Ethnomethodology and sociology:

an introduction

Stephen Linstead (Guest editor)

Abstract

Arising as a powerful challenge to programmatic views of sociology that sought

to determine stable laws underpinning social order, ethnomethodology set out an
alternative programme to reveal social order as a dynamic, contingent ‘ongoing
accomplishment’. This programme was neither micro nor macro, but was concerned
with different contexts of accountability in which both individuals and institutions
are given identity and reproduced. Recognising everyday life as an achievement,
collective sense making, and the central importance of talk as a social process,
ethnomethodology had an impact on all those arenas of sociology where ordinary
interaction is an element. This introduction to the special section discusses the
contributions of each of the papers – which cover mundane reasoning, social learn-
ing, the early acquisition of social competence, and the application of membership
categorization analysis to gender – in relation to the continuing relevance of
Garfinkel’s legacy to contemporary sociological theory and practice.

In 2002, some 35 years since the publication of his landmark book Studies
in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel published Ethnomethodology’s
Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Again a compilation of several
years’ work, Garfinkel made his case emphatically that ethnomethodology is
and always was fundamentally concerned with core issues of sociology –
including and perhaps above all that of social order. Although Garfinkel’s
critics had readily seen his debt to a tradition of phenomenology which ema-
nated from, inter alia, Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz (and in some
respects, via Schutz, Henri Bergson) they often rejected the legitimacy of
Garfinkel’s extensive debt to Emile Durkheim, and accused ethnomethodol-
ogy of indifference to problems of social order on a larger scale. Garfinkel
argues as early as the fourth line of the Preface to Studies that sociology has
tended to take a restricted view of Durkheim’s insistence that sociology’s task
is given to it by the concreteness of social facts (Garfinkel, 1967: vii). He
continues to note in Program that social facts have continued to be treated by
many sociologists as theoretical and conceptual – the Kantian social construc-
tions of professionals – rather than as concrete practical accomplishments by
those who participate in the social landscapes in which they arise (Garfinkel,
The Sociological Review, 54:3 (2006)
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Stephen Linstead

2002: 65). Ironically, although ethnomethodology arose as a powerful, and

indeed for many irresistible, challenge to those programmatic views of soci-
ology which saw it, as a social science in the image of the natural sciences, as
pursuing the determination of the stable laws that underpinned social order
(and perhaps the means for dealing with the odd exception in order to
explain occasional social change), it could be said itself to have a program
(Lemert, 2002: xi). That program was to reveal social order as dynamic, an
indexical, practical, contingent ‘ongoing accomplishment’ resting upon the
‘organized artful ways’ that ordinary people engaged in the practices of
everyday life, and reflexively rendered them accountable and meaningful
(Garfinkel, 1967: vii). As Rawls notes in her editor’s introduction, Garfinkel
has remained true to this vision – his concern is ‘to search for the foundations
of human intelligibility – reason and logic – in the details of collective prac-
tice’ (Rawls, 2002: 63). His work therefore is neither micro- nor macro-
sociology, and criticisms of it as individualistic are insupportable. Garfinkel
does not study either institutions or individuals, but contexts of accountabil-
ity, because this is where and how social institutions and individual members
are reproduced, holistically.
Garfinkel’s legacy to sociology has been enormous, as his students have
taken up and developed his ideas in a continuing dialogue which has seen what
was once dismissed as ‘California sociology’ take deep and lasting hold in
sociological communities in Boston, Manchester, the Netherlands, Australia,
Japan – indeed five continents are represented in the membership of the
International Institute for the Study of Ethnomethodology and Conversation
Analysis which holds biannual conferences and through its website links a host
of smaller localised associations of practitioners. Focusing on everyday life as
an achievement, on collective sense making, and on the central importance of
talk as a social process, ethnomethodology has since affected every area of
sociology where the study of ordinary people interacting has been recognised
as important. The recognition of the extraordinary nature of the ordinary,
which was Garfinkel’s especial insight, has also led to a focus on the ordinary
and routine nature of the extraordinary, especially in recent elite studies and
performance studies of politicians, gurus and media figures. Ethnomethodol-
ogy has been acknowledged to have had special relevance for health and
medical sociology, the sociology of education, the sociology of public admin-
istration, the sociology of the professions, gender studies, media studies, social
studies of science and technology, and the sociology of management, strategy-
making, organization and virtual organization. Ethnomethodology has also,
however, been an often unacknowledged influence on many writers and think-
ers who find it common to use such terms as ‘reflexivity’, ‘indexicality’ ‘situated
action’, ‘practice’, ‘common sense’ ‘stock of knowledge’ and ‘membershipping’
amongst others. Indeed, Lynch’s (2000) brilliant critique of the currently in
vogue practice of deploying the concept of reflexivity as a special and war-
ranting quality of new (social) science demonstrates how sharp and pertinent
Garfinkel’s insights remain.

400 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006

 Ethnomethodology and sociology: an Introduction

This special section features contributions that address the continuing rel-
evance of ethnomethodology to contemporary sociological theory and prac-
tice. It begins with an exemplary look at mundane reasoning, illustrating one of
Garfinkel’s key principles that the micro-study of interaction could illuminate
large and fundamental sociological issues. The story further unfolds with a
consideration of the relevance of and need for ethnomethodological con-
siderations of practices to be incorporated into new socially situated and
practice-based learning theory. A specific example of learning in practice –
that of a child acquiring social competence along with language – is then
developed in order to extend the insights of Garfinkel and Sacks’s discussion
of language, competence and social membership. Finally a reconsidered form
of application of membership categorization analysis in gender studies is
presented, and discussed in terms of its potential for developing feminist
gender research.
Eric Livingston begins this special section by developing the consideration
of ethnomethodology’s relation to the mundane in examining how it studies
skill and reasoning through mediated interaction in domains of mundane
expertise – with particular focus on the game of checkers, or draughts. Where
reasoning is generally considered to be a universal process that transcends
the empirical situations to which it is applied, the game of checkers suggests
something quite different: that reasoning is domain specific and that it belongs
peculiarly to the practices from within which reasoning arises. The forms that
reason takes are always a function of the context from which it emerges and
within which it is worked out. Through the close and illustrated examination of
material on checkers, Livingston demonstrates ethnomethodological research
to be a ‘tinker’s craft’. In doing so, he argues in a vein strongly echoing
Garfinkel, for the continuing vitality of small-scale ethnomethodological
studies for raising fundamental, foundational issues of social inquiry.
Steven Fox takes up the issue of the importance of existing ethnomethod-
ological understandings for new areas, or areas in which their potential con-
tribution has been neglected, by looking at the relationship between
ethnomethodology and the new socially situated learning theory through their
approach to practical action. Fox argues that the current interest in practice-
based theorising in the new social learning theory does not pay sufficient
attention to the existing ethnomethodological understanding of practical
action. Illustrating ethnomethodology’s approach and highlighting the con-
cepts of ‘inquiry’ and ‘work’, Fox draws upon examples from two phases in
Garfinkel’s work and discusses potential implications for the development of
the new practice-based social learning theory. One of the key differences is
that ethnomethodology recognises interpretive work, whether theoretical or
ordinary, as an ongoing practical accomplishment requiring effort, training and
time – in effect as a form of learning which is located in the work itself, rather
than in the mind. The practices of learning are almost always more interesting
than the theories used to explain them, and it is more instructive to regard
learning as a process that can be seen to be a temporal course of work in the

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Stephen Linstead

actual indexical detail of its practical actions, rather than as a process hidden
in the mind illuminated by and accessible only to the application of the
appropriate general theory.
Michael Forrester and David Reason return the consideration of learning
to one of the most fundamental of human learning settings: the child’s mastery
of language. Using conversation analysis they examine the importance of ideas
of competency and participation in these processes and use them to prompt a
reconsideration of the idea of social membership. The concepts of ‘member’
and ‘participant’ are central both to ethnomethodology and conversation
analysis, and Forrester and Reason consider, extend and clarify a number of
ideas originally outlined by Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) in discussing transcript
extracts from recorded everyday interactions between two parents and their
pre-school child. Membership, or what might constitute being a competent
member of a social situation, involves possessing a mastery of language and
being able to produce and recognise ‘glossing’ practices – where a complex
nexus of meaning is alluded to and left unexplicated. A ‘member’ is someone
who recognises that the actions that make conversations possible are reflex-
ively accountable practices. By looking at extracts where a child is ‘learning
how to talk’ they find evidence in support of the suggestions that membership
is indeed a dynamic and concerted accomplishment in context; adults often
treat children as ‘good-enough’ (though not fully competent) members; and
infants can attain membership status not only with reference to displaying a
mastery of language, but possibly by displaying a mastery of communication.
Whilst one of Garfinkel and Sacks’s insights was that in displaying mastery
of language speakers display membership of a social setting, Forrester and
Reason are able further to observe that mastery of language is itself a con-
certed accomplishment, precisely because speakers display membership by not
drawing attention to the fact that they are indeed already a competent
member.
Finally, Elizabeth Stokoe also explores the potential of conversation analy-
sis by considering the potential of membership categorization analysis as an
empirical tool for studying the social production of gender. Stokoe tracks the
history and development of ethnomethodological approaches to gender and
their practical translations, which have figured in its programme since its
early days and the seminal if controversial ‘Agnes’ chapter in Studies. Stokoe
argues that the ‘doing’ of gender in society is constituted in people’s situated
categorization practices, and that these practices can be fruitfully explored
using Sacks’ (1992) machinery for understanding how the social and moral
order is produced and maintained. Stokoe discusses in this new light previ-
ously disparate feminist membership categorization analytic (MCA) research
through some examples of analysis that illuminate the method-in-use and the
everyday gendering of social life. Social change, following Sacks, involves not
only the creation of new categories but also the achievement of shifts in
existing sets of categories and in the sets of rules under which such categories
are applied. Gender is an area of social life in which such categorizations are

402 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006

 Ethnomethodology and sociology: an Introduction

central – indeed it may be regarded itself as a categorization device or set of

devices. Feminists, in common with other minority groups, rely on the fact
that categories are the site where discourses are both locked into place and
where they might be unlocked and destabilised by new meanings. MCA
allows researchers to track the changes in categorization devices as well as
their deployment in the maintenance of customary relations. Recognising the
force of existing devices may therefore be the first prerequisite to changing
them, which opens the way to a feminist research that may be involved in
modifying the social practices that are the object of its study. Stokoe accord-
ingly argues for and considers the future shape of a feminist formulation of
membership categorization analysis.
The number of fields in which ethnomethodology is currently being applied
with, it must be said, greater or lesser precision, seems constantly to be increas-
ing. Ethnomethodology is once again making advances with regard to its
perceived institutional relevance for the study of organization and adminis-
tration, especially in the study of managerial processes such as decision-
making, negotiation, policy and strategy-making (see, for example Boden,
1994; Samra-Fredericks, 2004a, b). It is timely therefore to note more generally
in welcoming new participants to the ethnomethodological conversation that
there remains much to talk about: the range of current practices and applica-
tions of ethnomethodology; continuities, divergences, conflicts and critiques in
and around the ethnomethodological canon; theoretical developments includ-
ing reassessments of the theoretical and philosophical antecedents of eth-
nomethodology and its treatment of core concepts such as power; relations
between ethnomethodology and other branches of social science and the
potential for multidisciplinary and multiple method/paradigm study; and the
incorporation of continuing technical developments in fieldwork practice
allowing the close examination of communication in ordinary settings beyond
talk. The papers in this section do two things – first they open up new dimen-
sions of the issues they address for those already versed in ethnomethodology
and conversation analysis, and provide new insights for the field; second, they
reaffirm Garfinkel’s view that the rigorous non-positivistic micro-study of
natural social interaction can illuminate the most foundational sociological
issues. They do this in a way that hopefully will also open up the excitement
and relevance of ethnomethodology for those social inquirers not so familiar
with its ideas and practices, facilitating links and building bridges for future
work.

University of York

References

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Stephen Linstead

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404 © The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2006