Symbolic Interactionism (RLE Social Theory) by Bernard Meltzer John Petras Larry Reynolds

Author:Bernard Meltzer, John Petras, Larry Reynolds [Bernard Meltzer, John Petras, Larry Reynolds]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780710080561
Goodreads: 4027561
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1975-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

Several writers have discussed the affinities (for example: Denzin, 1969, 1970; Dreitzel, 1970; Petras and Meltzer, 1973; Wallace, 1969; Warshay, 1971) and the differences (for example: Deutscher, 1973; Douglas, 1970c; Heap and Roth, 1973; Hinkle, 1972; Zimmerman and Wieder, 1970) between ethnomethodology and symbolic inter-actionism. We agree with Wallace, who writes: ‘Insofar as ethnomethodology embraces a theoretic (rather than methodologic) viewpoint, it is clearly symbolic interactionist’ (1969: 35). Hence, we shall examine ethnomethodology as a variation of the general interactionist perspective.

H. Garfinkel, leading progenitor of ethnomethodology, has been on the faculty of the University of California (Los Angeles) since 1954. From this post he has developed and led a group of thinkers (several now at the Santa Barbara branch of the University of California) who have felt themselves to be adherents of an embattled, ‘encapsulated’ speciality, targets of contemptuous rejection by mainstream American sociology. His intellectual precursors have included, most notably, A. Schutz, E. Husserl, M. Merleau-Ponty, A. Gurwitsch, and other phenomenologists, as well as various linguistic philosophers. Of these former, Schutz has been most influential in Garfinkel’s thinking; but, T. Parsons, one of Garfinkel’s mentors at Harvard during his doctoral studies, has also exerted important influence.4

Any attempt to grasp the nature of ethnomethodology must come to grips with Garfinkel’s convoluted, opaque prose. Additionally, one must acquire a degree of facility with a large array of esoteric concepts, such as the following: ‘bracketing,’ ‘deep rules,’ ‘documentation,’ ‘epoche,’ ‘et cetera clause,’ ‘glossing,’ ‘idealization,’ ‘reduction,’ ‘reflexivity,’ ‘second order conceptions,’ ‘typification,’ etc. With this caution in mind, we shall follow the lead of P. Filmer (1972: 206-7) and present some of the many ‘definitions,’ or delimitations of ethnomethodology’s scope offered by Garfunkel:

Ethnomethodological studies analyze everyday activities as members’ methods for making those same activities visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes, i.e. ‘accountable,’ as organizations of commonplace everyday activities. The reflexivity of that phenomenon is a singular feature of practical actions, of practical circumstances, of common sense knowledge of social structures, and of practical sociological reasoning. By permitting us to locate and examine their occurrence the reflexity of that phenomenon establishes their study.

Their study is directed to the tasks of learning how members’ actual, ordinary activities consist of methods to make practical actions, practical circumstances, common sense knowledge of social structures, and practical sociological reasoning analyzable; and of discovering the formal properties of commonplace, practical common sense actions, ‘from within’ actual settings, as ongoing accomplishments of those settings. The formal properties obtain their guarantees from no other source, and in no other way (1967: vii-viii).

The following studies seek to treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually accorded extraordinary events, seek to learn about them as phenomena in their own right. Their central recommendation is that the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making these settings ‘account-able.’ The ‘reflexive,’ or incarnate character of accounting practices and accounts make up the crux of that recommendation (1967: 1).

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