have noticed in situ productions of order that an unreflective “application” of normative argumentation theory would have missed. EM insiders would undoubtedly have done a much better job of this, but even my limited effort has had some payoff from the alternate perspective of argumentation theory. The payoff consists of evidence that argumentation theory can be “relevant” to practice (from its own point of view) in certain specific ways, along with some novel concepts that can be abstracted from practice and incorporated into normative discourse.

This “application” of EM to argumentation theory is not, of course, EM. It violates every policy of EM. It is incommensurably alternate to EM. But still, it is something we can do and may find “useful” to do. EM can then step in to tutor us in what we are doing as an incommensurable alternate to “usefulness.” That will be very helpful.

References

Brown, P. and Levinson, S.C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cameron, D. (2000). Good to talk? Living and working in a communication culture. London, UK: Sage.

Craig, R. T. (1996a). Practical theory: A reply to Sandelands. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 26, 65-79.

Craig, R. T. (1996b). Practical-theoretical argumentation. Argumentation, 10, 461-474.

Craig, R. T. (1999). Metadiscourse, theory, and practice. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 32, 21-29.

Craig, R. T. (2000). 'The issue' as a metadiscursive object in some student-led classroom discussions. In T. A. Hollihan (Ed.), Argument at century's end: Reflecting on the past and envisioning the future (pp. 64-73). Annandale, VA: National Communication Association.

Craig, R. T., & Tracy, K. (1995). Grounded practical theory: The case of intellectual discussion. Communication Theory, 5, 248-272.

Craig, R. T., & Tracy, K. (forthcoming). "The issue" in argumentation theory and practice. In F. H. van Eemeren & P. Houtlosser (Eds.), The practice of argumentation (Benjamins).

Garfinkel, H. (1987). Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. (Original work published 1967)

Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism (Edited and introduced by Anne Warfield Rawls). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.