Define in detail ethnomethodology. Provide real world examples of how you could apply an ethnomethodological analysis to a social situation. Compare and contrast ethnomethodology and phenomenology. For extra credit, explain the connection between Garfinkel’s focus on “accounting practices” and his early education/time spent with Talcott Parsons at Harvard.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Ethnomethodology literally means the study of the methods people use to accomplish their everyday lives. The basic premise of ethnomethodology is that “people do what they do, right there and then, to be reasonable and effective and they do so for pervasively practical reasons and under unavoidably local conditions of knowledge, action and material resources” (Boden 1990:189). Like phenomenology, ethnomethodology is concerned with how individuals make sense of their everyday circumstances. Both emphasize that “we accept as unquestionable the world of facts which surrounds us” (Schutz 1970:58; emphasis added), and both pay attention to the methods or procedures that individuals use to interpretively produce the recognizable, intelligible forms of action that, paradoxically, they treat as “facts.” In short, both are intrigued by the “suspension of doubt” that sustains our everyday world. Phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists analyze the taken-for-granted everyday world that is the basis for all human conduct. Phenomenologists seek to explain how people actively produce and sustain meaning. Ethnomethodologists focus less on meaning and subjectivity and more on the actual methods people use to accomplish their everyday lives. In contrast to phenomenology, which as indicated above has close ties to psychology and philosophy, ethnomethodology has close ties to linguistics and mainstream sociology. Ethnomethodologists are more interested in how actors assure each other that meaning is shared than the actual meaning structures themselves.