Ethnomethodology

Garfinkel and the Study of Ordinary Skills

Garfinkel, the founder and leading interpreter of EM, arrived at his key ideas about social order, social action, and communication in the 1940s and 1950s, first as a graduate student at Harvard University and then as a researcher at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. The word he coined in 1954 to encapsulate these ideas—ethnomethodology—refers to the scientific study (-ology) of the patterned actions (-method-) of the ordinary people in a society (ethno-). EM is thus a research program for analyzing the orderly features of commonsensical daily activities. Before exploring EM, it is essential to understand why Garfinkel thought it important that social scientists take ordinary activities seriously and to further consider how he arrived at this view.

By 1954, Garfinkel had developed a highly original perspective on social order—the fact that human beings living in groups, like other animals, act in repetitive, organized, and to some extent predictable ways. Unlike most other sociologists at the time, Garfinkel argued that detailed observation of routine and everyday affairs (e.g., working in an office bureaucracy, serving on a jury, making dinner plans with one’s spouse) would show where much of this order was coming from. For Garfinkel’s contemporaries, there were two dominant ways of explaining social order: positivism and interpretivism. Positivists held that human behavior is much like the motion of particles studied by physicists. Sociological and psychological forces cause individual actions, producing patterned behavior at the micro-level and demographic trends at the macro-level. In contrast, interpretivists rebutted positivism by pointing to the many differences between people and particles. Unlike electrons, we actively make sense of our experience and can choose among several possible courses of action. According to interpretivism, actions such as working in an office or serving on a jury are shaped, but not necessarily caused, by our beliefs and values, and it is in such ideas that social organization resides.

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