Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism

305 Pages·2002·25.32 MB·English

by  Harold Garfinkel

Ethnomethodology's
Program
Legacies of Social Thought
Series Editor: Charles Lemert
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by Charles Tilly
The Voice ofA nna Julia Cooper: Including ·~ Voice from the South" and Other
Important Essays, Papers, and Letters
edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan
Making Sense ofA merica: Sociological Analyses and Essays
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Crime and Deviance: Essays of Edwin Lemert
edited by Charles Lemert and Michael Winter
The Ethics of Modernity
by Richard Munch
Forthcoming
Visions of Social Inequality: Class and Poverty in Urban America
by William Julius Wilson
The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages
by Max Weber, translated and introduced by Lutz Kaelber
Ethnomethodology's
Program
Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism
Harold Garfinkel
Edited and Introduced
by Anne Warfield Rawls
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Oxford
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
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Copyright © 2002 by Rowman & Litdefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Garfinkel, Harold.
Ethnomethodology's program: working out Durkeim's aphorism I Harold Garfinkel;
edited by Anne Rawls.
p. cm.-(Legacies of social thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7425-1641-5 (cloth: alk. paper)-ISBN 0-7425-1642-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Ethnomethodology. 2. Phenomenological sociology. I. Rawls, Anne, 1950- II. Tide.
III. Series.
HM481 .G37 2002
306'.01-dc21 2001058749
Printed in the United States of America
@ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992.
I dedicate this work to my wife,
Arlene Steinbach Garfinkel
Contents
The Pleasure of Garfinkel's Indexical Ways, by Charles Lemert lX
Editor's Introduction
Author's Introduction 65
Author's Acknowledgments as an Autobiographical Account 77
Part I: What Is Ethnomethodology?
1 The Central Claims of Ethnomethodology 91
2 EM Studies and Their Formal Analytic Alternates 121
3 Rendering Theorems 135
4 Tutorial Problems 145
5 Ethnomethodological Policies and Methods 169
Part II: Instructed Action
6 Instructions and Instructed Actions 197
7 A Study of the Work of Teaching Undergraduate Chemistry in
Lecture Format 219
8 Autochthonous Order Properties of Formatted Queues 245
9 An Ethnomethodological Study of the Work of Galileo's Inclined
Plane Demonstration of the Real Motion of Free Falling Bodies 263
Index 287
About the Author and Editor 299
VII
The Pleasure of Garfinkel's Indexical Ways
Charles Lemert
When Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology first appeared in 1967, read
ers were astonished. Some hardly knew what to make of it. Others were truly
excited by its freshness. Still others stood on the sidelines making uninformed
wisecracks like "mere California sociology."
In a sense the most astonishing thing about Harold Garfinkel's first, now classic,
work is that it was remarkable amid the long list of astonishments of that era.
In and around 1967, experiments in social thought and practice were as plenti
ful in the United States as in Europe-with one notable difference. Few of the
American innovations of that time were as bold as the European ones. Where
the French were preoccupied with the reconsideration of structuralism, and the
Germans were set upon revising critical theory, Americans, for the most part, were
just beginning to learn something of the classic European traditions of thought.
This was partly due to the chill sent through American politics in the 1950s when
the Red Scare led many Americans to throw out all but the most tame of Euro
pean babies with the Marxist dishwater. As a result, in the revolutionary 1960s,
when everywhere just about anything new and different was in fashion, American
social theorists were just beginning their adventure of discovery into the traditions
of European culture buried by two world wars. Within a decade, American sociol
ogy was beginning to catch up such that by the late 1970s its social thought was
nearly as lively and original as any, anywhere.
Still, when Garfinkel first came on the scene in the 1960s, he was nearly alone
in two respects. His thinking was completely and compellingly original, and it
was less a borrowing from the Europeans than a distinctively (if not exclusively)
American way. At the time, there was only one other of comparable originality.
That was, of course, Erving Goffman, whose two great early works-Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Stigma (1963)-were widely read. Perhaps
because the tone and quality of their writings stood out on the landscape of Ameri-
IX
X Charles Lemert
can sociology, Goffman and Garfinkel were thought to be, somehow, kin of some
uncertain kind. In retrospect, this judgment was too superficial to be of any lasting
value. Still, there was something to it in that both were, in their ways, devoted to
Durkheim, both were intrigued by the social nether regions between language and
action, and both were condemned by the then reigning U.S. champion of theoreti
cal originality, Alvin Gouldner.
In The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), Gouldner famously attacked
Goffman and Garfinkel (along with George Homans) for being, in a word, too
preoccupied with the little things of social life. What an irony it is that now, dec
ades later, it is Gouldner who has joined Homans in the grave of the seldom read.
Who, then, would have thought that Garfinkel and Goffman would live on as
they have in the lively forefront of social theory? I realize that (apart from con
founding the living and the dead) I risk ascribing Garfinkel and Goffman too
much to the other-as if those who stand out over time could ever stand in for
each other. Like all great social theorists, neither of these two is among those who
could be well ascribed to anyone other than themselves. Still, I linger on this coinci
dence of origins for the simple purpose of highlighting, as the present situation
requires, Harold Garfinkel's salience in late modern social thought.
Among Americans, what he (like Goffman) was uniquely on to was the idea
now very much better understood-that little social things (such as face-to-face
interactions) cannot be well thought through if they are situated as objects outside
the sway of so-called big social things (like structures of various kinds). Hence,
many of the essays collected in Studies in Ethnomethodology were very much medi
tations on the work of social structures in the reflexive play of indexical expres
sions in local settings-and none more brilliant than the book's seventh chapter,
"Good Organizational Reasons for 'Bad' Clinical Records."
Though ethnomethodology, as it was then conceived, and as it has developed in
the intervening decades, was anything but a dramaturgy of managed impressions,
Garfinkel's first major foray, like Goffman's own 1967 book (Interaction Ritual),
were serious borrowings (at different removes) from Durkheim for the precise
purpose of relocating our understanding of the work of structures not so much in
subjective actions as in the indexical revision of face-to-face communications of all
kinds.
Whoever it was who so snottily implied that the first wave of ethnomethodologies
were, in effect, mere California sociologies, could not have been more wrong. There
is nothing mere at all about the substantial body of work still coming from the
various lineages of ethnomethodologies that owe a direct or indirect debt to Gar
finkel. Whoever coined that insult (I resist remembering it because the only name
to surface is that of Tony Giddens, a man hardly given to cheap throw-away lines),
he (unlikely to have been a she, in any case) is to be forgiven.
Studies in Ethnomethodology is not, even today, an easy read-and in the late
The Pleasure of Garfinkel's Indexical Ways xi
1960s it was prohibitively so. This difficulty, much like the difficulty Americans
allege themselves to have with various European writers, is not because the ideas
are difficult in and of themselves. It is because the principle behind an ethnomethod
is itself so demanding. It demands nothing less than to give up the notion that the
work of a social science like sociology is a positive study of the stable laws of social
order. In which stead ethnomethodology imposes the obligation to study the
utterly practical methods by which notoriously ordinary people compose the ratio
nal grounds of their social orderings. Today we know that to unsettle a sociology
from its scientific foundations need not be a refusal of disciplined knowledge
and we know it in some good measure because of Harold Garfinkel's work. If,
then, we are to assess the long-term accomplishment of that work, we should at
least grant the unqualified sanity of its original proposition, beginning with Gar
finkel's own famous definition of the enterprise from the first pages of Studies: "I
use the term 'ethnomethodology' to refer to the investigation of the rational prop
erties of indexical expressions and other practical actions as contingent ongoing
accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life."
It is possible, still today, to resist the programmatic principle, but very difficult
indeed to ignore it. And, were one to try, it would be impossible not to trip over
this or that ethnomethodological monument upon reading through and about in
the many sociological subfields. What is truly impressive about ethnomethodology
is that it has served so very well to inspire empirical work in many different
areas--education, medicine and health care, cognitive science, gender, culture, sci
ence studies, communications and media, crime and judicial process, among many
others. It would be hard to name a method that has invaded so many different
areas to such good effect.
Many of these powerful effects can be traced to ideas developed in Ethnomethod
ology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism (the subtitle of which should be
carefully noted). Younger readers of the present book may well be surprised by
the parallels and links of much current thinking to Garfinkel's fertile sociological
imagination. We who are older can tell the stories of our first encounters with it.
I can remember, as if it was last year, the day I sat down with Studies in Ethno
methodology. Like others, I was at first confused, then alarmed. But unlike much
of what I read in those years, the book and subsequent writing by Harold Garfin
kel and his colleagues or students stayed with me.
A very good case can be made that the test of an enduring contribution is how
it reappears in thought and research--often without conscious effort. Just think
how widespread today is the idea that scientific work is a practical accomplish
ment. While Thomas Kuhn may have sketched the background to this notion, it
was Garfinkel more than anyone outside the Merton school of science studies who
set this very sensible notion in terms that go well beyond naive references to "con
structionism," an expression so overwrought with use as to be beyond repair. To