Garfinkel's Ethnomethodology's Program
Ethnomethodology's
Program
HAROLD GARFINKEL
University of California, Las Angeles
Social psychology Quarterly, , Vol. 59, No. 1. (Mar., 1996),
pp. 5-21.
1.1 What Is
Ethnomethodology?
Ethnomethodology gets reintroduced to me in a recurrent
episode at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association. I'm waiting
for the elevator. The doors open. "Oh, Hi Hal!" "Hi." I
walk in. THE QUESTION is asked: "Hey, Hal, what IS ethnomethodology?"
The elevator doors close. We're on our way to the ninth floor. I'm only able to
say, "Ethnomethodology is working out some very preposterous problems,1'
The elevator doors open.
On the way to my room it occurs to me that I should have
said that ethnomethodology is re-specifying Durkheim's lived immortal, ordinary
society, evidently, doing so by working out a schedule of preposterous
problems. The problems have their sources in the worldwide social science
movement. They are motivated by that movement's ubiquitous commitments to the
policies and methods of formal analysis and general representational theorizing
and by its unquestionable achievements .
Formal Analytic (FA) technology and its results are
understood worldwide. Almost
* Acknowledgements: There are many people whose
contribution to this work need to be acknowledged, not least those many
students and colleagues whose ethnomethodological studies have provided the
catalogue of investigations, discussed here, without which the original promise
of "Studies" would have remained unfulfilled. Ethnomethodology is
after all, and necessarily, an unrelievedly empirical enterprise. I thank also
Doug Maynard and Lucy Suchman for their steadfast friendship and for their
generosity with their time and their hard won knowledge in shoptalk. I am
deeply in debt to Anne Rawls. Years ago she was briefly my student. Now she is
my teacher, esteemed colleague, and rare friend. She sustained our discussions
through the writing and took the time to carefully edit this manuscript for
publication.
Because of many people who have taken up an interest
in ethnomethodology it is impossible that one description will encompass the
vast array of studies going by that name. However, I hope that there is room in
this discussion for those studies which take the importance of witnessable
recurrent phenomenal fields of detail seriously and as a primary issue, in
whatever other respects we may differ.
unanimously for the armies of social analysts, in endless
analytic arts and sciences of practical action, formal analytic procedures
assure good work and are accorded the status of good work. FA's achievements
are well known and pointless to dispute. FA technology exercises universal
jurisdiction in targeting phenomena for analysis. Phenomena of order are made
instructably observable in formal analytic details of conceitedly recurrent
achievements of practical action. These range from the conduct of war to the
transient pause before an invitation is refused. Phenomena made instructably
observable in formal analytic details of conceitedly recurrent achievements of
practical actions are so provided for by FA that a phenomenon, whatever the
phenomenon and whatever its scale, is made instructably observable as the work
of a population that staffs its production. Populations are usually treated as
straightforward counts of bodies. The proposal here is instead that it is the
workings of the phenomenon that exhibit among its other details the population
that staffs it.1 This population is exhibited in surveyable
particulars of body counts and dimensionalized demographics. These are
elucidated with variable analysis, quantified arguments, and causal structures.
Such analytic descriptions are available in all administered societies,
contemporary and historical.
That these achievements are unquestionable is assured by
being subordinated to FA's premier achievement, the corpus status of its
bibliographies. By corpus I mean (1) its investigations, always accompanied by
textual accounts that describe, specify, make instructably observable, satisfy,
and are exhibits of adequate
grounds of further
1 It is the workings of the traffic that make its
staff available as "typical" drivers, "bad" drivers,
"close in" drivers and anything else the demographers need to have to
administer a causal account of the driving. Endogenous populations are a topic
of recurring ethnomethodological interest. You don't start with bodies. The
Conversational Analysis of talk provides another example. It starts with
conversation which exhihits its speakers as typical recurring, doing it again
in the same way, staff. 5
inference and action. (2) These are adequacies of an
investigation's origins and problem specification, and of the problem's
essential history, descriptive coverage, facticity, relevance, and, as
contingencies in an actual occasion of inquiry may have required, any of the
rest. (3) The adequacies are instructably reproducible. (4) The foregoing are
satisfied in actual worksite achievements. (5) Investigations at all levels of
findings in these respects can be taken on these grounds seriously to define a
current situation of inquiry.
Ethnomethodology (EM) is proposing and working out
"What More" there is to the unquestionable corpus status of formal
analytic investigations than formal analysis does, did, ever did, or can
provide, EM does not dispute those achievements. Without disputing those achievements
as unquestionably demonstrable achievements2 EM asks "What
More" is there that users of formal analysis know and demand the existence
of, that FA depends upon the existence of for FA's worksite-specific
achievements in carefully instructed procedures, that FA uses and recognizes
everywhere in and as its lived worksite-specific practices.
There are practices that FA practitioners just in any actual
case know and recognize are unavoidable, without remedy or alternatives. The
practices are indispensable to practitioners. Just as in any actual case the
practices
2 If this claim is read as irony, it will he read
incorrectly. To read it without irony, recall the scene in lonesco's
Rhinoceros. Trie last man and his girlfriend, Daisy, are looking out into the
street below filled with rhinoceroses. Daisy exclaims, "Oh Look, they're
dancing." The last man: "You call that dancing!" Daisy:
"That's the way they dance."
Similarly, no disrespect is involved for FA's demand
that its investigations he worldly work of finding out and specifying real
order, evidently; real order, not cockamamle real order. Real order is FA's
achievement, without question. EM is not claiming to know better. But neither
is EM proposing to institute and carry out EM investigations of ordinary
society while heing in the midst of organizational things and therein knowing
nothing. Rather, we'll proceed without having to decide or even to know how to
proceed while knowing nothing. Instead, by [heginning], hy [carrying on], hy
[finding our bearings again], by [completing an investigation] we'll land
ourselves in the midst of things. Proeedurally we know something. We're not
agnostic. EM's commitments are the same as those of FA in worldwide analytic
studies of practical action and practical reason: In the midst of its endless
things we'll study the work as of which immortal ordinary society consists.
We'll see.
specify
practitioners' work and
make it instructably observable.
"What More" has centrally (and perhaps entirely)
to do with procedures. I have given procedural EM's emphasis on work. By
procedural, EM does not mean process. Procedural means labor. That emphasis is
exemplified in the probative descriptions by David Sudnow. At the
worksite—playing hearably improvised jazz at the piano keyboard; typing
watchably thoughtful words at the typewriter keyboard; enactedly solving the
problem, at the computer console, of getting a high score in
"Breakout," the video game-progressively and developingly coming upon
the phenomenon via the work in and as of the unmediated details of producing it
(Sudnow, 1978, 1979, 1983, 1996).
The central obsession in ethnomethodological studies is to
provide for what the alternate procedural descriptions of achieved and
achievable phenomena of order—methodologies—could be without sacrificing issues
of structure. That means without sacrificing the great achievements—of
describable recognizable recurrencies, of generality, and of comparability of
these productions of ordinary activities—activities that carry with them the
recognizable achievements of populations that staff their production, along
with the interchangeability and surveyability of those populations. This is not
an indifference to structure, This is a concern with structure as an achieved
phenomenon of order.
EM is concerned with "What More," in the world of
familiar, ordinary activities, does immortal, ordinary society consist of as
the locus and the setting of every topic of order, every topic of logic, of
meaning, of method respecified and respecifiable as the most ordinary
Durkheimian things in the world.
Ethnomethodology's fundamental phenomenon and its standing
technical preoccupation in its studies is to find, collect, specify, and make
instructably 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. These
methodologies are incarnate in familiar society. Therein they are uniquely
adequate to the phenomena whose production they describe substantively, 6
in material details. The competence of their production
staffs consists of the unique adequacy of methods. The competence of their
production staffs is, it exists as, it is identical with, the unique adequacy
of methods.3
EM addresses these provisions as empirically adequate
descriptions. It carries them out by eschewing the methods of formal analysis.
This is done without loss or sacrifice of issues of structure, and without
bowdlerizing or ignoring issues of structure or changing the subject.
Without sacrificing issues of structure or changing the
subject? That means without sacrificing the ubiquitous achievements, in
everyday life, of recognizable and accountable, observable recurrencies of
practical actions and practical reasoning in achievedly coherent, ordered,
uniquely adequate details of generality, of comparability, of classification,
of typicality, of uniformity, of standardization. These are recurrencies in
productions of the phenomena of ordinary activities-traffic jams, service
lines, summoning phones, blackboard notes, jazz piano in a cocktail lounge,
talking chemistry in lecture format—phenomena that exhibit, along with their
other endogenously accountable details, the endogenously accountable
populations that staff their production.
What in the world do these achievements consist of? Where in
the world are they found? How in the world are they found? What in the world of
commonplace, local, endogenous haecceities of daily life does immortal,
ordinary society consist of as the locus and the setting of every topic of
order, of logic, of meaning, of method, reason, rationality, science, truth,
respecified and respecifiable as the most ordinary concerted lived
organizationally enacted phenomena in the world?
1.2 There Is Order in the Plenum
According to the worldwide social science movement and the
corpus status of its bibliographies, there is no order in the concreteness of
things (Garfinkel, 1988). The research enterprises of the social scientific
movement are defeated by the apparently hopelessly circumstantial overwhelming
details of everyday activities—the plenum, the
3 The unique adequacy requirement of methods is
explained briefly in Garfinkd and Wieder, 1992.
plenty, the plenilunium. To get a
remedy, the social
sciences have worked out policies and methods of formal analysis. These
respecify the concrete details of ordinary activities as details of the
analyzing devices and of the methods that warrant the use of these devices.
They respecify the sheer circumstantiality of ordinary activities so that order
can be exhibited analytically. It is essentially an empirical demonstration.
The details found in the model reveal the essential recurring invariant
features which are FA's phenomena.
A Catalog of Ethnomethodological Investigations4 consists of
evidence to the contrary. Indeed, there is order in the most ordinary
activities of everyday life in their full concreteness, and that means in their
ongoingly procedumlly enacted coherence of substantive, ordered phenomenal
details without loss of generality.5 It has to do with the unexplicated
specifics of details in structures, in recurrencies, in typicality, not the
details gotten by administering a generic description. These details are
unmediatedly experienced and experienced evidently.
Just-in-any-actual-case immortal ordinary society is a
wonderful beast. Evidently and just in any actual case, God knows how it is put
together. The principal formal analytic devices currently in hand, of paying
careful attention to the use, the design, and administration of generic
representational theorizing—models, for example, get a job done that with the
same technical skills in administering them lose the very phenomenon that they
profess.
4 A Catalog of EM Investigations with Which ft)
Respecify Topics of Logic, Order, Meaning, Method, Reason, Structure, Science,
and the Rest, In, About, and As ike Workings of Immortal, Ordinary Society Just
in Any Actual Case. What Did We Do? What Did We Learn?
In A Catalog Statement, briefly annotated themes and
topics, in various documents, are arranged in several collections of
ethnomethodological investigations. Formatted as a directed review and
understood as steps of an argument, these investigations, in several volumes,
make up the EM Catalog.
5 I use generality as synecdoche for various features of
lived phenomena that formal analysis collects and describes as structures. Structures
are extensively discussed in Seven Cases With Which to Specify How Phenomenal
Fields of Ordinary Activities Aye. Lost With Engineering Details of Recording
Machinery: Rhythmic Clapping, Summoning Phones, Counting Turns at Talk,
Scrubbing the Sink and Other Trivial, Unavoidably Sight-Specific Ordinary Jobs
Around the House, Traffic Flow, Service Lines, and Computer Supported Real Time
Occupations. 7
Enacted specifically ordinary organizational phenomena in
ordered phenomenal details of structures evidently are strange. Immortal,
ordinary society is strange.
Strange? In particulars, what's so strange? What is strange
is already well known and available.
Consider that immortal ordinary society evidently, just in
any actual case, is easily done and easily recognized with uniquely adequate
competence, vulgar competence, by one and all—and, for all that, by one and all
it is intractably hard to describe procedurally. Procedurally described, just
in any actual case, it is elusive. Further, it is only discoverable. It is not
imaginable. It cannot be imagined but is only actually found out, and just in
any actual case.6 The way it is done is everything it can consist of and
imagined descriptions cannot capture this detail. Just in any actual case it is
both vulgarly done and intractable when it comes to making it instructable.
Absent that, and God knows how it is put together. More to the point of
strange: In God's silence, formal analysts, by exercising the privileges of the
transcendental analyst and the universal observer, do not know; yet still
somehow they know they need not hesitate to say.
More on "strange." How immortal, ordinary society
is put together includes the incarnate work by formal analysts of paying
careful attention to the design and administration of generic representational
theorizing. It is no news that that work is an enacted detail of the immortal
society it learns about and teaches. In the social science movement the jobs of
descriptive analysis get done with generic theorizing. The skills with which
these jobs are done are everywhere accompanied by curious incongruities. These
are well known, and even freely acknowledged, they include that with the same
procedural skills of carrying out these jobs the phenomena they so carefully
describe are lost.
Further, the procedure of generic representational
theorizing puts in place of the enacted witnessable detail of immortal ordinary
society a collection of signs. The FA procedure ignores the enacted,
unmediated, directly and immediately witnessable details of immortal ordinary
society. Then, analysts have only one option, in order to carry through their
6 For a deep explication of that claim see SchegLoff, 1987
analytic enterprises, these being the careful enterprises of
description that will permit the demonstration of the corpus status of ordinary
actions; in order to do that, analysts become interpreters of signs. Following
through consistently with this procedure, it is then argued that interpretation
is unavoidable. That designing and interpreting "marks, indicators, signs,
and symbols" is inevitably what sociologists and social scientists must do
in order to carry out the corpus status of their studies of ordinary
activities.
EM is not in the business of interpreting signs. It is not
an interpretive enterprise. Enacted local practices are not texts which
symbolize "meanings" or events. They are in detail identical with
themselves, and not representative of something else. The witnessably recurrent
details of ordinary everyday practices constitute their own reality. They are
studied in their unmediated details and not as signed enterprises.
Is it then that ethnomethodology in its concerns with
"What More" is critical of formal analytic investigations? Is it that
ethnomethodology is one more in a familiar line of academic sociology's
in-house critics, stirring the waters the better to fish therein? There have
been authors of ethnometho do logical studies whose reputations were promoted
by offering to the members of the worldwide social science movement ways of
upgrading their craft. "Your science is cockeyed. We need to sit down and
diagnose for you just where you're going wrong." Ethnomethodology has yet
to deliver promised repairs to formal analytic social scientific enterprises
without losing its own phenomena.
Ethnomethodology is not critical of formal analytic
investigations. But neither is it the case that EM, and that means A Catalog of
EM Investigations, has no concern with a remedial expertise and has nothing to
promise or deliver. Ethnomethodology is applied ethnomethodology. However, its
remedial transactions are distinctive to EM expertise.
That expertise is offered for phenomena whose local,
endogenous production is troubled in ordered phenomenal details of structures.
EM does not offer a remedial expertise that is transcendental to these
phenomena. In these the generality of EM's remedial expertise is indifferent to
(independent of) the use of policies of generic representational theorizing and
methods of constructive analysis to specify the generality of remedial
expertise. 8
Having been found out, EM's findings are described with the
questions "What did we do? What did we learn? More to the point, what did
we learn, but only in and as lived doings, that we can teach? And how can we
teach it?" EM's findings are tutorial problems. They are not different
than pedagogies. They were learned in settings in which teaching and learning
being done in concert with others were locally and endogenously witnessable by
and "relevant to the parties.11 In these respects they were essentially
unavoidable and without remedy.
That EM's findings are pedagogies has an obvious focus in
eth no methodological studies of work and occupations. Its findings are found
there in the phenomena of two constituents of the Shop Floor Problem: (I) shop
floor achievements and their accompanying careful*7 descriptions, and (2) shop
floor theorizing. They are found there also, and everywhere else, in careful*
descriptions; in the praxeological validity of instructed actions;8 and in one
of EM's distinctive results and its central phenomenon: The praxeological
validity of instructed action is (i.e., "exists as," "is
identical with," "is the same as") the phenomenon. These results
are collected in EM studies of work in the professions and sciences.
Flatly, none of EM's questions are concerned with who is
ahead in a contest between rival claims to adequate science in the social
sciences. Instead, and just as flatly, the two disciplines, FA and EM, are both
and simultaneously incommensurably different and unavoidably related. What do
the two technologies have to do with each other? This is EM's prevailing
question. This question is the center of EM's bibliographies.
1.3 Formal Analytic Literatures and Their EM
Alternates
A collection of EM investigations establishes and specifies,
by making instructably
7 Careful, spelled with an asterisk refers to
descriptions that arc available at the worksite to misreading as the first
segment of an instructed action. This is explained further in 3.1 trie
Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action.
8 The following is an explicating phrase for the
"praxeological validity of instructed action": at and as the worksite
misreading a description as instructably the work of following which exhibits
the phenomenon that the text describes.
observable, a territory of new organizational phenomena.
These consist of the paired achievements: 1) topical literatures of formal
analytic investigations and theorizing, accompanied by 2) their eth no
methodological alternates. The collection's empirical specifics are the work of
an international company of authors of books, articles, dissertations, master's
essays, seminar papers, and occasional notes.
In the pairs that compose the collection, EM alternates to
FA literatures are alternates, not alternatives. Case by case they are specific
alternates. Members of a pair make demonstrably disjunct provisions for the
corpus status of the ordinary activities that a pair describes. The EM
alternates are incommensurable, asymmetrically alternate phenomena of order.
The achievements of formal analytic theorizing and
investigations are always accompanied by ethnomethodological alternates, and
they are accompanied everywhere. Wherever in an actual investigation one is
found, the other is also found. Wherever the ground is analytically trampled,
its specific ethno methodological alternate is findable. The more heavily the
ground has been trampled, and wherever it has been trampled for the longest
time, the more certainly will its EM alternate be findable. When it is found,
the more curious is its prior absence in mainstream literatures, for its
absence is a positive phenomenon and an accomplishment of immortal ordinary
society not less than are those described by FA investigations.9
In order to describe FA literatures and their EM alternates
I have appropriated the term coeval:10 where one arises, the other arises
alongside and with it. Coeval brings to center stage and underlines
ethnomethodology's premier questions: What do FA literatures and their EM
alternates consist of in any actual case? Just in any actual easel What do they
consist of at the worksite, as the worksite, first time through?
FA investigations and EM studies are both and simultaneously
incommensurably different and specifically related. EM knows this to be so,
empirically and demonstrably, via the
9 In an
aspect of their curious absence, EM alternates are buried by the work of mains
(ream ing them. Like any other procedurally specified phenomena of order the work
of mainstrearrmng is done in details of structures.
10 Maynard
and dayman (1991) first used this term to describe the alternates.
9
Catalog of EM Investigations. EM knows this in instructable
ways that FA does not have empirical access to and that it CAN not get access
to. EM has the unavoidable task of explaining these claims and demonstrating
them. Do FA literatures and EM alternates arise together? Are they related?
Then how do they arise together? How are they related?
Just what do they have to do with each other? But not as
thoughtfull theory writing with which a theory writer, not being required to
know at first hand or to be constrained by just what in its proceduraliy11
ordered phenomenal details he is talking about empirically, can have it in the
way he can imagine and however it is needed to do his FA theorizing; doing with
an imagined state of affairs whatever is needed to carry off an argument that
is available in a Borgesian library13 of theories to choose whatever adds to a
literature of topical controversies.
Durkheim's aphorism is taught to graduate students from the
first day of graduate work: "The objective reality of social facts is
sociology's fundamental principle." The aphorism is taken very seriously
in both programs of investigations and by both technologies of analysis, FA and
EM. Their takes are different; they are incommensurably different. Nevertheless
they are inextricably related. For one thing—one organizational thing, and a
social fact in its own right—they are asymmetrically alternate.13
That means that you can use ethnomethodology to recover in
phenomenal ordered details —in a phenomenal field of ordered details the work
that makes up, at the worksite, the design, administration, and carrying off of
investigations with the use of formal analytic practices. You can't do it the
other way around. That is to say, you can't use the methods of formal analysis
to recover the work and the findings that ethnomethodology is coming up with.
So their takes on Durkheim's aphorism indeed are not only
11 By way of a reminder, in eth no methodology
procedural means labor of a certain incarnate methodological sort: at the
worksite progressively and developingly coming upon the phenomenon via the work
in and as of the unmediated, immediately and directly observed phenomenal-field
details of producing it.
12 Jorge
Louis Barges talks about a "The Library of Babel." We Learned in
graduate school that it is a free democracy of theories. You pick up whatever
you need.
13 The EM
Catalog describes this and other relations in a collection of "rendering
theorems." See Garfinkel and Weider (1992).
alternate; they are asymmetrically alternate, and that they
are asymmetrically related is itself a social fact.
In the contemporary worldwide social science movement,
"The objective reality of social facts is sociology's fundamental
principle" is understood procedurally, although not as procedurally is
understood in ethnomethodology. In the countless analytic arts and sciences of
practical action of the worldwide social science movement, the aphorism in
substantially explicated details consists of and is demonstrated in the corpus
status of investigations carried out with the policies, methods, and results of
formal analytic technology. Therein, too, the aphorism is variously understood
according to need and occasion as FA's aim, tasks, work, procedural demands,
achievement, and fundamental phenomenon.
EM also accords the aphorism heavy procedural emphasis, but
distinctively so. Ethnomethodologically the aphorism is understood like this.
From the outset of its investigations, EM addressed various settings of
immortal14 ordinary society whose particu-
14 Immortal is borrowed from Durkheim as a metaphor
for any witnessable local setting whose parties are doing some human job that
can range in scale from a hallway greeting to a freeway traffic jam where there
is this to emphasize about them: Their production is staffed by parties to a
standing crap game. Of course the jobs are not games, let alone a crap game.
Think of freeway traffic flow in Los Angeles. For the cohort of drivers there,
just this gang of them, driving, making traffic together, are somehow, smoothly
and unremarkably, concerting the driving to be at the lived production of the
flow's just thisness: familiar, ordinary, uninterestingly, observably in and as
observances doable and done again, and always, only, entirely in detail for
everything that detail could be. In and as of the just thisness (the
haecceities) of driving's details, just this staff are doing again just what in
concert with vulgar competence they can do, for each another next first time;
and it is this of what they are doing, that makes up the details of just that
traffic flow: That although it is of their doing, and as of the flow they are
"witnessably oriented by" and "seeably directed to the
production of it," they treat the organizational thing as of their doing,
as of their own doing, hut not of their very own, singular, distinctive
authorship. And further, for just this cohort, it will be that after they exit
the freeway others will come after them to do again the same familiar things
that they—just they— just these of us as drivings doings are in concert doing.
Immortal is used to speak of human jobs as of which
local members, being in the midst of organizational things, know, of just these
organizational things they are in the midst of, that it preceded them and will
be there after they leave. It is a metaphor for the great recurrences of
ordinary society, staffed, provided for.
10
lar staffs so concerted their activities as to exhibit
copies of order* as their activities' achieved phenomena of order* in and as
real world settings, in real time,15 and therein as the most ordinary achieved
organizational things in the world. Any and all topics of order*16 were taken
to be eligible for ethnomethodological respecification as achieved phenomena of
order*, commonplace achievements, seen but unnoticed, specifically
uninteresting, and specifically unremarkable "work of the streets."
It is ethnomethodological about EM studies that they show
for immortal ordinary society's substantive events in material contents just
and only in any actual case, that and just how vulgarly competent members
concert their activities to produce and display, to demonstrate, to make
observably the case, locally, naturally accountable phenomena of logic and
order, of cause, classification, temporality, coherence, consistency, and
analysis, of details, of details in structures, of meaning, mistakes, errors,
accidents, coincidence, facticity, reason, truth, and methods in and as of the
unremarkable embodiedly ordered details of their ordinary lives together.
From time to time, in one publication or another, their
relevance for sociology would be summarized with a restatement of Durkheim's
aphorism. For its investigations, ethnomethodology took this to mean the
objective reality of social facts, in that and just how every society's
locally, endogenously produced, naturally organized, naturally accountable,
ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and
entirely members' work, with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion,
hiding out, passing, postponement, or buyouts, is thereby sociology's
fundamental phenomenon.n
produced, observed and
observable, locally and accountably in and as of an "assemblage of
haeccieities." EM places heavy emphasis on "immortal." [t is a
recurrent theme in the EM catalog and a source of its topics.
15Various tutorial problems
in the EM Catalog empirically respecify several meanings of standard time and
various established literary meanings. In its concerns with time, Sudnow's work
is particularly rich.
16 Order* spelled with an
asterisk is a proxy for any and all topics of logic, meaning, reason, method .
. .
17 I understand this
restatement of Durkheim's aphorism to be EM's center. I understand this
restatement and teach it as EM's distinctive and central statement of its aims,
tasks, program, policies, methods, results, and teachings, [t has been a
recurrent theme in my courses
EM took it[s that the workings of immortal, ordinary society
are the origins, sources, destinations, locus, and settings of achieved
phenomena of order*. Provisions for achievements of order, whether these
provisions are vernacular or technical, lay or professional, begin, have their
course, and finish in the midst of these ordinary workings.
EM takes it that immortal ordinary society exists as,
consists of, is identical with achieved phenomena of logic, meaning, method,
reason, rational action, truth, evidence, science, Kant's basic categories, or
Hume's, or the primordials of anyone else, any of which is a lot of territory
inasmuch as General Ideas of the Universal Observer are commonly used in the
social sciences and humanities to topicalize and justify valid knowledge of
every possible thing in any possible world.19
Durkheim's aphorism "The objective reality of social
facts is sociology's fundamental principle" is specified in the
investigations of the EM catalog. In the Catalog's investigations, the objective
reality of the social facts is made instructably observable and instructably
reproducible in and as the most ordinary and familiar organizational things in
the world.
The different takes on Durkheim's aphorism by the formal
analytic arts and sciences of the worldwide social science movement
and seminars at UCLA since 1954 and In conferences at
various universities. It is the explicit sutaject of
various publications (e.g., Oarfinkel, 1988; Garfinkel and Weider 1992, Chapter
10). It is explicitly thematic in dissertations for which I was chair at UCLA
and UC Irvine, or on which [ served there or elsewhere. It is specified in
themes and topics throughout the EM Catalog of Investigations.
18 Took
it, that is, beyond hermeneutics, beyond interpretive sociology, certainly
beyond Husserl's Ltb- tnswtli or the matters debated by Schutz and Gurwitsch,
beyond writers of theory such as Parsons, Coleman, Foucault, or Merleau-Ponty.
Possibly and most promis ingly more than any of these, took it beyond Durkheim's
socio-empirical epistemology that has been elucidated recently by Anne Rawls
(1956).
19 My
allusion has its source in Anne Rawls's (1995) startling article
"Durkheim's Epistemology: The Ne glected Argument." Rawls shows
Durkheim to have been the original author of that understanding and of its
research program. She shows in the detailed texts of The Elementary Forms of
ike Religious Life, as the book's principal project, that this was Durkheim's
program, that the book's argument continues the program of his corpus, that he
named sociology as the program's disciplinary source; and that project and
legacy have been neglected by almost 80 years of Durkheimian scholarship.
11
and ethnomethodology are incommensurably different but
nevertheless they are inextricably related. Just in case the members of a pair
are compared procedurally, they present to EM a preposterous problem: The
phenomenon of interest to EM is not that the FA literatures and their EM
alternates make up a collection and its properties. The phenomenon of interest
is this: The phenomenon of interest is Che preposterous problem: namely, case
by case, for each pair, the literature and its alternate: The phenomenon of
interest is the disjunct corpus status of its respective bibliographies. This
is an initial preposterous problem. Further preposterous problems flow from
that. Case by case, the LITALT™ pairs are preposterous problems.
2.1 A Collection of FA Literatures and Their EM
Alternates!
EM alternates are specific alternates to the FA literatures with
which they are paired. They are demonstrably31 alternate provisions for the
corpus status of the ordinary activities that an FA literature describes. This
claim is critical to the collection. A literature is ordinarily read for
familiarly probative studies of its subjects. When its studies are read for
that, the reading is apt to be looking in studies at hand to a well-known past
(the reader's included), reviewing, collecting, and deepening established
studies, promoting a tradition, renewing it by singling out a line of studies
to find what next in line might look like, and perhaps so attaching a next
study to the line as to continue the structure that was used to find what
"next" could be and should be.
The EM reading is incommensurably different in material
details in that instead of renewing a tradition, it deliberately searches a
literature for news to carry further EM's previously uncovered and established
markers of strangely new organizational phenomena in what nevertheless remains
FA's familiar territory. The EM search is for "What More" the
territory offers up in language to describe it as a literature's very own
subject; offers up, not in the ineffable seeing of something, but with a
language that is itself part of the territory, but that in its matters can't be
imagined but is only discoverable. The EM reader, having
caught on to
something,
20 LITALT = FA literatures and their EM alternates. 21
By demonstrable I mean instructabty observable.
21 Credit
is long overdue for
Florian Znaniecki's
wouldn't want only to stipulate or imagine it. New
directions would have already been taken, so why would one want to? And so on,
and so forth.
Various EM authors have described worksite-specific,
discipline-specific, procedural enactments of the "etcetera" clause,
the documentary method of interpretation, indexical expressions and their
essential ubiquity, reflexive body/world relations, details in structures,
tacit knowledge, the essential mundaneity of reason and calculative
rationality, and oracular reasoning and its endless cognates. These subjects
had their start in 1952 after I learned about the work of Calvin Mooers.
Graduate studies with the use of Mooers1 "Zatocoding" and
"Catalog" began at UCLA in 1954. They were developed in PhD
dissertations at UCLA, and later by faculty and students at other universities:
UC Santa Barbara, Irvine, San Diego, York, Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, Manchester, Boston, and elsewhere. They remain standing subjects for
EM authors.
Another subject is familiar and prevalent in formal analytic
literatures: the accomplished transparency and specifically unremarkable
smoothness of concerted skills of "equipmentally affiliated" shopwork
and shoptalk. These are respecified ethnomethodologically with "Heideggerian
uses" of handicaps, illnesses, disability, and their affiliated
equipmental "aids to independent living," as well as with inverting
lenses and other bodily, characterological, organizational, and procedural
"troublemakers." With these "troublemakers," work's
incarnate social organizational details are revealed by overcoming their
transparency in their topically ordinary concerted recurrencies of ongoingly
developing phenomenal fields of ordered details of generality, uniformity,
interchangeable populations, and the rest—i.e., in ordered details of
structures.
Studies of many and various subjects concerned with the
workings of organizational things, with or without their availability in FA
literatures, were done while eschewing the policies and methods of formal
analysis. Each investigation, for its empirical adequacy, described practices
that are recognized by practitioners as doable, done, true, "relevant to
the parties,"11 and even versimilitudi-
12
nous.23 EM studies deliberately abstained from
the use of mental mechanisms, psychologized actions, clinical psychological
biographies, signed objects, and hermeneutics. They are concerned with
practices that are chiasmically chained embodiedly to the environment of
ongoingly ordered phenomenal details. Descriptively provided for, these are
above all commonplace, notably unremarkable, in specifics that are
uninteresting but indispensable, and somehow -and this is critically of
interest—they are specifically unmentioned in established descriptions.
A very strong collection of studies was done with
deliberate, clear, and targeted emphasis on ethnomethodological
discipline-specific "hybrid" results. By "hybrid" I mean
studies of work in which the analyst is uniquely and adequately competent to
produce the phenomenon, the coherent uniquely adequate details of which his
descriptions can be misread instructionally, as and at a worksite, to
exhibit.24 Among EM hybrids, David Sudnow's studies, particularly of
improvisation in jazz piano playing and piano pedagogy, are sine qua non.
Hybrid studies also come into strong focus in EM studies of discovering work in
the natural sciences.15
Their studies established, among analytically familiar
literatures of instructed actions, their EM alternate, "the praxeological
validity of instructed action." At and as the worksite, misreading a
descriptive account instructionally, the work of following which exhibits the
phenomenon that the text describes. The alternate was original with, first
proposed, and elaborately developed by Britt Robillard and Christopher Pack in
their joint
(1937) Social Actions for early and deep explication
of this insistence. I thank James Fleming, my mentor and friend in the
Sociology Department of the University of North Carolina, for insistently
teaching it in 1939 as an acknowledged and central relevance in
discipline-specific literatures of social science theorizing Sacks and
Schegloff incorporated it as a central methodological policy in conversational
analysis. The felicitous phrase is theirs.
23 Thanks to Martin Krieger's studies of physicists'
work.
24 EM authors of indispensable studies are Melinda
Baccus, Stacy Burns, Richard Heyman, Katherine Jordan, Kenneth Liberman, Eric
Livingston, Michael Lynch, Doug Maynard, Jay Meehan, Louis Meyer, Christopher
Pack, Anne Rawls, Albert Robillard, Lucy Suchman, David Sudnow, Peter Weeks,
and D. Lawrence Wieder.
25 See Eric Livingston, Christopher Pack, Albert
Robillard, Katherine Jordan and Michael Lynch.
program of medical research, pedagogy, and evaluation in the
Pediatrics Department of Michigan State University from 1973-1984.
Their program was notable for working out and demonstrating
the condition of EM adequacy: that the analyst's ethnomethodological findings
be taken seriously in the FA discipline that was studied. By being "taken
seriously1' I mean that at the worksite, practitioners will demand of EM
findings just as they demand of FA findings that they satisfy the
worksite-specific, discipline-specific corpus status of FA investigations, and
that EM findings be incorporated in FA work at hand or reasons be given for not
doing so.
2.2 A Collection of Pairs
The following is a list of FA/EM pairs that consist of
topical literatures of formal analytic studies of work and their specific EM
alternates. An enumerated list of briefly annotated subjects of formal analytic
literatures <Iight tew> and their ethnomethodological alternates [bold
text] follows.
<1> The premier achievement of FA studies of work is
the generality of work and occupations, not in occupations' aesthetics but as
labor described in their generically represented details of structure: e.g., in
their details of generality and comparability, staffed by interchangeable and
surveyable populations, the descriptions being responsive across occupations,
disciplines, and literatures to inductive inference without incoherence, etc.
These are demonstrated with studies that are carried out with the policies of
generic representational theorizing and methods of constructive analysis. Among
the most powerful of these are the well-known and widely practiced analytic
privileges of the transcendental analyst and universal observer. Their evident
use provides to PA cases that describe achieved details of generality and other
structures of work and occupations, their guarantee of adequate description and
valid knowledge.
[1] Stacy Burns
provides a specific ethnomethodological alternate. She describes the gap in
conventional studies of lawyers' work in law school training. After reviewing
well-known social science studies of law school training, she writes:
"These conventional studies broadly outline, but are ultimately
independent of, the detailed
13
orderliness of how
actual pedagogic interchange unfolds in real time, in real space and in the
first place in the law school classroom. They are unable to specify what
connection, if any, there may be between the observable detail and contingent
ordering of pedagogic tasks in the law classroom and the skills identifying of
professionally competent legal practice. . . . Hence the lived and local
orderliness identifying of pedagogy in the law school classroom remains
predominantly unexplored analytic territory. What is reported in the social
scientific, educational, and juris prudential Literature Leaves largely
unaddressed many matters of central practical concern, relevance, and
consequentiality to law professors and their students ..." (Burns, 1995).
To conclude her point, Burns adds "As Heritage describes it," this
gap "consists of all the missing descriptions of what occupational
activities consist of and all the missing analyses of how practitioners manage
the tasks which, for them, are matters of serious and pressing significance
..." (Heritage, 1984:299).
<2> Practical action and practical reason are vastly
worked subjects. They range in technicality from the alchemically arcane to the
commonplaces of pop technologies. Subjects are centered academically in
canonical investigations of Wittgenstein, Dewey, Simon, Schutz, and
Evans-Prichard, and, most interestingly, in the ethnodisciplines in
anthropology (e.g., eth no astro no my, ethno-botany). In these literatures,
recurrencies of practical action and practical reason are made instmctably
observable and exhibited just in any actual case in the coherence of
generically theorized, formal analytic details of structures. Elaborate but
separate topical literatures of practical action are identifying mainstays of
the separate university departments of psychology and sociology.
[2] Calvin Mooers'
"Zatocoding" and "Catalogs" respecify descriptions, rules,
definitions, glossaries, schemas, instructions, instructed actions, actions as
a rule, purposive actions, ends-means schemata, procedural accounts,
operational definitions, context, science, oracular reason, divination . . .
In 1952 Calvin
Mooers, at the time a recent graduate of MIT, had designed and needed to sell
and service to engineering firms
his "Catalog" and
"Zatocoding"
system for the
storage and retrieval of small libraries of valuable documents. He described,
with marvelous delicacy of experiential specifics gathered from his jobs of
selling and installing his system and helping members of client firms to make
it work, that and just how context, practical action, categorizing phrases,
reasons, search prescriptions, relevance, identity, definitions, glosses, and
glossaries were renegade topics.
Mooers' clients were
engineers. "Context" was an omnipresent renegade topic in their
in-house discussions about the Zatocoding system and in, about, and as their
actual in-course work of naming documents, describing, filing, searching for
relevant texts but not being able or not wanting to prespecify what it would
have to look like before it was found; or finding just what they needed and
discarding it as garbage; or so naming, filing, searching, and recovering
documents that their company library in any of these ways of operating in it
and with it would, to their work satisfaction, have incorporated their
developing and changing interests.
A user of the
dictionary would select an itemized string of descriptors as a search
prescription. Upon the completion of a search, the documents that dropped had
to be examined to learn what grammatic readings the items could be found to
have. The examinable coherence of a first collection was often deliberately
temporary, undertaken just to see where it would lead. Was the document
relevantly a document that the prescription had been directed to find? These
and densely affiliated other "relevancies" could not be prespecified.
Context as a locally occasioned, instructably achieved, repeatedly and
collaboratively achieved, and achievable local phenomenon by and for a firm's
particular gang was indispensable to assure the locally occasioned, locally
achieved efficacy as instructably reproducible recurrencies of worksite
practices in details of storage, numbers of documents, the "Catalog,"
all together with the "Zatocoding" procedure—as an in vivo worksite
achievement, just in any actual case.
From 1952 until 1976
the Mooersian catalog was used to add and procedurally specify rules,
rule-governed activities, indexical expressions, objective expressions,
14
rational decision
making in commonsense situations of choice, glossing as a way to talk plain
English, methods, schemes of details, propertied classes of objects, and
structure—structure in the way its use collects, and seeks to exhibit about
practical action, details in patterns, generality, comparability, typicality,
standardization, uniformity, coherence in accordance with the logic of
inductive inference, and the existence copula "is" in the senses
"there exists" and "is identical with."
<3> A third topic of formal analysis includes occasion
maps315 and their cognates; repair manuals, models, mock-ups, tour guides,
assembly instructions, freeway signing, contractors1 path descriptions, medical
decision trees, directions, rules, norms, games-with-rules, blueprints, musical
scores, analytical cartography . . . FA is embarrassed by occasion maps and by
the occasioned use of maps. Formal analysts don't know what to do with them.
The occasioned uses of maps are treated as mentalisms and turned into features
of the perceiver, perceived features of a territory. For FA the
"real" map is made useless, rendered merely perceived, by being made
subjective.
[3] Occasion maps are
low-cost, high-production gold mines. Whole libraries of analytic
cartographical maps and their cognates offer in specific EM alternates the
locally occasioned, endogenously achieved properties of logic, order, meaning,
method, reason, rationality, effective procedure, foliowability, completeness,
sufficiency, and the rest of occasion maps. These are the endlessly analyzed
topics of intellectual history.
It is not possible to
read from the map the work of following the map in a way-finding journey. The
traveler's work of consulting the map is an unavoidable detail in the lived,
ongoingly, in-its-course, first-time-through, traveling body's way-finding
journey that the map is consulted to get done. Under that worksite condition,
the map's consulted, inspectable, relevant-to-the-user properties
of logic, order,
26 In order to specify the literatures. Groups I and 1
of the eight sections of text in Cartographical Innovations
(Wallis and Robinson, 1982} is a splendid source and
guide. In addition, Norman Thrower's classic on maps (recently revised to be
published by University of Chicago Press) is indispensable, as is the canonical
textbook by Arthur Robinson.
meaning, factual
adequacy, followability, completeness of instructions, sufficiency of
instructions, notational clarity, analyzable format, methodic procedure, and
the rest are embedded in the territorially and equipmentally historicized
practices of the traveling. Being so embedded they are salient,17 problematic,
topical, unavoidable, and [identifying]18 of traveling's practices in
relentlessly chiasmically embodied details of those practices. The map's
properties of order* are exhibited in and as territorial organizational things.
These are the map's very own territorial organizational things. As territorial
objects in a phenomenal field, the map's properties of order* are chiasmically
chained to the traveling body's way-finding practices; they are made available
to those practices, as those practices.
The map library at
UCLA has a list of sketch maps that the Department of Defense publishes, called
landing maps, approach maps, horizon maps, etc. From the point of view of
embodied traveling, they must put in the hands of the troops ways of
recognizing an actual shoreline so that they minimize their casualties. The
maps have this occasioned character not because they are faulted, but because
they are used.
Occasion maps are
analytic cartography's stepchildren. Formal analytic studies of occasion maps
have missed these phenomena entirely. With the same careful technical policies
and methods with which formal analytic studies have described occasion maps,
these phenomena are lost.
<4> A fourth topic of formal analysis includes
scientific demonstrations such as Galileo's inclined plane demonstration of the
27 "Salience" is used in an EM
respecification of Gurwitsch's (1964) result; that is, the "coherence of a
group of data." He obtained this finding in his transcendental
phenomenological criticism of the gestalt theory of form.
28 "Identifying" is misleading. Cm using it
as a collector for other members of its family that are also misleading for EM
studies—e.g., definitional, essential, genetically essential, paradigmatic,
criteria!, primitive, primordial, primary, schema, ideal, ideal type, Uhr-this-and-that,
etc. "Identifying" is a temporary place holder for the work it
describes when it is ^ respectfted ethnomethodologically. For the time being I
am using it as a natural language descriptor, [t alludes to the work it is used
in vivo to describe. No one needs to be inevitably misled.
15
real motion of free-fall ing bodies in the literatures of
science studies. It also includes models and analogies in the natural sciences,
such as Rasmussenfs use of maps to describe the development of methods in
electron microscopy (Rasmussen, 1994) and studies of work in the natural
sciences.
[4] In the phenomena I-field properties of Galileo's
inclined-plane demonstration of the [real motion]29 of free-falling bodies, the
achieved coherence of objects has very much to do with naturally accountable
work.30 So do Louis Narens' "right hand" and "left hand"
paths from instructions to the demonstrated [real motion] of free-falling
bodies, described as S/T2 = K.
"There's a gap in the literature" in science
libraries. I made inquiries first to several librarians in the physics library
at UCLA, and, when they couldn't help, to the library director. Were there
descriptive materials available whose adequate pedagogic relevance consists in
that and in the way that they specify the first and second segments of
Lebenswelt pairs?31 These would be materials that are pedagogically relevant to
teaching's worksites in physics. Were any materials available? Could any be
found for any of physics teaching's worksites, from introductory labs for
undergraduates to arcane settings of collaborating professional faculty? After
he showed me several volumes and described several others, and after he
listened to my reasons why they were not what I was looking for, the director
replied, "There's a gap in the literature."
<5> Gestalt phenomena: Themes, topics, subjects,
demonstrations, in gestalt psychology conatitute an Important FA literature:
gestalt illusions, figural alternates in experimental perception (e.g.,
"ambiguities"), CAD models and modeling. A classic PA study was that
of Heider and Simmel (1944), who, in order to study the psychology of person
perception, developed a moving-picture film of 2 1/2 minutes' duration with
various geometric figures (including a large triangle, a small triangle, and a
circle) that
29 Square brackets in bold, [ ], mark off an EM
procedural account of the phenomenon that is described with the name in the
enclosed brackets.
30 See my study of the phenomena I-fie Id properties of
Galileo's inclined-plane demonstration in Garfinkel (forthcoming).
31 Lebenswelt pairs are discusses in 3.2 below.
moved around a space also occupied by a stationary
rectangle. They asked subjects to view the film and answer questions such as
"What kind of person is the big triangle (little triangle, circle)?"
and they asked subjects to tell the story of the movie in a few sentences. In
their analysis of subject's answers, Heider and Simmel proposed that subjects
saw the figures in the movie in terms of distal stimuli that were mediated
according to more proximal features of the field in which those stimuli were
embedded. In his own book Heider argues that these mediating features were
stages in intervening variables of various sorts. There are comparable examples
and elaborations in various subjects and demonstrations—for example, in studies
of gestalt illusions, in figural alternates (alterations).
[5] Visual horizons
are perspicuous settings with which EM topics of figurations of detail,
phenomenal fields, chiasmic relations of body/world pairs, rendering theorems,
transcendental data, and the rest are made instructably observable as achieved
phenomena, just in any actual case. By pointing out the social gestaltists,
Heider and Lewin, Maynard lets a jinni out of the bottle. "With their film
Heider and Simmel 'come so, so close' and lose the phenomenon" (Douglas W.
Matnard, personal communciation). His study is a propaedeutic case for a
collection of FA investigations that come "so, so close" and lose the
phenomenon. Maynard suggests that "within Heider's account are indications
of how subjects actually perceive, not according to relatively inert and
extrasensuous stages and variables that accord stimuli some transcendental
meaning, but, perception occurs according to in situ, sensuously-produced,
functional significations formed between the geometric figures, their parts,
and additional constituents whose presentation unfolds in time as time itself
is produced through the procedures of actors. Subjects see one thing preceding
another and the other succeeding the one, thereby assembling a chronology out
of an inextricably inner or endogenous order that then informs and is informed
by just what a geometric figure might be as a type of person" (Maynard,
1995).
Indexing the classic
gestalt domain of illusions and figural alternates in experi-
17
mental perception,
Maynard asks whether "there could be "more" to those processes
glossed by the terms perception, consciousness, cognition, etc. In a classroom
context, working with gestalt figures, perception and its production cannot be
separated from public descriptions that students and professors produce and
attend to as joint courses of action. In embodied tellings of their seeings
members bring into being "panels-of-a-cube," "fronts,"
"backs," "tallness," "width," "depth,"
"alternating configurations." These emerge in and as temporalized
narratives enacted both through talk and through the body's gestures that
concertedly model and rehearse visualizations as classroom-specific
accomplishments" (Maynard, 1995).
Also, EM's
"Heideggerian" uses of incongruities of bodily impairments and brain
injuries and illnesses are perspicuous in revealing the ("hidden")
transparent work of achieved coherence.
<6> Phenomena made instructably observable in formal
analytic details of concertedly recurrent achievements of practical actions are
so provided for by FA that a phenomenon, whatever the phenomenon and whatever
its scale, is made instructably observable as the work of a population that
staffs its production. An instant population is surveyable. It is exhibited in
surveyable particulars of body counts and dimensionalized demographics. These
are elucidated with variable analysis, quantified arguments, and causal
structures. Analytic descriptions of populations inhabit the literatures of
demography, the U.S. Census, the survey industry, university-based social
sciences, professional schools, and the rest.
[6] Endogenous
populations are specific EM alternates. An instant phenomenon of order—freeway
traveling waves, service lines, conversational greetings—along with
endogenously exhibiting its other details such as [unmotivated slowing ahead]
in traveling waves, [the apparent line that exhibits an order of service] in
formatted queues, [the hearable absence of a greeting in return] in
conversational greetings-exhibits as another detail its staff as a population
that produces it. More, the phenomenon exhibits its staff as an interchangeable
population. More, it exhibits its staff, as a surveyable population. The work
of a phenomenon's
production exhibits its staff as a population.
<7> The Dictionary of Occupational Titles is a premier
collection of formal analytic studies of work, and an extraordinary achievement
in the social sciences. In formal analytic studies of work, entries in the
Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), on the one hand, and analytic
ethnographies of work, on the other, can be adequately read and understood
interchangeably either as synopses or as elaborations of each other. Their
interchange ability is therein the subject of a massive literature in
bibliographies of social analysis, for in that relation they specify, satisfy,
and are exhibits of the corpus status of their details of structure.
Therein, DOT entries are sources for well-known advisories
that serve across studies of work and occupations as analytic ethnographic
detailing devices: e.g., "goal oriented behaviors,"
"context-dependence," "rational problem solving,"
"local settings," "tacit knowledge," "skills,"
"the village versus the city." Course bibliographies offer technical
guides to their existence and correct use in established topics of university
departments and professional schools.
[7] Various
university departments teach ethnomethodological expertise in studies of work
and occupations. Their required emphasis is on ineradicable, unavoidable,
indexical properties of adequate descriptions of work, etc. They require that
attention be paid to the uniquely adequate competence of the
analyst/practitioner as a requirement for describing methods of work. This
involves indifference to the transcendental analyst, and eschewing the
universal observer. "Ethnographic descriptions" are accounts of
worksite-specific "relevances" that consist in-course of
occupation-specific, instructably observable, instructably reproducible
coherence of ordered phenomenal details of structures. Remedial expertise is
directed to elucidating, as its targets, generic representational theorizing,
replacing it with the phenomenon as the origin and source of trouble.
2.3 Three Advisories
Advisories in EM studies of work are also available for use
as ethnographic detailing devices. These are offered in various lists by
18
various authors as one or another agenda in the seminars at
UCLA. Advisories were taped and developed to deliberately provide for and
exhibit the relevance of uniquely adequate competence to the described work of
its practitioners, who are also its analysts. Their descriptions are written by
design to be read praxeologically — i.e., to be muread- as worksite-specific
instructions for their observability, foliowability, completeness, sufficiency,
their bodily/equipmental intertwining, their in-course evolving elaboration,
their autochthonous coherence, their autonomous criticism, and the rest in
procedurally enacted coherent details of structures.
I offer three examples of such specifically EM advisories:
1) the uses by practitioners/ analysts of an "etcetera clause"; 2)
their uses of the interpretive gloss described by Mannheim as the documentary
method of interpretation; and 3) their uses of the properties of indexical
expressions.
1) It was
news that and just how an "etcetera
clause" can be used to provide according to local occasion, for
completeness and generalizability in a collection of rules. It can be used as
well to provide for other properties of rules—e.g., folio wability,
sufficiency, ideality of meaning, factual adequacy, universality, necessity,
and any of the rest.
2) Another
advisory is the documentary method of interpretation. The reader need only
recall the vexed jobs of reading and writing careful, empirically adequate
descriptions of work. The documentary method of interpretation is a convenient
gloss for the work of local, retrospective-prospective, pro actively evolving
ordered phenomenal details of seriality, sequence, repetition, comparison,
generality, and other structures. The gloss is convenient and somehow
convincing. It is also very powerful
in its coverage—too powerful. It gets everything in
the world for practitioners/analysts.
Its shortcomings are notorious:
In any actual case it is undiscriminating and just in any actual case it is
absurdly wrong.
3) From the
beginning of EM studies, the well-known properties of indexical expressions
have offered and continue to offer less heroic possibilities. The properties of
indexical expressions are witnessable only locally and endogenously. This is
known to one and all. Therein they are known and are available to one
and all in
that they consist
of practitioners' vulgarly competent skills. The properties are
ubiquitous. They are essentially unavoidable and without remedy or alternative.
They are also specifically ordinary and uninteresting, and in both of these
respects, in assuring as achieved phenomena coherent sense, reference, and
correspondence to objects, they do so achievedly in uniquely adequate details.
These are uniquely adequate details of structures. By that is meant that these
phenomena exhibit their locally staffed production as the commonplace work in
details of populations.
These properties mark their observability as phenomena sine
qua nan in EM studies of work. Their existence is demonstrable—their existence
is both instructably observable and instructably reproducible—in all studies of
work. Their adequate observability is staff-specific, worksite-specific,
discipline-specific.
These properties of indexical expressions are unique to
incarnate investigations of immortal, ordinary society. They are not properly
used as cognitive functions. They are improperly used as transcenden tali zed
intentional ides of analytic consciousness. The phenomena that the devices are
used to elucidate cannot be found or recovered if the devices are interpreted
psychologically or if the ethnographic descriptions are explicated as psychologized
activities. And, in any case where they are administered as predescribed codes,
the result can be lucid, perfectly clear analytic ethnographic description, and
the description will have missed the subject matter, its probity, and the point
of the description, with no accompanying sign that they are misunderstood.
The lessons are clear: In order to lose the phenomena that
the devices describe, give them over to the intentionalities of consciousness.
And in order to assure their loss in any actual case, do so with the methods of
generic representational theorizing.
In deliberately careful* descriptions of their work, EM
practitioners/analysts provided for the procedural presence of indexical
expressions with respect to persons, biographies, identities, settings,
equipment, costumes, gestures, architecture, and language, vernacular and
technical, in unavoidable relevancies to the parties. By attention to these,
practitioners/analysts in careful* descriptive exposition make instructably
observable work's uniquely coherent definiteness of details; their clarity,
consistency, coherence, and the rest
18
of work's observable properties of logic, meaning, reason,
and method. Their studies of work describe, specify, make instructably
observable, satisfy, and are exhibits of the unique adequacy requirement of
methods; the uniquely adequate competence of analysts/ practitioners who can be
taken seriously by local companies and by "our shops" of
practitioners whose work the analysts describe; and the observable in-course,
ongoing carrying out of descriptions in empirical, instructably observable
details of structures while exercising eth no methodological indifference to
policies, methods, and the corpus status of formal analytic investigations. All
this while making no use of the privileges of transcendental analysis and the
universal observer, and without bowdlerizing issues of structure, while at
every point satisfying the demands of empirical adequacy for claims of corpus.
3.1 The Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action
The many achievements by the worldwide social science
movement in the uses of formal analytic technology are pointless to dispute.
Among these achievements, FA technology's premier achievement is the corpus
status of its bibliographies of studies. From the outset of EM investigations,
the corpus status of FA's bibliographies has provided ethnomethodological
investigations with themes of instructions and instructed actions in topics
galore for respecifications as distinctively achieved phenomena of order* in
and as the great recurrencies of immortal, ordinary society without
sacrificing, downgrading, bowdlerizing, avoiding, or losing ordinary society's
endogenous, naturally accountable achievements of structure, or changing the
subject, and without lip-synching the natural sciences.
EM does not deny FA's achievements. Without denying FA's
achievements, the investigations of the EM catalog of radical phenomena of
order* [repeatedly] pose the empirical question: "What more is there to
instructions and instructed actions than FA does, did, ever did, or can
provide?"
Distinctive investigations in the EM catalog of achieved
radical phenomena of order* bear particularly and uniquely on instructions and
instructed actions. Cases of instructed actions from the EM catalog have been
described in games-with-rules; in a game with rules, the
completeness of its collection of basic rules; in any case
of rule-governed actions, the completeness of a collection of rules; in the
Mooersian catalog; in formatting in queues; in the local, occasioned,
endogenously achieved properties of logic, reason, method, and structure of
occasion maps; in EM pairs; in Lebenswelt pairs; and in the praxeological
validity of instructed actions. In the EM catalog these are propaedeutic cases
with which to emphasize, with studies of instructed actions, the enormously
prevalent and commonplace skill of praxeologizing descriptive accounts.
3.2 Praxeologizing Descriptive Accounts
In endlessly many disciplines, as local occasion demands,
practitioners are required to read descriptive accounts alternately as
instructions. They do so occupation ally, as a skilled matter of course, as
vulgarly competent, specifically ordinary, and unremarkable worksite-specific
practices. These are chained bodily and chiasmically to places, spaces,
architectures, equipment, instruments, and timing. Within a discipline,
practitioners require such competence of each other, not exclusively but
centrally just in any actual case, and then unavoidably and without remedy,
passing, evasion, or postponement. When occasion calls for a division of work,
practitioners can be found to concert their efforts to assure a praxeological
reading its recurrent, smooth, uninterrupted achievement by the culturally and
organizationally local staff of its production.
The EM catalog examines, as astronomically, massively
prevalent work, various ways in which an account that is readably
descriptive—say diagrammatically, or as freeway signing, or as wall
announcements, or in the prose of declarative sentences—can be read
alternatively so that the reading provides for a phenomenon in two constituent
segments of a pair: 1) the-first-segment-of-a-pair, which consists of a
collection of instructions; and 2) the work, just in any actual case of
following which somehow turns the first segment into a description of the
pair?2
32 I emphasize of the
pair. This ts in contrast to a common and even hackneyed use that would read
this passage like this: Following instructions somehow turns them — i.e., the
disengaged and disengageable instruc-
19
Call. 2) the-second-segment-of-a-pair. Call the pair an
instructed action, and call the work of reading a descriptive account, as
related constituents of an instructed action "praxeologizing descriptive
accounts."
For both technologies of social analysis — for the
administered policies, methods, and corpus of formal analysis (FA) and for
those of ethnomethodology (EM)—somehow is key. Both FA and EM are preoccupied
with their technical jobs and as their technical jobs of empirically specifying
praxeologizing's work. Both seek to replace somehow with an instructably
observable just how. Each does so with distinctive policies and methods of
analysis in distinctive analytic formats.
Characteristically, FA does the specifying job by designing
and administering generically theorized formats. Instructions < > and
instructions-in-use [ ] are described in generically represented relations of
correspondence. The analysis furnishes empirical descriptions of < >, and
[ ], in one or another of their relations. With these, the pair's actual
adequate correspondence is made decidable in any actual empirical case.
EM does the specifying job differently. In EM's early
interests, < > and [ ] in technically achieved relations were described
as achievements of "interpretive work1' such as "etcetera" and
the documentary method of interpretation in ordinary fact finding. Later
studies examined locally produced, endogenously achieved, naturally accountable
coherent haecceities that constitute as coherent instructed actions the
phenomenal fields of ordinary human "jobs." These studies examined
the two segments of docile instructions and their implementation when in vivo
they are distinguished and with the distinction they are provided for in vivo
in formal analytically and other classically specified, remedially sought
relations of adequate description, adequate facticity, adequate followability,
adequate completeness of instructions, and so on. Since 1972 EM studies of work
in the professions and sciences have added to these previous EM focusings that
instructions < > and instructions-in-use [ ] are related as EM
asymmetrical alternates or EM pairs, as Lebenswelt Pairs, and as the
praxeological validity of instructed actions.
It is with these later interests and with these
tions —into
a description of
following them. See Livingston (1986)
later analytic formats that topics and themes of instructed
actions are collected and come to focus in EM studies res pec ify ing the
natural sciences as discovering sciences of practical action.
Conditions of adequacy in EM investigations are used in each
of these to respecify FA's formats, < > and [ ], and their relations. By
"adequacy conditions" is meant that EM investigations, in each of the
groups, ask "What did we do? What did we learn?": <i) What did we
learn that is other than what FA does, did, ever did, or can provide? (ii) What
did we learn that FA recognizes as massively and unavoidably prevalent and
available to FA in worksite-specific details?
(iii) What did we learn that FA depends upon the existence
of for FA's worksite-specific achievements, for FA's pride of profession and
technical stock in trade of instructably observable adequate professions of
worldliness and reality, and for the instructably observable corpus status of
its bibliographies?
(iv) What did we learn that FA uses and recognizes EM
everywhere in and as its in vivo work site-specific practices?
These are practices that FA practitioners just in any actual
case know and recognize are unavoidable, without remedy, and without
alternatives. The practices are indispensable to practitioners, and
practitioners demand them. Just in any actual case the practices identify FA
practitioners' work, they are known to FA's practitioners, and are recognized
by them to be that. In all these respects the practices are specifically
uninteresting to practitioners and are ignored. Known to practitioners and
recognized by them in all these respects, the practices are known to and
recognized by them categorically.
And, FA practitioners, being deeply careful in endless
enterprises that for FA's various disciplinary reasons must make the adequacies
of their achieved professions of worldliness and reality instructably
observable in generically theorized structures of practical action, therein do
not know what to do with these practices.
EM catalog investigations respecify FA's analytic formats.
Each of the different groups of studies does so distinctively with its
particular investigations. In each group of studies the practices that are
specified EM-wise are known to and recognized by FA practitioners; their
existence is demanded by
20
them and depended upon; their existence is specified and
made instructably observable in, about, as and in established languages, as of
worksite-specific competent practices of shopwork and shoptalk; for FA's
practitioners they are unavoidable, without remedy, without alternatives; they
identify FA competent accounting practices in worksite-specific witnessable
detail. And in work site-specific detail they are specifically uninteresting
and ignored.
EM asks: What in the world is so obstinately and relevantly
omnipresent? What in the world is so unanimously known and recognized by FA
practitioners? Where in the world is it found? And how?
The issue is this: In the entirety of FA's corpus,
"What More11 is nowhere specified or specifiable. Nor can "What
More" to instructions and instructed action be found with FA's methods.
Thenjiut what in the world is being looked for? Just what is to be found? Just
where? Just how?
The investigations in the EM catalog offer selected answers
to these questions. The answers cover selected perspicuous settings from the EM
catalog. What did we do? What did we learn? What can we do? And what can we learn?
EM investigations, along with their accompanying EM policies and methods,
compose a catalog of tutorial problems. Their epistemological and ontological
status is that of a catalog of tutorial problems. These are grounds in EM
investigations for replies to these queries.
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Directions.
Bums, Stacy. 1995, "Practicing Law: A Study of
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GarfinkeL, Harold. 1988. "Evidence for Locally
Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order*,
Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. in and As of the
Essential Haecceity of Immortal, Ordinary Society," Sociological Theory
88, V.6, No.l, pp. 103-109. _. 1994. "Seven Cases with Which to Specify
How
Phenomenal Fields of Ordinary Activities Are Lost".
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Garfinkel, Harold and D. Lawrence Weider, "Two
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Robert M. Seiler. Newbury Park CA: Sage.
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and Fritz Simmel. 1944. "An Experimental Study of Apparent
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Rasmussen, Nicholas. 1994. "Through Another Looking
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Harold Garfinkel
is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Department of Soeiology at UCLA. His
research interest is with the problem of social, order.
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