Alfred Schutz and ethnomethodology: Origins and departures

Schutz and the positivists

Schutz begins by outlining the respects in which he agrees with Nagel (1952) and Hempel (1952). ⁵ These areas of agreement are sometimes overlooked by those who have read Schutz as advocating a phenomenological sociology radically at odds with the dominant approaches in the discipline at the time. Schutz argues, first of all, that the same set of ‘rules for scientific procedure is equally valid for all empirical sciences whether they deal with objects of nature or with human affairs’. He defines these rules as ‘the principles of controlled inference and verification by fellow scientists and the theoretical ideals of unity, simplicity, universality, and precision’ (Schutz, 1962: 51). In particular, he accepts that ‘all empirical knowledge involves discovery through processes of controlled inference, and that it must be statable in propositional form and capable of being verified by anyone who is prepared to make the effort to do so through observation’ (ibid.). In short, he argues that all science operates via the same logic, and that all scientific inference must be explicit and subject to observational testing.

Schutz also agrees with the positivists that the aim of science is to produce theories that specify relationships among variables that are ‘determinate’, which presumably means that they are stable to a considerable degree. These theories can then be used to explain observed empirical regularities. In other words, he accepts the covering-law model. He also insists that ‘neither the fact that these regularities have in the social sciences a rather narrowly restricted universality, nor the fact that they permit prediction only to a rather limited extent, constitutes a basic difference between the social and the natural sciences, since many branches of the latter show the same features’ (Schutz, 1962: 52). Schutz therefore accepts a methodologically unified conception of science, defined by these features – even though, as we shall see, in a key respect he sees a fundamental difference between natural and social science. ⁶

Not surprisingly, the bulk of Schutz’s paper is concerned with outlining the areas in which he disagrees with Nagel and Hempel, and why. In particular, he rejects what he calls ‘their basic philosophy of sensationalistic empiricism’ (Schutz, 1962: 52). There are two components to his argument: one relating to the nature of all science, the other specifically about social science.

First, he argues that the starting point for all science, including natural science, is necessarily ‘the social cultural world as experienced by the common-sense thinking of men living their daily lives among their fellow-men’ (Schutz, 1962: 53), and he insists that there can be no escape from reliance on experience of this kind. ⁷ Here he is repeating what could be claimed to be one of the central themes of Husserl’s phenomenology (expressed most explicitly in Husserl, 1970). He notes that ‘from the outset, we, the actors on the social scene, experience the world we live in as a world both of nature and of culture, not as a private but as an intersubjective one, that is, as a world common to all of us, either actually given or potentially accessible to everyone; and this involves intercommunication and language’ (Schutz, 1962: 53). He argues that ‘all forms of naturalism and logical empiricism simply take for granted this social reality, which is the proper object of the social sciences. Intersubjectivity, interaction, intercommunication, and language are simply presupposed as the unclarified foundation of these theories’ (ibid.).

What Schutz is criticising here is the positivist attempt to treat science as if it could operate entirely on the basis of observation and reporting of physical behaviour (this, I think, is what he means by ‘sensationalistic empiricism’), and the assumption that the only alternative to this would be psychological introspection or sympathetic identification, neither of which could vouchsafe objectivity. Against these assumptions, he notes that, in order for one scientist (B) to control and verify the observational findings and conclusions of another (A), ‘B has to know what A has observed, what the goal of his inquiry is, why he thought the observed fact worthy of being observed, i.e. relevant to the scientific problem at hand, etc’. He points out that ‘such an intersubjective understanding between scientist B and scientist A occurs neither by scientist B’s observations of scientist A’s overt behaviour, nor by introspection performed by B, nor by identification of B with A’ (Schutz, 1962: 53–4). He therefore insists that the practice of natural science itself relies upon our common-sense capabilities in making sense of one another’s actions. This is a major challenge to the positivist philosophy of science, but, as should be clear from what I have already said, it is a challenge that nevertheless shares much common ground – as regards assumptions about the nature of science – with the positivists. In this respect, Schutz’s position is the same as, and strongly influenced by, that of his friend Felix Kaufmann (1936a, 1936b, 1944; Hammersley, 2017a).

Schutz notes that ‘philosophers as different as James, Bergson, Dewey, Husserl, and Whitehead agree that the common-sense knowledge of everyday life is the unquestioned but always questionable background within which inquiry starts and within which alone it can be carried out’ (Schutz, 1962: 57):

For all these thinkers agree that any knowledge of the world, in common-sense thinking as well as in science, involves mental constructs, syntheses, generalizations, formalizations, idealizations specific to the respective level of thought organization. The concept of Nature, for instance, with which the natural sciences have to deal is, as Husserl has shown, an idealizing abstraction from the Lebenswelt, an abstraction which, on principle and of course legitimately, excludes persons with their personal life and all objects of culture which originate as such in practical human activity. Exactly this layer of the Lebenswelt, however, from which the natural sciences have to abstract, is the social reality which the social sciences have to investigate. (ibid.: 58)

This leads us directly to the second component of Schutz’s argument, concerned specifically with social science. Using the positivists’ notion of ‘protocol propositions’ – basic observational statements – and drawing specifically on the work of Kaufmann, Schutz argues that protocol propositions about the physical world ‘are of an entirely different kind’ from those ‘about the psycho-physical world’ (Schutz, 1962: 54). In other words, ‘there is an essential difference in the structure of the thought objects or mental constructs formed by the social sciences and those formed by the natural sciences’ (ibid.: 58). His argument here is that the phenomena that social science seeks to explain are by their very nature already constituted through people’s deployment of common-sense knowledge and practices (whereas this is not, of course, true of physical phenomena). As a result, the social scientist cannot even access the phenomena with which he or she is concerned without somehow taking such knowledge and practices into account. It is not possible to abstract from these in the way that the physicist does. This is because what is to be described and explained in this instance is the actions of human beings, who themselves actively make sense of their situations and act on the basis of this sense-making. Schutz argues that, for this reason, social scientists must use ‘second-order constructs’: typifications of the typifications employed in their actions by the people whose behaviour is to be explained. At least in general form, this argument is of course not distinctive to Schutz; it can be found in the work of Simmel, for instance, and arises from nineteenth-century hermeneutics, and beyond that from the writings of Herder and Vico. However, this tradition has generally insisted that the human sciences represent a different form of science from physics and chemistry, whereas Schutz places greater emphasis on what is shared.

In support of this argument, Schutz notes that the same overt behaviour can have different meanings, that ‘not-acting’ (for example, not selling certain merchandise at a given price) may be of social significance but is not overt physical behaviour, and that many social relations are not face to face, and are therefore not subject to direct observation (Schutz, 1962: 54). Moreover, he argues that despite its ‘inadequacies’ (such as its internal inconsistencies, varying degrees of clarity, and ‘blind belief in things just taken for granted’),

common-sense knowledge of everyday life is sufficient for coming to terms with fellow-men, cultural objects, social institutions – in brief, with social reality. This is so, because the world (the natural and the social one) is from the outset an intersubjective world and because…our knowledge of it is in various ways socialised. Moreover, the social world is experienced from the outset as a meaningful one. The Other’s body is not experienced as an organism but as a fellow-man, its overt behaviour not as an occurrence in space-time of the outer world, but as our fellow-man’s action. We normally ‘know’ what the Other does, for what reasons he does it, why he does it at this particular time and in these particular circumstances. That means that we experience our fellow-man’s action in terms of his motives and goals. And in the same way, we experience cultural objects in terms of the human action of which they are the result. (ibid.: 55–6)

Lessons drawn by Garfinkel

There are a number of points made by Schutz in this article that seem to have been picked up by Garfinkel and become key elements of ethnomethodology. For one thing, at the very least, Schutz’s work reinforced Garfinkel’s doubts about the capacity of the social sciences to match the positivist ideal that was influential among US sociologists in the late 1940s and 1950s. Like Schutz, Garfinkel argues that, despite their own claims, the work of these sociologists necessarily relies upon common-sense knowledge, so that its distinctiveness from lay reasoning about social matters is, at best, much less than is typically claimed. He also accepts Schutz’s account of the phenomena dealt with by social scientists, as necessarily involving the deployment of common-sense understanding to make sense of the actions of others and to pursue one’s own projects (Garfinkel, 1959, 1967). He concludes from this that ‘the problem of meaning’ must be addressed – in other words, that social science cannot proceed via a behaviourist approach (Garfinkel, 2012[1946]: 1; 2006[1948]: Pt1; 2008[1952]: ch. VI and passim).

Garfinkel also notes, echoing Schutz, that for all its faults (emphasised by the positivists), common-sense knowledge and practices are patently adequate for the practical purposes of carrying out everyday activities. Indeed, while Schutz does not believe that the everyday, practical ‘solution’ to the problem of intersubjectivity means that there is no philosophical problem, this seems to have been the conclusion drawn by Garfinkel (Lynch, 1993). The task for him becomes not solving this problem, but documenting how it is routinely solved in practical terms in everyday social life. Drawing on Parsons’ concern with the problem of social order, Garfinkel underscores the fact that the practical action to be described by social scientists is orderly, even though it does not conform to the requirements of scientific rationality (Garfinkel, 1962). Where Parsons saw the problem of social order as needing to be solved by sociologists, Garfinkel insists that it is routinely solved by ordinary people, and so the task of the researcher is to describe how this is done. Thus, Garfinkel came to argue that documenting the orderliness of the everyday world, and the ways in which this is achieved, is an essential topic of inquiry. This parallels Schutz’s insistence on the need for methodological clarification of the problem of intersubjectivity, even though there is a significant difference between them concerning exactly what this requires. Indeed, it is striking in this connection that Schutz appeals to the example of jury members deliberating on guilt, since this connects directly with Garfinkel’s reflections on his involvement in a project on juries in the early 1950s – in the course of which the term ‘ethnomethodology’ emerged (Garfinkel, 1967: ch. 4). Whether Schutz’s comment here directly prompted Garfinkel’s distinctive approach to the work of juries is difficult to know, but the parallel is intriguing.

It is also perhaps worth noting that Schutz’s discussion of the way in which natural scientists must themselves employ common-sense knowledge and practices as part of their work – specifically in his account of scientist B and scientist A – is echoed by Harvey Sacks’ analysis of the way in which natural scientists necessarily engage in reporting their own social activities as stable phenomena in the course of their work, this being essential to the process of scientific investigation (see Jefferson, 1989: 212–14; Schegloff, 1992: xxxi–xxxii). It also paved the way for the studies carried out by Garfinkel and some of his students into the work of natural scientists (Garfinkel, Lynch and Livingston, 1981; Lynch, 1985).

Finally, we should note that both Schutz and Garfinkel regard social actions, and people’s understanding of these, as emerging from participation in social interaction. Along with Husserl, they emphasise that our experience is intersubjective from the start, but even Schutz questions whether the existence of intersubjective understanding can be explicated by reliance on the egological approach adopted by his mentor. Moreover, it was perhaps Schutz’s identification of the ‘methods’ by which intersubjectivity is constituted – such as assuming a reciprocity of perspectives, accepting appearances ‘until further notice’, and so forth (Schutz, 1962) – that led Garfinkel (1963: 210–14) to completely abandon Husserl's focus on the individual ego. ⁹

Significant differences

The points of difference between Schutz and Garfinkel and ethnomethodologists are at least as important as the similarities, although, as we shall see, identifying them is not entirely straightforward. A first point would be that while Schutz insists that existing social science meets, or at least can meet, what he takes to be the universal requirements of science, many ethnomethodologists have questioned this. ¹⁰ In doing so, however, they have adopted as a criterion of assessment the positivist requirement that scientific inference must involve no reliance upon common-sense knowledge and practices. This amounts to a form of ‘internal critique’, or an application of the somewhat similar phenomenological conception of rigour, which requires a suspension of the natural attitude (see, for instance, Zimmerman and Pollner, 1970). ¹¹ By contrast, as we have seen, Schutz insists that all science displays reliance on common-sense knowledge, rejecting the positivist insistence that science must avoid dependence upon such knowledge. Furthermore, he emphasises that certain aspects of the logic of science can be applied within the framework of common sense, so that, for example, legal deliberations involve controlled inference, in the sense of systematic efforts to test potential conclusions against evidence. ¹² Schutz treats this process as potentially effective, albeit by no means offering certainty, whereas Garfinkel suspends the question of whether, for example, jurors reason in ways that are likely to produce sound conclusions, adopting a stance of ‘ethnomethodological indifference’ towards this issue.

Second, where ethnomethodology calls for a re-specification of social science to investigate common-sense practices, Schutz seems to regard such investigations as the task of philosophy or methodology, and therefore as requiring phenomenological reflection on experience rather than empirical investigation. We should note, however, that there are questions about whether Schutz’s approach can, strictly speaking, be described as phenomenological (Costelloe, 1996), as well as about exactly what sort of investigation Garfinkel is proposing, since it did not conform to any of the forms of empirical inquiry then extant within social science. ¹³ Furthermore, Schutz does not believe that economists or sociologists need to transform their focus of inquiry, or their theoretical and empirical practices, despite the rootedness of their work within the lifeworld. By contrast, Garfinkel not only concludes that the work of documenting how social order is ongoingly achieved is an empirical task, but also, in some moods at least, regards it as the central task of a re-specified sociology. It is a task in its own right, not a necessary precondition for, or a foundation of, conventional social scientific work.

A third point is that while Schutz and Garfinkel focus on intersubjectivity, and abandon Husserl’s egological approach, there remains a significant difference between their orientations. Schutz still retains from Husserl the notion that social phenomena are subjectively constituted, even though he treats this process as occurring within the lifeworld so that, in effect, these phenomena are also intersubjectively constituted. He does not make the move, characteristic of ethnomethodology, towards viewing constitutive processes as occurring entirely within the intersubjective realm, so that subjectivities are themselves intersubjectively constituted. Rather, he seems to have seen intersubjectivity as coming about through the social interaction of subjects who each constitute the world for themselves, but by relying upon shared methods – notably by assuming the reciprocity of perspectives. Garfinkel may have been close to this position in his early work, but, if so, later moved away from it (Wilson, 2003, 2012).

This is closely related to the final point, which is that – most explicitly in his later work – Garfinkel abandons Schutz’s subjectivism for a sophisticated form of behaviourism whereby social meanings consist solely of what is publicly displayed and is thereby integral to the coordination of action and the production of social order. Even early on, he writes that ‘I shall exercise a theorist’s preference and say that meaningful events are entirely and exclusively events in a person’s behavioural environment’ (Garfinkel, 1963: 190). This reflects the fact that whereas Garfinkel inherited from Parsons a conception of sociology as focused on ‘the problem of social order’, Schutz was concerned with exploring the constitution of intersubjectivity so as to underpin the interpretive sociology of Weber and the praxeology of von Mises (1949; see also Prendergast, 1986). These latter scholars had little interest in why there was order rather than disorder, but rather were concerned with how and why particular forms of social organisation have developed historically (Weber), and with how markets could operate in a way that maximised the satisfaction of demand, along with the preconditions for this – in terms of individual behaviour and the (minimal) role of the state (von Mises).

Against this background, I want to turn now to an important debate about the relationship between the work of Schutz and ethnomethodology.

Lynch and Dennis on Schutz and ethnomethodology

Lynch (1988, 1993: ch. 4) has questioned the assumption that there is a close relationship between the work of Schutz and ethnomethodology. He does not deny the early influence of Schutz on Garfinkel, but argues that, as ethnomethodology developed in the 1960s, a radical rupture occurred between the two. Indeed, he suggests that in some ways ethnomethodology has more in common with the work of Husserl than with that of Schutz (see also Garfinkel and Liberman, 2007; Ruggerone, 2013). At the same time, the difficulties involved in clarifying this relationship are signalled by his reporting Garfinkel’s injunction to his students to misread Husserl and other phenomenologists for their own purposes (Lynch, 2012). ¹⁴

What Lynch criticises in Schutz, above all, is his reliance on a conception of science, drawn from the work of his friend Kaufmann and therefore to some extent from logical positivism, which Lynch sees as implying a very sharp divide from common sense. He argues that some ethnomethodological work, particularly a great deal of conversation analysis, has taken over this conception, but that it is at odds with Garfinkel’s mature thinking, particularly as exemplified in the ‘studies of work’ programme, notably the investigations of the activities of natural scientists, in which Lynch was himself involved (Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston, 1981; Garfinkel, 1986). He argues that Schutz relies upon an idealised conception of science, one that treats what some scientists, and especially some philosophers of science, say about the principles of science, as if this were an adequate description of the practical rationality of scientific work. Instead, Lynch sees this rationality as displayed in the embodied, contingent processes of social interaction to be found in laboratories, in which material artefacts of various kinds are used. Here he appeals not just to ethnomethodological work on science, especially his own, but also to science and technology studies more generally.

Dennis (2004) has challenged Lynch’s argument, pointing out that Schutz (1943) does not argue that scientific rationality is superior to practical rationality, and that he recognises that they share more features in common than the select few that he attributes solely to science. Dennis also suggests that the accounts of scientific work provided by Garfinkel, Lynch, and others reveal that scientists display an orientation to the distinctive features of science that Schutz identifies, and indeed that ethnomethodologists themselves do this in their own studies. While Lynch (1988: 80) has already acknowledged the first of these claims, he describes scientists as simply ‘giving lip service’ to these features. At issue here, in part, is whether Schutz’s ideal type of scientific rationality consists of ‘a set of cognitive norms’ or refers to ‘situated organisational working practices’ (Dennis, 2004: 7). Dennis claims that Schutz is ‘not making any metaphysical claims about the essential nature of rationality, but is trying to show under what circumstances statements made by scientists and other members of society can legitimately be counted as rational’ (ibid.: 17). This suggests a normative concern on Schutz’s part, on which see below. ¹⁵

It seems to me that Schutz was clearly concerned with the orientation, or ‘attitude’, of scientists as exhibited in their activities, rather than with a set of abstract norms or ‘rationalisations’ – despite the fact that, as Lynch (2004: 27) points out, elsewhere (Schutz, 1945) he separates the scientific attitude from practical scientific activities (see Hammersley, 2017b). Dennis is also right to point out that Schutz does not present scientific rationality as completely different from, or as superior to, practical rationality. However, it does seem that Schutz is seeking to identify what is essential to a scientific orientation. This reflects the rather different view he took of ideal types from that of Weber. Whereas the latter regarded these as artificial constructions that might be useful on particular occasions for particular purposes, Schutz (1943), along with von Mises, and drawing on the eidetic approach of Husserl, seems to have believed it possible to identify the universal features of practical and scientific rationality, respectively.

This touches on a key point that is, in my view, a problem with the work of all three authors, Schutz, Lynch, and Dennis. This is that they fail to address – and indeed may reject – the distinction between a normative account of what should be the distinctive features of a scientific orientation and the empirical matter of whether and how particular scientists display a distinctive orientation in their work. These two issues are not unrelated, of course, but they are not the same. While we can gain strong hints about what should be distinctive about science from the views and practices of scientists, especially those whom we take to have been successful, this requires a process of abstraction and evaluation. ¹⁶ In my view, these empirical and normative matters are both legitimate topics of inquiry, but they demand investigations of different kinds. The work of all three authors tends to obscure this, I suggest.

While Schutz does not regard himself as offering an empirical account of the attitudes and practices of scientists in the past, or even among his contemporaries, there is a sense that, rather than engaging in an explicitly normative argument, he seeks to reach a normative conclusion through descriptive (phenomenological) inquiry. As already noted, his aim appears to have been to determine the essence of science, in more or less the manner that Husserl proposed discovering the essential character of other phenomena. Problems arise here, however, not only regarding the relationship between Schutz’s ‘constitutive phenomenology of the life-world’ and the ‘eidetic’ form of analysis, relying on the transcendental reduction, that Husserl claimed could reveal essences, but also concerning the validity of the latter. ¹⁷

By contrast, both Lynch and Dennis are, it seems, concerned entirely with the empirical character of the ‘situated organisational working practices’ of scientists. Furthermore, I take it that Lynch, at least – in line with much thinking in science and technology studies – does not regard normative methodological questions about science as worthwhile or justifiable topics of investigation. His view seems to be that, while scientists themselves may discuss these questions, they do so on particular occasions for particular practical purposes, rather than in an effort to provide a general account of the normative requirements of science; moreover, he suggests, no such general account can be produced because of the very nature of social life. Given this, as far as he is concerned, the philosophy of science should be put out of business – to change the metaphor, it is presumably one of the ‘diseases of intellect’ that ethnomethodology, along with Wittgenstein, aims to cure (Lynch, 2000). For Lynch, the only legitimate task of outside observers of natural science is to explicate the practices in and through which scientists do their work. He writes that

a truly radical break with traditional standards of scientific rationality requires facing up to the existential absence of transcendental standards for any claims that are made, and a willingness to ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ – to defer all but the most provisional outline of ‘programme’ until a body of investigative practices emerges in the social organization of the discipline. Such a coherent body of investigative practices may never come to pass, and even if it does it will not offer any guarantees on the inherent rationality of the constituent activities. In any case, there should be no reason to fear falling into ‘mere common sense’ as a basis for inquiry, since ‘common sense’ can no longer be defined as the reciprocal of ‘scientific rationality’. What ‘it’ might be remains to be discovered. (Lynch, 1988: 92)

It is also worth noting that, like many ethnomethodologists, Lynch adopts a very different attitude when it comes to discussing conventional social science, or even the work of his fellow ethnomethodologists. The account above would suggest that social scientists’ evident ability to carry on their work in a collectively orderly manner means that the epistemic status of what they do and produce is no different from that of natural scientists. Yet Lynch in fact offers negative evaluations not just of the arguments of Schutz, but also of conventional social science, and even of some conversation analysis (Lynch, 1993, 2016). Normative conclusions are being put forward here, but presumably it is not just a matter of ‘lip service’ being paid to them. If this is correct, then it is unclear what form of justification is supposed to underpin them. It looks as though this relies upon turning ethnomethodology from a ‘study policy’ into an ontology, in much the manner that, it seems to me, Husserl turned phenomenology as an inquiry into the ways in which phenomena presented themselves within experience into a metaphysics, via the transcendental reduction. However, such a move raises fundamental problems (see Hammersley, 2018).

Conclusion

In this article, I have examined the arguments presented in one of Schutz’s most influential papers, with a view to identifying what is and is not shared with ethnomethodology. As noted, there is little in Schutz’s work to warrant the kind of radical stance taken by many ethnomethodologists towards conventional sociology – or, for that matter, towards the requirements of rigorous inquiry. ¹⁸ Indeed, built into his account is a justification for much of the conventional work that social scientists do, in the face of criticism from positivists. This aspect of Schutz’s argument can be summarised as follows: science cannot escape its dependence upon common-sense ideas and practices, but this does not undermine its scientificity, because intrinsic to these practices is a capacity for developing and verifying explanatory ideas, and science can build on this. While Schutz insists, following Husserl, that the foundations of science require philosophical clarification, particularly as regards the character of the lifeworld on which it relies, from his point of view this foundational work is unlikely to imply any radical change in the goal or focus of social scientists, any more than in that of practical reasoners or natural scientists. At most, what is required is to abandon the misleading arguments put forward by positivists and behaviourists. Also ruled out by Schutz’s argument, I suggest, is a metaphysics that is fundamentally at odds with the assumptions built into the lifeworld. In both these respects, Schutz’s position differs starkly from that of ethnomethodologists.

Initially, at least, both Schutz and Garfinkel draw a distinction between what constitutes rationality in science and common sense, and recognise that this raises a question about how there can be a science of social life. However, they adopt different solutions to this problem. For Schutz, philosophical clarification of the character of the lifeworld allows understanding of how subjective processes can be understood objectively, via the use of ideal types. By contrast, Garfinkel argues that what is required is empirical investigation of the ways in which social order is constituted through the use of mundane methods that generate intersubjective understanding, methods that include those identified by Schutz in his phenomenological investigation of the constitution of the lifeworld. The conception of rigour, or objectivity, adopted by Garfinkel is different from that of conventional social science; it is more analogous to that of Husserlian phenomenology. This is despite the fact that what is involved is a ‘third-person phenomenology’ (Anderson and Sharrock, 2018), rather than Husserl’s first-person approach. Where Schutz conceives of social science as concerned with explanation, with his own work simply clarifying the foundations of this, ethnomethodology is aimed at the explication of practical rationality as a locally produced phenomenon.

In the final part of the article, I examined a key debate about the relationship between Schutz’s work and ethnomethodology. I argued that Schutz, along with the protagonists in this debate, do not distinguish sharply enough between factual and normative inquiry, and I showed that Lynch rejects the latter while at the same time relying upon it. We can conclude from this that normative judgements about science are unavoidable, and that the kind of philosophy of science practised by Kaufmann, on which Schutz based his conception of science, must therefore be retained.

My argument carries some implications for the intellectual status of ethnomethodology. At the beginning I noted the uncertainty surrounding this. One must conclude, I think, that rather than being a phenomenological version of sociology, inspired by Schutz, the field must be seen, as the later Garfinkel insists, as a quite different activity from sociology, as well as from the philosophy of social science. Whether it is to be regarded as a supplement to sociology, or social science generally, within the present landscape of disciplines, or as an entirely different kind of animal inhabiting a very different sort of landscape, remains to be seen. My argument here, however, has raised doubts about the viability of any radical intent to restructure the field, such as by erasing both empirical social science and philosophy, and transcending the empirical/normative divide.