ethnomethodology

ethnomethodology

1. it emerged in the 60s in america, mainly ffrom the work of garfinkel. he rejects the view that society is out there

2. garfinkel is interested in how social order is achieved

   • he says social order is created from the bottom up. order and meanign are not achieved becayse people are puppets
   • he believes social order is accomplished, something members of society construct using commonsense knwoledge

3. ethnomethodology attempts to discover how we accomplish social order by studying peoples methods of making sense of the world

4. indexicality and reflexivity

   • EM sees meanings as always potentially unclear- indexicality
     • nothing has a fixed meaning
       • everything depends on context
   • indexicality is a threat to social order because its meanings are unclear and unstable- communication can become difficult and relationships can break down
   • however, this is a paradox as indexicality suggests that we cannot take any meaning as fixed but this is what we do in everyday life
     • garfinkel says what enables us to behave as if meaning is clear is reflexivity
       • reflexivity is how we use commonsense knowledge in interactions to construct a sense of meaning and stop indexicality from occuring
   • language
     • it is important in achieveing reflexivity. for EM when we desire something we are creating it. our description gives reality making it seem clear

5. experiments in disrupting social order

   • garfinkel sought to demonstrate the nature of social order by a series of 'breaching experiments'
     • the tried to haggle over groceries at the supermarket checkout
   • the aim was to disrupt people's sense of order amd challange reflexivity by undermining assumptions about the situation
   • he concluded that by challanging peoples taken for grantedness, the experiments showed how the orderliness of everyday situations is not inevitable but is an accomplishment of those who take part in it.
   • social order is 'participation produced'

6. suicide and reflexivity

   • garfinkle is interested in the methods we use to achieve reflexivity
   • in the case of suicide coroners make sense of deaths by selecting particular features from the infinite number of possible facts about the deceased e.g, mental health, employment
   • garfinkel says humans strive to impose their order by seeking patterns, even though these patterns are social constructs. e.g. seeming patterns that suicides are mentally ill becomes part of the coroners taken for granted knowledge
   • when faced with future cases with similar features the coroner will interpret tyhem as assumed pattern
     • cases fitting the pattern will be classified as suicides and will prove the existing pattern. the assumed patter becomes self reinforcing but it tells us nothing about the external reality
   • garfinkel is critical of conventional sociology. he accuses it if using the same methods as ordinary members of society use to create order and meaning. this means conventional socioology is commonsense rather than true objective knowledge
   • positivists such as durkheim take for granted that the official stats and social facts are merely the decisiobns made by the coroner who uses commonsense understanding od what types of people kill themselves. therefore the laws that positivists produce are an elaborate version of the coroners commonsense

7. evaluation

   • carib
     • findings are trivial. em sociologists seem to spend a lot of time uncovering taken for granted rules that turn out to be no surprise to anyone
   • EM argues that everyone creates meaning by identifying patterns and producing explanations that are essentially fictiosn. this must apply to EM itsel, and so we have no particular reason to accept its views
   • it denies the existence of wider society but is also assumes that a structure of norms really exists beyond these contexts
   • it ignores how wider structures of power and inequality affect the meanings that individuals construct e.g. marxists would say that commonsense knowledge is the RCI