Abstract
Sociologists have long built their work on basic theoretical concepts such as action (or social action) and power. In recent decades, however, concepts such as communication and interaction have come to the fore as alternative theoretical points of departure. The book under review is presented as a systematic review and elaboration of two relatively young but closely related research traditions, viz. ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, which have played a key role in the recent theoretical transitions in sociology and related disciplines.
Admittedly, the genesis and relative success of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are not just the result of autonomous theoretical developments. Like other protagonists of the so-called ‘linguistic’ or ‘cultural’ turn in the social sciences, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis also responded to social and technological transformations, such as those associated with the rise of new communication media (telegraph, telephone, photography, television, video, computer, etc.). What is now canonized as classical sociology emerged mainly in an era of industrialization. Its theories, with their emphasis on power or social action, are germane to an industrial society. They mainly focus on processes of producing and trading goods or resources (commodities). Most of the recent social-scientific theories, which make communication and information central issues, reflect a different social reality. They reflect the fact that communication networks – both locally and globally, both in private and public settings – have become more important in and for contemporary society. And this theoretical transition also allows us to shed new light on ‘well-known’ phenomena, such as communicative interactions in everyday life, in formal organizations or with machines.
The book under review presents 10 chapters (written by 14 authors altogether), which apply resources from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to a variety of phenomena at the micro-level of social order. In the introductory chapters of the first part, the editors particularly focus on the relevance of these resources to the study of formal organizations, but not all of the different case studies included in the book’s second part are predominantly characterized by this focus. It is more apt to say that the empirical chapters highlight the order or ‘organisation’ of specific chains of social interaction. And they do so in different ways, as the editors themselves acknowledge in the book’s preface:
Some chapters direct attention to embodied and material aspects of interaction, whereas others focus more on the organisation of talk. Differences are also apparent in the ways that data are presented, ranging from subtle variations in the notation used in transcripts to the ways that authors represent moving pictures on the printed page. (p. xiii)
Thematically one finds analyses of the social organization of a school board meeting, recruitment interviews, lectures by a management guru, biddings at auctions, pre-verbal bodily interactions in a showroom retail store, form filling in a copy shop, collaborative work on a firm’s strategy document, as well as dental training practices with patients.
Despite such divergences, most of the empirical chapters draw on the works of Harvey Sacks and Harold Garfinkel, the central figures in the development of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology respectively. In some of these chapters, the lasting influence of the writings of Erving Goffman is also apparent. But theoretical and thematic issues have been of lesser concern to the authors and editors alike. It is instead methodological issues that constitute common ground. The authors all utilize audio and/or video recordings. Some of them apply the standard transcription orthography developed by Gail Jefferson. Others complement this ‘classic’ emphasis on textual recordings by using video frame-grabs to reveal key visual features associated with different segments of verbal and/or non-verbal conduct. In theoretical respect, the empirical chapters show that communication is not ‘done’ by the participants. The case studies illustrate that the chain of events cannot be causally related to (the intentions of) particular actors. The case studies point to the limitations of reductive strategies that try to decompose communication into the actions or decisions of the participants. Instead, they employ approaches that put stress on the self-organization of such communicative events.
But as is often the case with edited volumes, the quality of the different chapters is somewhat uneven. Many chapters succeed in illustrating the differences which ethnomethodology and conversation analysis make. Time and again, stress is put on the novelty and the alternative character of the applied micro-sociological perspectives. None of the chapters, however, contains systematic reflections on both the advances in and the (remaining) limitations of the applied theory-cum-methodology. None of them tries to discuss ethnomethodology and/or conversation analysis in relation to other competing or complementary approaches in sociology and related disciplines. This volume remains a collection of papers, because it lacks a sociological reflection on the propagated theory and methodology itself.