Studies in Ethnomethodology

This book isn't for everyone, and most of the people who read it, generally don't get it. That's the nature of the beast. Essentially, Garfinkel has re-asked the Durkhiemian question -- How is Social Order Possible? His query is, How is the Sense of Social Order Possible? So the methodology is not a research method, but rather it's the members methods for constructing reality. So the sense of social reality is constructed using documentary methods. This book shows how that's accomplished.

This is Garfinkel's only book (setting aside a compilation he published of some of his students' work). The book and the ethnomethodological take on social life can be hard to grasp, especially for those trained in mainline sociology. A word of advice: If you are accustomed to skipping prefaces, don't skip Garfinkel's. In wild prose that pays dividends when read aloud, the preface sets up the whole book and ties Garfinkel's project to classical sociology.

I came across this little gem several years ago, among bibliographies I looked at while trying to get a handle on some emotional travails. Some of the chapters here were published separately as papers in journals. The tenor of the book can be summed up in one of the chapter titles: Good Reasons for Bad Records. Now, that'll never be a feature on 60 Minutes.Harold Garfinkel was among a number of professionals in the 1950s that were examining the dynamics of human interaction, including the human interaction involved in examining those dynamics. How do professionals alter the dynamic they're attempting to examine? This is not a question that's asked by medical or social researchers these days.American dry, lifeless scholarship is content to impose a tired theory on activity & show how folks just aren't following the party line. Then they're called marginalized or a lot worse. Garfinkel, Laing, Goffman, even Sartre wondered: why this person with this theory on these folks at this time?"Ethnomethodology" is the methods of just plain folks. Rather than squeezing the work of groups into a theory, Garfinkel created a theory for the work of groups. The approach & the language are highly original.[Note: this is the review that stated Mr. Garfinkel was dead. Sorry. This was based on a misunderstanding of something I'd read.]

I read this book when it was first published in 1967. I could not understand a word but as it began to sink in I befuddled my Sociology professors with the ideas.This was the first real look at how social members make the "social" effect seem real for one another. Ethnomethodology makes none of the assumptions that brought down the Sociology of old. How can the discipline talk of social problems before it knows what the social is?The Computer scientists have now gotten hold of the ideas in the book and are running hard with it in developing computer systems in terms of human computer interaction (HCI). In my opinion this book and its author started Sociology and its tasks anew. Its unforseen consequence will, in my opinion, lead to a revolution in embedded systems. See the book by Paul Dourish for more on this.A five star for sure!

I first encountered Garfinkle's classic work almost 30 years ago in an introductory sociology of deviance course. We students loved it, because it was at once substantive and quirky, scholarly and entertaining. Its focus is the social construction of reality -- a central contruct in sociological theory and research. Briefly, Garfinkle argues that the shared reality that makes possible social intercourse is not fixed, but rather arises as a consenus of participants in social groups. So, for example, manners, rules of conversation, or even definitions of insanity can be shown to be arbitrary and mutable while at the same time indespensible for comprehensible interactions between and among people.This little book is a must read for any student of social or organizational behavior or anyone curious about the social world. Rarely will you meet a practicing sociologist who does not get a twinkle in his or her eye when someone mentions Studies in Ethnomethodology. It is that good. And that much fun.