Ethnomethodology

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Ethnomethodology

• By
• Cole HippenDanielle Yates
• Kit Mason

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Harold Garfinkel

• Harold Garfinkel was born in Newark, New Jersey,
  on October 29, 1917. His father was a businessman
  and hoped that Harold would learn the trade, but
  Harold wanted to attend college.
• He attended the University of Newark beginning in
  1935 and became a student of economics. He
  graduated in 1939.
• He spent the summer in a Quaker work camp in
  rural Georgia where he was later accepted into
  the program with a fellowship and chose Guy
  Johnson as his thesis adviser. He then received a
  M.A. From the University of North Carolina in
  1942.

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Harold Garfinkel cont

• After serving in WWII he attended Harvard
  University to study with Talcott Parsons. While a
  doctoral studen he taught for two years at
  Princeton, and after obtaining his Ph.D. He
  taught for two years at Ohio State University
• He joined a project researching juries in
  Wichita, Kansas , and in preparing a talk for the
  1954 American Sociologiacal Association meetings
  he came up with the term ethnomethodology to
  describe what fascinated him about the jury
  deliberations and social life more generally.
• He accepted a position as assistant professor at
  UCLA, where he continued to conduct research in
  the field of ethnomethodology.
• His career at UCLA is a distinguished one as he
  is now a professor emeritus and in 1995 he
  received the Cooley-Mead award for lifetime
  contributions to the intellectual and scientific
  advancement of sociology and social psychology.

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Influences

• Ethnomethodology is influenced by phenomenology,
  linguistics, anthropology, symbolic
  interactionism, and other mainstream concepts
  found in sociology. In Studies in
  Ethnomethodology (1967) he wrote that his work
  had been particularly influenced by Talcott
  Parsons, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, and
  Edmund Husserl.
• As Ritzer (2000c) stated, While Parsons stressed
  the importance of abstract categories and
  generalizations, Garfinkel was interested in
  detailed description.

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Structure of Social Action

• The Structure of Social Action is that all the
  carious social sciences essentially deal with
  systems of social action. 1. An Actor The agent
  of the act. 2.An end A future state of affairs
  which the actor seeks to bring about by the act.
  3. Action A current situation within which the
  actor acts and which he or she seeks to transform
  by his or her behavior. 4. Means A mode of
  orientation.

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More Influences

• Shutz concluded that each indicidual carries with
  him or hear a stock of knowledge at hand
  consisting of constructs and categories that are
  common sense and of social origin when
  interacting with others in the social world.
• Branching out from ethnomethodology, Garfinkel
  became famous for his breaching experiments.
  Garfinkel argued , one must breach constitutive
  expectancies in radical ways, since the natural
  attitude guarantees that people assimilate
  strange into familiar, without dismantling
  the presuppositions underlying a shared world.

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Ethnomethodology

• Ethnomethodology is an approach to understanding
  social interaction and is based on the
  assumption that social reality is the reasult of
  our agreement to agree with one another.
• Ethnomethodology, given its greek roots literally
  means the methods of ordianry people that are
  used on a daily basis to accomplish their
  everyday needs.
• Wallace and wolf stated, If we translate the
  ethno part of the term as member or folk or
  people then ethnomethodology can be defined as
  members' methods of making sense of their social
  world. Ethnomethodology interest is in how people
  make sense of everyday activities.

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Ethnomethodology Cont

• Garfinkel believed that life consists of many
  ordered things and activities. Ethnomethodology's
  fundamental phenomenon and its standing
  technical preoccupation in its studies is to
  find, collect, specify, and make instrutably
  observable the local endogenous production and
  natural accountability of immortal familiar
  society's most ordinary organizational things in
  the world, and to provide for them both and
  simultaneously as objects and procedurally as
  alternate methodologies. The identity of objects
  and methodologies is key.
• In other words ethnomethodology is concerned with
  the organization of everyday, ordinary life
• Ethnomethodology attempts to reveal the
  subjective nature of human interaction. It has a
  microfocus on daily life and on the thoughts and
  actions of human behavior.

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Accounting

• Accounting is the process by which people offer
  accounts in order to make sense of the world.
  Ethnomethodologist devote a lot of attention to
  analyzing peoples accounts, as well as to the
  ways in which accounts are offered and accepted
  (or rejected) by others.
• Garfinkel (1967) stated that sociologists
  distinguish the product from the process
  meanings of a common understanding. As product,
  a common understanding is thought to consist of a
  shared agreement on a substantive matters as
  process it consists of various methods whereby
  something that a person says or does is
  recognized to accord with a rule.

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Applying Ethnomethodology

• Ethnomethodology is concerned with an
  interruption of daily life in order to reveal
  standard rules
• In order to reveal rules that are a natural part
  of society, Garfinkel believes that we must
  disrupt the natural process of reality
  construction in order to reveal deep set rules.

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Breaching Experiments

• Breaching Experiments
• The breaching experiment is a type of empirical
  inquiry in which normal interaction is
  interrupted
• Social reality is violated in order to reveal the
  methods of reality construction
• This research is based on these foundations
• Production of social life occurs all the time
• Participants are unaware that they are engaging
  in such actions
• Breaching must be radical because people will
  naturally assimilate strange situations into
  familiar ones, and in order to cause disruption,
  one must create a radical enough breach that it
  cannot be normally constructed
• Individuals attempt to normalize imbalances in
  the breaching experiment. Seeking balance is a
  normal constant and is an attempt at putting
  meaning to the world
• Breaching experiments can be done in fairly
  casual settings
• One example is the tic-tac-toe experiment, in
  which the researcher places their mark between
  lines, confusing the subject, who attempts to
  rationalize the actions of the researcher
• Breaching experiments will often cause the
  subjects to become confused, angry, and upset

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Conversation Analysis

• Garfinkel's definition of communication is a
  means of clarifying or repairing social problems
  created by human communication.
• Garfinkel believes that a greater aspect of
  communication is what goes unsaid, rather than
  what is said
• Anticipatory knowledge from previous interactions
  guide the conversation
• Without this knowledge, conversations would spend
  all their time explaining history of interactions
• Language is a tool for interpreting and
  clarifying social interactions

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Phenomena of Order

• Order over chaos
• Rational thinking reinforces need for social
  order
• Social order is an ongoing process subject to
  constant change and even misinterpretation

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The Degradation Ceremony

• Identify is influenced by
• Internal reflection
• External projection
• Degradation ceremonies are public attempts to
  inflict identity alteration
• They are purposeful attempts at embarrassment
  rather than accidental
• Status forcing is a planned event in which the
  subject will know that they are in for a loss of
  self credibility
• Unplanned embarrassment is different than the
  degradation ceremony because it is accidental and
  unplanned, while still resulting in a loss of
  face
• Examples would be Don Imus racial slurs, Bill
  Clinton's sexual affair etc
• The degradation ceremony is calculated and would
  more include the public backlash at the
  embarrassment in which the subject can foresee
  this and anticipate their own loss of face

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8 Conditions for Degradation

• Both event and perpetrator must be removed from
  the realm of character and be made to look out of
  the ordinary
• Both event and perpetrator must be placed in a
  scheme that shows no preferences were given
• The denouncer must identify themselves to all
  witnesses that during denunciation the
  perpetrator is a publicly known person, and not
  privately known by the denouncer, clearing
  possible bias
• The denouncer must make the dignity of the values
  of the group salient and viewable. The
  denunciation must be done in the name of the
  people
• The denouncer must arrange to be invested with
  the right to speak in the name of the values of
  the group-the denouncer represents society
• The denouncer must be recognized as this societal
  representor
• The denouncer must maintain proper social
  distance from the accused perpetrator and
  witnesses
• The denounced person must be ritually separated
  from a place in the legitimate order. They must
  be classified as an outsider

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Studies by other Ethnomothodologists

• Talking the convict code in an inmate halfway
  house (1974)
• Designing a Xerox copier to ensure complaint-free
  operation by office personnel(1985)
• Learning to play jazz piano(1978)

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Aaron V. Cicourel

• Belief that quantitative research methods does
  not guarantee more objective research study
• Renamed his brand of ethnomethodology as
  Cognitive Sociology
• Goal uncover the universal interpretive
  procedures that humans use to give meaning to
  social situations

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Dierdre Boden

• Attempted to integrate ethnomethodology with
  symbolic interactionism
• She focuses on conversation and focuses on the
  verbal talking aspect of conversations
• Coined the term interactional analysis
• She attempts to highlight the importance of the
  thought process involved in conversation
• People dont only react to talk, but interpret it.

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Harvey Sacks

• He also studies talk
• He wants to discover universal forms of
  interactions that apply to all conversations

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Other Ethnomethodologists

• Conventional sociologists use the everyday social
  world as a topic.
• Zimmerman, Pollner, Wieder reject the
  conventional view and treat the world as a
  resource
• They are concerned with how members of society
• See
• Describe
• Explainin
• Social behavior

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Relevancy

• Theoretical perspective that seeks to understand
  human behavior by examining the methods that
  people employ to make sense of the world
• Study of the everyday practices of people
• Not considered mainstream sociology
• Has not produced laws of general behavior
• Greatest contribution is conversation analysis
• Degradation ceremony research relevant
• Ignores macrostructural factors in
  micro-interactions