Abstract
Ethnomethodology, on the one hand, acknowledges the ambiguous, indeterminate, highly dynamic nature of social reality in which all of us live, on the other hand, it believes in the organized nature of social situations and the patternedness of social members’ methods. In a word, as is summarized by Atkinson and Drew (1979, p. 20), in order to provide an adequate theory of social order, ethnomethodology aims to be ‘neither so inflexible or rigid that it lacks any sensitivity to the potentially infinite range of contextual variation in the world, nor so inflexible or loose that nothing at all is held to be general across different contexts.’ In this chapter, I will first introduce some important conceptualizations in ethnomethodology such as the role of social members, intelligible meaning-making, indexicality and reflexivity, which are central to Garfinkel’s solution of the problem of social order. In particular, we will see how his linguistically charged accounts provide fruitful possibilities to conceptualize the languaging social actor beyond the system view as outlined in Part I. Following that, I will analyze the methodological difficulties inherent in Garfinkel’s project.
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Notes
- 1.
One may argue that Garfinkel’s emphasis on actors’ acts instead of their psychological dimensions verges on behaviorism. Yet, it can be seen that Garfinkel’s seemingly behaviorist tendencies are actually serving a theoretical purpose, which is, the witnessable acts demonstrated by social actors are the means through which intelligible social meanings can be made and in consequence order production by social members could be possible. This is distinctly different from behaviorism, which aims at a naturalistic study of observable behaviors in the manner of natural sciences. For Garfinkel, the emphasis on observable behavior serves to highlight social members’ activities of producing intelligible sequences of acts while behaviorism’s project is to qualify itself as a positive science through studying objectively observable human behaviors.
- 2.
Lynch (2012, p. 232) points out that Garfinkel in his critique of the ‘cultural dopes’ does not aim at providing an alternative model of man which is ‘active, skilful, and reflexive’ social agent as some critics claim. Instead, Garfinkel’s concern is not about any cognitive, emotional, or other properties of a generalized person; the crucial issue for him is the practices of social actors, namely, ‘actions produced in (and productive of) contexts; organized sequences of interaction; embodied work with materials at hand; and the “working out” of sociological theories’.
- 3.
- 4.
The same spirit is captured in the following quotation: ‘I shall exercise a theorist’s preference and say that meaningful events are entirely and exclusively events in a person’s behavioural environment, […] Hence there is no reason to look under the skull since nothing of interest is to be found there but brains. The ‘skin’ of the person will be left intact. Instead questions will be confirmed to the operations that can be performed upon events that are “scenic” to the person’. (Garfinkel, 1963, p. 190).
- 5.
- 6.
Refer to McHugh, Raffel, Foss, and Blum (1974) for critique on the loss of this radical reflexivity in some ethnomethodological works.
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Zhou, F. (2020). Garfinkel: Members’ Methods of Producing Order. In: Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_10
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