I recall in particular here two sessions of the British Sociological Association, I think in the mid-1970s. The first was at Surrey University and involved a group of ethnomethodologists from Goldsmiths College in London who had pre-circulated the text of a book on ethnomethodology they’d just written and, when presenting to an audience of 100+, refused to discuss its contents. The audience had presumably been expected to read it beforehand. Senior figures like Goldthorpe and Rex, genuinely curious, were unimpressed. Maybe it was a ‘breaching experiment’? The second occasion involved keynote addresses by Giddens and Turner on ‘Whither Sociology?’ While the former attempted to plot the likely future of the discipline, the latter asked why we were asking this particular question at this particular time (to a mixture of confusion and groans). What binds these two recollections is speakers’ interest in the – then – novel studies of Harold Garfinkel (see his Studies in Ethnomethodology, published in 1967), the subject of this brief introductory blog.
Ethnomethodology, Ritzer tells us in his Contemporary Sociological Theory and its Classical Roots, ‘is the study of ordinary members of society in the everyday situations in which they find themselves and the ways in which they use commonsense knowledge, procedures, and considerations to gain an understanding of, navigate in, and act on those situations.’ Following in the footsteps of Schutz, ethnomethodologists reject the notion that members of society are ‘judgemental dopes’, but they acknowledge that action is typically routine and relatively unreflexive. Ethnomethodologists, it might be said, are interested in the ‘artful practices’ that produce people’s sense of macro- and micro-structures. They therefore offered, and offer, a novel way of tackling objective structures.
Garfinkel focused on ‘accounts’, or the ways in which people describe, come to terms with and explain specific situations. It is through the process of ‘accounting’ – offering accounts – that people make sense of the world. Ethnomethodologists accordingly concentrate on and analyse conversations (qua ‘accounting practices’).
Sociologists, like everyone else, offer accounts (hence Turner’s theme recalled earlier). In this sense it is part of the ethnomethodological project to study, and demystify, sociologists’ accounts.
Accounts can be seen as reflexive in the sense that ‘they enter into the constitution of the state of affairs they make observable and are intended to deal with’ (Ritzer). It follows that sociologists, in studying and reporting on social life, are changing what they are studying (ie people’s behaviour changes as a result of ‘being studied’).
The notion of ‘breaching experiments’ was mentioned at the outset. This refers to violating of the social order in order to shed light on how people construct social reality. The point of the breaching experiment, then, is to disrupt normal procedures so that the process by which the everyday world is constructed or reconstructed can be observed and studies.
In one of Garfinkel’s more notorious breaching experiments he asked his students to act like lodgers for between 15 minutes and an hour each day in their own homes. This involved them being especially polite, cautious, impersonal, formal and so on. Unsurprisingly, family members were confused, shocked and outraged by this behaviour. The students reported (gave accounts of) family reactions (they were seen as rude, nasty, impolite etc). These reactions indicated to Garfinkel (and presumably his students) just how important it is that people act in accordance with the commonsense assumptions about how they are supposed to behave. Garfinkel was particularly interested in how family members responded. They typically demanded – and looked for – explanations; for example, were the students ill, ‘not themselves’, or just rebelling? Sometimes deep emotions were aroused and students were told to ‘shape up’ or move out. When the study was explained to family members harmony was generally, but not always, restored. Doubts about the ethics of this project have often been expressed!
Incidentally, my single published paper on the pandemic – so far at least – draws loosely on this notion to suggest that COVID might usefully be seen as a naturally occurring breaching experiment (see Health Sociology Review 2020 vol 29 140-148).
Garfinkel’s comments on ‘accomplishing gender’ remain salient, perhaps the more so in the context of current ‘post-binary’ analyses. While sexiness, Garfinkel argues, is often seen as ‘accomplished’, gender rarely is. He considers the case of Agnes, who appeared to have all the characteristics of a woman, but was she? What Garfinkel learned was that Agnes was at the time trying to convince physicians that she needed surgery to remove her male genitalia and create a vagina. Agnes, in other words, was defined as a male at birth, and was ‘by all accounts’ a boy until she was 16, at which point she ran away from home and began to dress, act, and pass as a girl. Over time she learned the ‘accepted practices’ and in consequence ‘came to be defined, and to define herself, as a woman’ (Ritzer). Only in learning these practices, Garfinkel maintained, do we come to be – in a sociological sense – a man or woman. Thus (even) a category like gender, often considered an ascribed status, might be viewed as an accomplishment of a set of situated practices. It is easy to see this analysis as prescient. Whatever one’s reading of current – often vigorous, sometimes intemperate and even binary (ie you are either with us or against us) – debates about post-binary perspectives on sex and gender, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological excursions have a significant input and bearing.
So the core message from Garfinkel’s endeavours is that it is the sociological task to reveal social order as a dynamic, ‘indexical’ (indexical = the meaning of words, gestures etc depend on context), practical accomplishment resting on the organized ‘artful’ ways that ordinary people engage in the practices of everyday life and reflexively render them accountable and meaningful. A bit of a mouthful, but an apt summation.
In the writings of some of Garfinkel’s successors it seems that only when there exists an accumulation of investigations of micro-phenomena, like the beginnings of telephone conversations, will it be possible to move on to macro-phenomena like class divisions and conflict. This has been much critiqued. What ethnomethodologists have undoubtedly achieved is a greater reflexivity on the part of sociologists around their own intrusion and impact on the social worlds they enter and study. Cicourel’s classic critique of conventional approaches to surveys is a prime example (see his Method and Measurement in Sociology).