Building a New Astronomy Without a Telescope: Why Critical Interactionism Cannot Ignore EM/CA

                         Building a New Astronomy Without a Telescope: 

Why Critical Interactionism Cannot Ignore EM/CA

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen’s Critical and Cultural Interactionism (2019) assembles some of the most distinguished voices in symbolic interactionism—Greg Smith, Michael Schwalbe, Adele Clarke, Sherryl Kleinman, among others—to chart a revitalized critical agenda. The collection demonstrates the enduring vitality of symbolic interactionist (SI) thought, its capacity for cultural critique, and its adaptability to new social conditions. Yet its silence on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA) is striking. To attempt a new critical sociology of interaction while ignoring EM/CA is like trying to build a new astronomy while refusing to look through a telescope. The tools are there, and they have opened up an entirely new field of vision. To refuse them is to commit to voluntary blindness.

From Chicago to EM: Garfinkel Beyond Becker

Harold Garfinkel’s intellectual trajectory was never detached from symbolic interactionism or the Chicago School. On the contrary, he designed his program in dialogue with their achievements and limitations. Howard Becker’s classic study of jazz musicians (Outsiders, 1963) gives a rich account of their careers, reputations, and cultural distance from “squares.” But what it does not show is how jazz is actually played—how musicians, in real time, make music together. The work of improvisation is left in the shadows.

By contrast, David Sudnow’s Ways of the Hand (1978) offers a radically different ethnographic strategy. Sudnow apprenticed himself at the keyboard, documenting finger-by-finger how improvisation is materially realized: how a left-hand chord “anchors” a run, how a right-hand phrase is tested, repeated, abandoned, and re-shaped in the moment. He describes the lived temporality of jazz—the micro-choices of fingering, the embodied knowledge of scales, the reflexive monitoring of audience and co-musicians. What Becker represented as a cultural world, Sudnow revealed as a practical accomplishment. His account shows that to “know jazz” is not only to belong to a community of musicians but to inhabit a body trained in tactile, temporal coordination.

Where Becker illuminated the social world around the work, Sudnow revealed the work itself. Garfinkel’s “studies of work” were designed in precisely this vein: to shift attention from occupational storytelling to the endogenous practices through which activities are competently accomplished.

From Goffman to CA: Extending the Grammar of the Interaction Order

The same dialectic is visible in the relation between Erving Goffman and Harvey Sacks. Goffman’s enduring contribution was to delineate the interaction order—a moral and structural domain on par with institutions such as family or religion (Goffman 1955, 1964, 1983). His concept of “face” captured the ritual stakes of everyday encounters. But Goffman’s analyses remained impressionistic, drawn from etiquette manuals, field notes, and vignettes.

Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson extended Goffman’s insights into a new methodological program. Using recordings and transcripts, they uncovered the sequential machinery of talk: turn-taking, repair, preference, categorization. What Goffman gestured toward as ritual, EM/CA demonstrated as an organized, replicable phenomenon. John Heritage and Steven Clayman (2022) have shown how “face” can be re-specified in terms of the preference structures of interaction: delays, mitigations, pre-sequences, accounts, and appreciations are not psychological residues but the observable mechanics through which solidarity and deference are maintained. Goffman named the ritual; EM/CA revealed its syntax.

The Technological Revolution: Audio, Video, Transcript

This transformation was not simply conceptual but technological. The tape recorder, as Sacks (1992) emphasized, enabled repeated scrutiny and collaborative analysis, making “getting it descriptively right” possible in ways previously unimaginable. The shift to video, as demonstrated in the work of Charles Goodwin (1981, 1994), Marjorie Goodwin (1990), and Lorenza Mondada (2014, 2018), extended this revolution to embodied conduct—gesture, gaze, posture, the material environment. Video made it possible to see how interaction is coordinated moment by moment across multiple modalities. To ignore these tools is to insist on mapping the heavens while keeping the telescope capped.

Integration, Not Rivalry

It is crucial to see that EM/CA did not emerge as a rejection of symbolic interactionism but as an advancement beyond it. Garfinkel was intensely aware of Becker, Hughes, and the Chicago tradition of work studies. Sacks was trained by Goffman. Both were deeply attuned to the insights and the blind spots of SI. EM/CA presses further into precisely those questions—identity, order, accountability—that SI opened but could not resolve with its existing methods.

Conversely, EM/CA without SI risks a different blindness: a meticulous grasp of mechanics without an appreciation of their cultural, historical, and political stakes. The challenge is not to choose one over the other but to bring them into productive tension.

Conclusion: The Cost of Voluntary Blindness

The omission of EM/CA from Jacobsen’s volume signals more than oversight—it exemplifies a disciplinary silo that impoverishes both traditions. Symbolic interactionism without EM/CA risks impressionism; EM/CA without SI risks political thinness. A genuinely critical interactionism must integrate both: the telescope of EM/CA and the interpretive imagination of SI.

To build a sociology of interaction today without EM/CA is to refuse the telescope at the very moment our vision could be clearest. The lesson is not replacement but integration. We have the instruments. We can see the sequential mechanics of talk, the embodied coordination of action, the lived work of interaction. To ignore them is to choose blindness—and to settle for maps of the stars drawn by naked eye, long after the telescope has shown us their deeper order.

⸻

References

Becker, Howard. 1963. Outsiders. New York: Free Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1955. “On Face-Work.” Psychiatry 18(3):213–231.

Goffman, Erving. 1964. “The Neglected Situation.” American Anthropologist 66(6):133–136.

Goffman, Erving. 1983. “The Interaction Order.” American Sociological Review 48(1):1–17.

Heritage, John & Steven Clayman. 2022. “Goffman, Face, and the Interaction Order.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology.

Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (ed.). 2019. Critical and Cultural Interactionism. London: Routledge.

Mondada, Lorenza. 2014. Interactional Space and the Study of Embodied Talk. Cambridge: CUP.

Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sudnow, David. 1978. Ways of the Hand. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

⸻