Customer Reviews

Studies in Ethnomethodology (Social and Political Theory)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I first encountered Garfinkle's classic work almost 30 years ago in an introductory sociology of deviance course. We students loved it, because it was at once substantive and quirky, scholarly and entertaining.

Its focus is the social construction of reality -- a central contruct in sociological theory and research. Briefly, Garfinkle argues that the shared reality that makes possible social intercourse is not fixed, but rather arises as a consenus of participants in social groups. So, for example, manners, rules of conversation, or even definitions of insanity can be shown to be arbitrary and mutable while at the same time indespensible for comprehensible interactions between and among people.

This little book is a must read for any student of social or organizational behavior or anyone curious about the social world. Rarely will you meet a practicing sociologist who does not get a twinkle in his or her eye when someone mentions Studies in Ethnomethodology. It is that good. And that much fun.

This is Garfinkel's only book (setting aside a compilation he published of some of his students' work). The book and the ethnomethodological take on social life can be hard to grasp, especially for those trained in mainline sociology. A word of advice: If you are accustomed to skipping prefaces, don't skip Garfinkel's. In wild prose that pays dividends when read aloud, the preface sets up the whole book and ties Garfinkel's project to classical sociology.

This book isn't for everyone, and most of the people who read it, generally don't get it. That's the nature of the beast. Essentially, Garfinkel has re-asked the Durkhiemian question -- How is Social Order Possible? His query is, How is the Sense of Social Order Possible?

So the methodology is not a research method, but rather it's the members methods for constructing reality. So the sense of social reality is constructed using documentary methods. This book shows how that's accomplished.

I read this book when it was first published in 1967. I could not understand a word but as it began to sink in I befuddled my Sociology professors with the ideas.
This was the first real look at how social members make the "social" effect seem real for one another. Ethnomethodology makes none of the assumptions that brought down the Sociology of old. How can the discipline talk of social problems before it knows what the social is?
The Computer scientists have now gotten hold of the ideas in the book and are running hard with it in developing computer systems in terms of human computer interaction (HCI). In my opinion this book and its author started Sociology and its tasks anew. Its unforseen consequence will, in my opinion, lead to a revolution in embedded systems. See the book by Paul Dourish for more on this.
A five star for sure!

I came across this little gem several years ago, among bibliographies I looked at while trying to get a handle on some emotional travails. Some of the chapters here were published separately as papers in journals. The tenor of the book can be summed up in one of the chapter titles: Good Reasons for Bad Records. Now, that'll never be a feature on 60 Minutes.

Harold Garfinkel was among a number of professionals in the 1950s that were examining the dynamics of human interaction, including the human interaction involved in examining those dynamics. How do professionals alter the dynamic they're attempting to examine? This is not a question that's asked by medical or social researchers these days.

American dry, lifeless scholarship is content to impose a tired theory on activity & show how folks just aren't following the party line. Then they're called marginalized or a lot worse. Garfinkel, Laing, Goffman, even Sartre wondered: why this person with this theory on these folks at this time?

"Ethnomethodology" is the methods of just plain folks. Rather than squeezing the work of groups into a theory, Garfinkel created a theory for the work of groups. The approach & the language are highly original.

[Note: this is the review that stated Mr. Garfinkel was dead. Sorry. This was based on a misunderstanding of something I'd read.]

There is merit to Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology, but the author seems determined to prevent the reader from discerning the book's value. The usual characterization of Garfinkel's writing style is "deeply embedded," with ever-longer run-on sentences ever-more deeply embedded in each other.

Nevertheless, Garfinkel's objective is interesting and useful. He wants to find out how we make the social world understandable for ourselves and each other. The answer, he affirms, is through use of interpretive procedures.

So, what is an interpretive procedure? Here is a homespun example. Suppose a student is 15 minutes late for class. His instructor asks why the student is late, and the student responds by saying "there was a three-car wreck on I-64." In and of itself, this is not a literal answer to the instructor's question. But the instructor can fill in the blanks -- the student was caught up in a traffic jam -- and the student knows that the instructor can fill in the blanks. That knowledge and its use constitutes an interpretive procedure.

In general, the notion of an interpretive procedure is founded on taken-for-granted understandings. In the example, the student takes for granted that the instructor knows that a wreck on I-64 will create a traffic jam, that the student might get caught up in it, and that this might cause the student to be late.

In a presentation at an annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, an ethnomethodologist purported to show how silence is used to invoke the teacher's authority in an elementary school classroom. On film a teacher is shown telling her students to take their seats. One student does not immediately comply. The teacher emphatically says the student's name and then is silent. The student mumbles inaudibly and takes his seat. The point is that the student knew, without being told again, that having his name called out followed by silence meant "take your seat."

Garfinkel views interpretive procedures based on taken-for-granted knowledge as universal. Construed sufficiently abstractly, they apply everywhere. He illustrates the consequences of departures from usual tacitly understood social behavior through the use of "breaching experiments." If a participant in an everyday social setting responds as if he were ignorant of usual taken-for-granted knowledge, a more or less chaotic social situation follows.

Based on my very limited knowledge of the development of ethnomethodology over the years, it is now subsumed by conversational analysis. Whatever it has become, I think that the interpretive procedures themselves are less interesting than the taken-for-granted knowledge on which they are based. How do we acquire it? Maybe this is a problem for someone who does the sociology of knowledge.

I just read first 30 pages of the book, and I must say, Professor Garfinkel is a terrible writer. His ideas may be grand, but he sure can't articulate it. Perhaps he is assuming too much about the readers' familiarity with his earlier works. In any case, I can't fathom why any writer wouldn't take a page or two to explain some of the "jargons" -- in order that even a casual reader can easily understand what the book is about. Some of the sentences seem just wrong--grammatically. Having just finished Erving Goffman's book and Peter Berger's book, I have greater appreciation for the importance of "good" writing. (Both Goffman and Berger are excellent writers.) As I said, I only read 30 pages and his ideas seem interesting, but I think he could've benefited from using a ghost writer.

[ok, so I've finished the book, and I have to say that I am really baffled by Professor Garnfikel. Why? Because some of the chapters in the book are written absolutely BRILLIANTLY. The chapter on Agnes is the highlight of the book. Do not skip this chapter. In fact, I would recommend everyone to read this chapter first. It is written with lucidity, also with some narrative subtlety (not sure if it was intended) of a suspense novel. The appendix on the Agnes chapter will shock many readers. The chapter on Clinic Record Keeping is equally well written. So apparently, Professor Garnfinkel "can" write - which leads me to wonder why he cannot do it consistently.]

Less wowed by this work than everyone else...

just a quick note that garfinkel is not quite dead. Not
teaching anymore, but still alive.