define ethnomethodology

[jofish22]

I have been trying to write a good definition for ethnomethodology, a field of research founded by Harold Garfinkel, since most of them out there are horribly written and only make sense to people already in the field. Please let me know if this makes sense to you

Comments

[lucylane]

oooh melike. i've never heard the term before, so i'm a good guinea-pig :)
is there something in there about the social facts themselves being socially defined? i'd assume you're saying that the "breaking apart" of the social facts means figuring out where they came from and how they were defined, is that true? but if that's true, then it kind of *is* a method of studying people--it's a method of studying people making methods. or something.

wait, now i'm more confused. you said it's a study of the ways in which people make sense of the people they deal with (as compared to making sense of plants)--wouldn't that be ethnopsychology or something? ethnomethodolgy would be the study of the making sense part, not the biology/psychology (plant/person) part.

[jofish22]

yeah, this is where it gets tricky.

so the social facts being socially defined: one of the big things of sociology is that social facts are "real". so yes they're socially definied (how else could they be defined?!).

and yes, it is a way of studying people, but it is a way of studying how people make sense of other people.

i sort of skipped over that difference in the interests of brevity, but you're right. it's about the *methods* people come up with to make sense of other people rather than their direct approaches to making sense of other people. it's a tricky little distinction and i'm not quite sure what it means.

one of the big problems is that it's a reasonably badly named field. dammit.

but thank you for your feedback. useful.

[dr_tectonic]

I think this makes sense.

You tell me: so an ethnomethodological observation might be something like "members of the 'geek' tribe are fond of classifications and taxonomic schemes, and so tend to find great utility in systems like Meyers-Briggs temeprament classification as a way of understanding how people who think differently than they do approach the world"?

If it's the study of how people make sense of other people, why didn't he just call it "ethnoethnology" or "metaethnology"?

[jofish22]

Yes, that's pretty much it. Although part of ethnomethodology is all about being suspicious of existing systems of categorization, and recognizing that people use such systems to bring order to the world rather than reflecting an order that pre-exists in the world

[nehrlich]

When I read this yesterday, it reminded me of a quote from Dourish that I went looking for this morning. It turned out I was smoking crack and it was actually Lucy Suchman, end of section 4.3, p.58 in my edition.
"The interest of ethnomethodologists, in other words, is in how it is that the mutual intelligibility and objectivity of the social world is achieved. Ethnomethodology locates that achievement in our everyday situated actions, such that our common sense of the social world is not the precondition for our interaction, but its product. By the same token, the objective reality of social facts is not the fundamental principle of social studies, but social studies' fundamental phenomenon".

That last statement - that ethnomethodology is the study of how social facts come into existence - is the one that sums it up for me. At least based on the totally minimal reading that I've done. Which is basically what you wrote, but stated a bit more strongly, I guess.

[jofish22]

yup, that's actually got much more direct garfinkel words in. the phenomenon/principle split is important,but it's usually presented much less clearly than that. thanks for that, will work it in.

[eddyfoible]

Your sphere, is it okay?

[jofish22]

yes, i need something about accountabilty in that. good point. thanks.