Ethnomethodology

views updated

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is an approach to the study of everyday life with a particular emphasis on the construction of cultural meanings amongst minority groups. The term incorporates the prefix ethno- to refer to cultural context, including language and jargon, myths, symbols, and codes of behavior, and the word methodology, which refers to the means, rationale, and philosophical assumptions involved in the approach to investigating such phenomena.

Developed by Harold Garfinkel in 1967, ethnomethodology was initially dismissed by prominent social theorists of the time, such as Alvin W. Gouldner (1920–1981), who described Garfinkel’s work as “mere Californian sociology” (cited in Garfinkel 2002, p. 3). In spite of this early disinterest, ethnomethodology continues to influence empirical social science research in a diverse range of fields, most notably in the areas of education, health, gender, media, and criminal justice.

Specifically, ethnomethodology investigates the functioning of common sense within cultural contexts, stressing the active, reasoned, and informed character of human social behavior. Put simply, ethnomethodology is the study of how individuals maintain a sense of reality in a given social situation through the means of social interaction with other individuals. That is, a conversation is a social process of interaction that has certain requirements in order for individual participants to identify it as a conversation and keep it going as such. For example, people will look at one another, nod, murmur, take turns in speaking, and in asking and responding to questions. If these requirements are not met, or are employed in ways that deviate from the expectations attached to the perceived reality of a conversation, then the interaction breaks down to be replaced by an alternative social process.

Garfinkel’s work was thus a development of the phenomenological insights of Alfred Schutz (1899–1959), who had argued that commonsense knowledge is patchy and incomplete and that shared understandings between individuals are contingent achievements based upon this revisable and approximate knowledge. Garfinkel conducted a series of quasi-experimental procedures that exposed the tacit assumptions and presuppositions that underpin shared understandings during social interaction, which he argued had to be understood as an “event-in-context.” That is, linkages are assembled between a process of social interaction and the cultural context within which the interaction takes place.

Crucially, therefore, changes in the understanding of an event’s context will evoke some shift or elaboration in an individual’s ability to grasp the meaning and reality of the interaction itself. Put simply, to make sense of social interaction between individuals it is necessary to grasp the cultural context in which it takes place. Individuals frequently design their interaction so as to make use of localized contexts in order to elaborate and particularize the sense of their talk and actions. A useful example here is how the cultural products of the poor and minority groups, such as rap lyrics, can be misunderstood if the cultural context in which they are produced is not fully grasped.

Ethnomethodology remains a highly influential approach in the international social sciences, continuing to open up innovative areas of analysis in sociology, social psychology, and linguistics in particular.

SEE ALSO Communication; Conversational Analysis; Cultural Relativism; Culture; Culture of Poverty; Ethnicity; Minorities; Nonverbal Communication