Abstract
Following the death of Harold Garfinkel in 2011, and with the further devolution of conversation analysis away from ethnomethodology and towards formal analytic linguistics, ethnomethodologists have spent some significant time and effort in the ensuing eight years considering how Garfinkel’s radical agenda can be recaptured. As Anderson and Sharrock (2017) indicated, there is a tendency towards formulaeity in contemporary ethnomethodology research that undercuts claims of a radical alternate to conventional social science. This is akin to the formulaeity Rod Watson (2008) has criticized in conversation analysis. These issues were discussed at some length in a meeting organized by Mike Lynch in 2016, held at the University of Manchester. Hammersley was present and a welcomed discussant at that meeting, and in part, this book reflects some of the concerns expressed there.
The book comprises five chapters, the first three of which look at ethnomethodology’s predecessors in Schutz’s social phenomenology, the intellectual connections between Garfinkel, Goffman and Simmel, and whether or not ethnomethodology is distinct from sociology. It is chapters four and five where a more considered discussion of the merits of ethnomethodology occurs, and it is on these chapters I will focus.
For a book ostensibly dedicated to appraising ethnomethodology’s radical departure from conventional social science, there are few clear enunciations of the radical project. Four pages in the introduction present a brief account of how Garfinkel, Zimmerman, Pollner and Cicourel parted ways with formal analytic sociology. What remains is very little discussion of what many ethnomethodologists will consider the key of the approach: a disavowal of the position of social scientist as ‘expert’ over the affairs of individuals. Instead, the book focuses more intently on some perceived shortcomings of ethnomethodology research, perhaps foremost the status of theory in ethnomethodology.
Hammersley’s contention is not a new one; it reflects some of the concerns raised by Blum and McHugh (1984) and Pollner (1991). The difference is Blum, McHugh and Pollner reached the limits of ethnomethodology inquiry and asked ‘is there not something more to be discovered?’ whereas Hammersley asks ‘can this stuff even be done?’ From here, the miscomprehensions of ethnomethodology’s project become most evident. He struggles with how Garfinkel uses the notion of social order, apparently seeking to define order rather than simply presuming its existence (pp. 88–92). Apposite to Hammersley’s suggestion that for ethnomethodology the opposite of order is confusion (p. 88), Sacks (1984) noted for ethnomethodology there is order at all points. What Sacks’ statement does is divorces the analyst from any obligation to define orderly from disorderly (an occupation Hammersley notes that Garfinkel’s teacher, Talcott Parsons, took very seriously). Order effectively drops out of the equation, and ethnomethodologists spend no time asking ‘is this thing orderly?’ Hammersley postulates that Garfinkel’s definition of order conflates the intelligibility of an action with its coordination among other actions (p. 92) but the question this begs is intelligible for whom? And when? And where? Surely a great deal of social action is confusing for those not versed in the practices under examination, but the point of ethnomethodology is to understand the orderly properties of action according to those who produce those actions.
This leads into Hammersley’s second criticism of ethnomethodology, that ethnomethodology relies on unexplicated theories yet claims to be a-theoretical. However, again, this is a miscomprehension of the project. If we took the previous distinction between orderliness and confusion to be ontologically founded in ethnomethodology research, we would need a theory to arbitrate between these two states. But ethnomethodology makes no such moves. Instead, ethnomethodology simply observes that things have the order they have for the members who produce and find that order in the world, including the finding ‘this is confusing’. Alternatively, ethnomethodologists treat what people say they are doing as being part and parcel of what they are in fact doing. I take it that Hammersley’s allusion to theory is something like ‘If I want to study the orderly properties of political work, I require some theory of politics’ because that ‘theory of politics’ is what makes the phenomenon discoverable in the first instance. Garfinkel’s solution to this is ‘phenomenological bracketing’, where things like a researcher’s common-sense understanding of a culture, things like ‘politics occurs at the legislature’, are bracketed out. No [sociological] theory of politics is required, just a member’s understanding that people whose occupation it is to do politics tend to do it in places like, for example, legislatures. Such primitive ‘theories of politics’ are then bracketed out, and ethnomethodology’s radical perspective is articulated through this; no longer focusing on the question ‘does this or does this not conform to our theory of politics?’, ethnomethodology’s radical question takes the form ‘given that this is the place where politics work gets done, as is commonly understood by members of this culture, what does this work entail?’ While Hammersley asserts that this reliance-on-theory-while-claiming-to-be-atheoretical diminishes the distinction between ethnomethodology and conventional sociology, Garfinkel anticipated this and shifted the discussion in the first instance by posing a different type of question. When one understands this, the truly radical nature of the ethnomethodological project emerges, and the second of Hammersley’s core criticisms of ethnomethodology is pushed aside.
Hammersley is demonstrably well read, and is engaging in an obvious good faith effort at exploring how ethnomethodology fits with, and departs from, conventional social science approaches. That some of the discussion is conceptually muddled is a testament to the complexity of the commitment that ethnomethodologists must undertake in relation to conventional social science research, rather than a deficiency on his part. The volume is worth considering, and should open discussions for ethnomethodologists, such that they might more clearly understand their own radicalism, and how they can more clearly enunciate that radicalness for other members of the sociological community.
