Ethnomethodological Wars and Ethnomethodological Social Science

 The Ethnomethodological Wars: A Family Quarrel and a Proposed Truce

Harold Garfinkel was a mild, unassuming man. He also started a war.

In the four decades since Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), the field he founded has split into several lines of descent. Garfinkel's intellectual heirs now argue, sometimes politely and sometimes not, over whose work counts as real ethnomethodology. Most of the time the family holds together. Some holidays it doesn't.

What holds it together is real. Every version of ethnomethodology asks the same questions about a social activity. What makes it the activity it is? How do people bring it off in actual situations? And by what methods do they do it, recognizably and accountably, for one another? No ethnomethodologist treats social order as something imposed on people from outside. All of them treat it as something members accomplish.

The disagreements are also real. As I have discussed elsewhere on this blog [link], George Psathas identified five distinct types of ethnomethodological study, and several hybrids have formed since then. But one split matters more than the others. It runs between conversation analysis and the program Garfinkel himself pursued in his later work, especially the studies of work.

Where I first saw the split

I first ran into this division in the mid-1980s, when I was presenting material from my MA thesis on 911 calls at meetings such as the American Sociological Association and the Talk and Social Structure conference. It was the first time I had met large numbers of ethnomethodologists from outside Santa Barbara. Many of them did not work the way we had been trained to work. And many did not share our aim.

At Santa Barbara, under Don Zimmerman and Thomas Wilson, we understood ethnomethodology and conversation analysis as building a naturalistic observational science of the interaction order. That was Harvey Sacks's original ambition. We collected recordings, built collections, made claims others could check against the data, and expected our findings to add up. I learned at those meetings that for a significant part of the family, that aim was itself the problem.

Two answers to one dilemma

The clearest account of the split I know is Ilkka Arminen's 2008 article in Philosophy of the Social Sciences. My thinking here also owes a great deal to Thomas Wilson's short essay "Garfinkel's Radical Program" (2003).

Arminen argues that ethnomethodology is pulled between scientific and radical aspirations. The scientific wing is conversation analysis. It accepts ordinary scientific standards for judging empirical claims: evidence, replicability, cumulative findings. Its central figures include Emanuel Schegloff, John Heritage, Don Zimmerman, Douglas Maynard, and Steven Clayman. The radical wing grows out of Garfinkel's later writings (1986, 2002) and is associated with scholars such as Michael Lynch, Eric Livingston, and Melinda Baccus. It refuses to become one more interpretive social science. It treats mundane reasoning strictly as a topic of study and will not borrow the methods of standard science to study it.

Arminen traces the split to a single problem, posed by Don Zimmerman and Melvin Pollner in 1970: the topic/resource dilemma. Sociologists routinely use members' commonsense knowledge as an unexamined resource for their analyses, relying on the very competence they claim to explain. Ethnomethodology's founding move was to make that competence a topic. The two wings answer the dilemma differently:

• Conversation analysis treats members' practices as its topic but still relies on analytic and scientific procedures as resources. The analyst's own competence is disciplined by recordings, transcripts, and collections. It is not banished.
• The radical program tries to bracket commonsense resources entirely. It pursues the "unique adequacy" of description from within a practice, whether that practice is proving a theorem or discovering a pulsar, rather than from a standpoint outside it.

Here is a detail I find telling. The paper that framed the dilemma was co-written by a founder of the Santa Barbara conversation-analytic tradition and a leading voice for radical reflexivity. The fault line ran through the collaboration from the start. That suggests to me the two wings are not rival paradigms that happen to share a name. They are two developments of a tension built into ethnomethodology's founding idea.

Arminen's proposed truce

What I value most in Arminen's article is his proposal: an ethnomethodological social science, a synthesis of the two wings. In his view, it would renew our understanding of social action and bring back Sacks's original goal of a science of social life. Its features would be:

• Investigate phenomena through observation and discursive reporting, so that others can use the reports for further inference and action. The point is findings that can travel, not insights that stay private.
• Study action in interaction. This means looking at how any action, move, or utterance is ordered and positioned relative to others. Social action is treated as a situated accomplishment that emerges as people work with language, with one another, and with objects.
• Explore people's tacit resources, meaning their common sense and interactional competence, the elementary properties of action that make up the taken-for-granted basis of social life.
• Show how collaboration is achieved. This means specifying the practices through which different participants' perspectives are brought into alignment.

Why the truce will be hard to keep

I support this synthesis. It is close to what we thought we were doing in Santa Barbara. But I doubt it will be accepted evenly on both sides.

For conversation analysts, joining an "ethnomethodological social science" costs very little. We already accept scientific criteria. We already build cumulative findings. The synthesis mostly affirms what CA is.

For the radicals, it asks a great deal. Their whole point is to refuse to turn members' practices into data for a professional science that stands outside those practices. From that vantage, a synthesis that keeps scientific standards looks less like a truce than an absorption, the scientific wing claiming the family name. If the synthesis is going to work, it has to take the radical critique seriously. It cannot simply adopt the radicals' vocabulary. The questions they press still need answers: what our analytic categories presuppose, and what they miss about practices as their practitioners live them.

That is the real test of Arminen's proposal. Can a science of social action stay reflexive about its own commonsense resources while still producing findings others can use? I think it can. But it will take the cousins talking to each other rather than past each other.

---

References

Arminen, Ilkka. 2008. "Scientific and 'Radical' Ethnomethodology: From Incompatible Paradigms to Ethnomethodological Sociology." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38(2): 167–191.

Berard, Tim J. 2003. "Ethnomethodology as Radical Sociology: An Expansive Appreciation of Melvin Pollner's 'Constitutive and Mundane Versions of Labeling Theory.'" Human Studies 26(4): 431–448.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Garfinkel, Harold, ed. 1986. Ethnomethodological Studies of Work. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology's Program: Working Out Durkheim's Aphorism. Ed. Anne Warfield Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Garfinkel, Harold, Michael Lynch, and Eric Livingston. 1981. "The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11(2): 131–158.

Lynch, Michael. 1999. "Silence in Context: Ethnomethodology and Social Theory." Human Studies 22(2–4): 211–233.

Pollner, Melvin. 1991. "Left of Ethnomethodology: The Rise and Decline of Radical Reflexivity." American Sociological Review 56(3): 370–380.

Wilson, Thomas P. 2003. "Garfinkel's Radical Program." Research on Language and Social Interaction 36(4): 487–494.

Zimmerman, Don H., and Melvin Pollner. 1970. "The Everyday World as a Phenomenon." In Jack D. Douglas, ed., Understanding Everyday Life, 80–103. Chicago: Aldine.

Wayne Martin Mellinger, July 4, 2008