Qualitative Sociology, Iioi. 15, No.

Z 1992

Introduction: A Reader's Guide to

Ethnomethodology
Michael Lynch 1,3 and Mark Peyrot 2

Two consecutive issues (Numbers 2 and 3) of Volume 15 of Qualitative Sociology have been devoted to recent work in ethnomethodology.
Although ethnomethodological research has been published in past issues
of this journal, we thought it would be worthwhile to put together a collection of papers that represents the range of approaches to social interaction and practical action that ethnomethodology presently includes.
Ethnomethodology is sometimes assumed to be a narrow approach to "microsociology," but we believe that research in the field can contribute to
a broad range of scholarly concerns in the social sciences and humanities.
The seven papers in this collection, for instance, cover topics and methodological considerations in such diverse fields as sociolinguistics, educational research, science studies, literary criticism, sociology of deviance, and
applied ethics.
The research tradition called "ethnomethodology" got started during
the 1960s. Harold Garfinkel coined the multisyllabic term to describe "studies of practical activities, of common-sense knowledge, of this and that,
and of practical organizational reasoning" (Garfinkel, 1974: 18). Garfinkel's
most frequently cited work is the series of "breaching experiments" that
he devised for disrupting the taken for granted identities, sensibilities, and
interactional routines in familiar settings like family dinners, retail establishments, and job interviews (Garfinkel 1964; 1967). These interventions
were not the usual kind of social psychological experiment, as their aim
was to act as "aids to a sluggish imagination" by dramatizing the subtlety
and specificity of what Garfinkel at the time called the "background expectancies" operating in everyday social scenes. As a renegade student of
1Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts.
ZLoyola College, Baltimore, Maryland.
3Address correspondence to Michael Lynch, Department of Sociology, Boston University, 96100 Cummington St., Boston, MA 02215.
113
1992 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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Talcott Parsons, Garfinkel succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which

normative order penetrates the moment-to-moment accomplishment of
situated social actions. He reasoned, contrary to Parsons, that the concerted
production and recognition of social order could not emanate from a common set of shared cultural principles. Instead, he proposed that the production of order and disorder in actual conduct was immediately bound to
ever-changing constellations of "scenic" detail. Consequently, be believed
that it was necessary to describe the intricate and unremitting way in which
linguistically competent members "assemble" ordinary social scenes.
The lessons Garfinkel drew from the breaching experiments and the
series of ethnographic inquiries he reported in Studies in Ethnomethodology
(1967) have been developed further in his own work, and in a substantial
body of research by many others who have taken up ethnomethodological
initiatives) Presently, ethnomethodology is established internationally as a
field within sociology, but it has also made inroads into anthropology, communication studies, cognitive science, and science studies. For the most
part, the early cognitive emphasis in ethnomethodology has been replaced
by detailed investigations of material displays of intention, orientation, and
recognition, which are produced whenever persons converse, conduct embodied actions, and accomplish more or less specialized work practices.
Consistent with the emphasis in Garfinkel's early work, ethnomethodologists reject the idea that persons make sufficient sense of each others' actions by attaching culturally encoded meanings to particular words and
gestures. Instead, ethnomethodologists treat meaning contextually, which
means that they endeavor analytically to unpack relational configurations
that enable sense to be made and understood in situ. "Context" for ethnomethodologists is not a fixed set of social, cultural, environmental, or
cognitive "factors" impinging upon specific instances of conduct as though
from outside. Instead, the term describes a "reflexively" constituted relationship between singular actions and the relevant specifications of identity,
place, time, and meaning implicated by the intelligibility of those actions.
In the '60s and '70s ethnomethodology was occasionally denounced
by prominent social scientists as an occult approach to the investigation
of social order, and many otherwise sympathetic sociologists were put off
by the prolixity of the writing and the exceptionally detailed attention ethnomethodologists devoted to apparently trivial topics like conversational
greetings, exchanges of glances, and service lines. Although hostilities have
subsided in recent years, the strange writing and tendentiousness that surrounded ethnomethodology in the '60s and '70s indicated that something
IAn extensive bibliography of ethnomethodological studies has been compiled by Fehr, Stetson
and Mizukawa (1991).

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115

new was going on that most sociologists were not prepared to accept without struggle. Garfinkel, his students, and his early colleagues developed
an unusual way to address sociology's classic topics, and they drew inspiration from philosophical sources (principally, phenomenology, existentialism, and ordinary language philosophy) that were unfamiliar to most
American social scientists. Ethnomethodologists seemed to threaten the
dominant trends in scientistic sociology when they proposed that systematic interviews, coding procedures, and quantitative analysis were among
the many lay and professional methods that members reflexively use to
construct, encode, and administer accounts of the real-worldly societies in
which they live (Cicourel, 1964). Presently, with the fragmentation of sociology's theoretical and methodological center, and the rapid popularization of "postmodernist" approaches to sociology and anthropology,
ethnomethodology may no longer seem so strange or threatening. Continental approaches have been imported wholesale into American sociology,
and it has become commonplace to assert that natural and social scientific
facts are "constructed" or "invented". Terms like "reflexivity" that used
to be emblematic of "ethnomethodological jargon" have become commonplace items in the sociological vocabulary.2 Indeed, for some proponents
of the "new" interpretive sociologies, ethnomethodology may now seem
out of date. We prefer to think that it was perhaps ahead of its time, and
that it presently offers a more subtle approach to the situated production
of social order than is found in many currently popular constructivist and
interpretive sociologies.
Thus far, we have discussed ethnomethodology as though it was a
single coherent "approach," ignoring for the moment that there no longer
is (and perhaps never was) a single way to do ethnomethodology. We are
reminded of this confusing diversity when we turn our attention to the collection of articles we have selected for the two issues of Qualitative Soci-

ology:
- - D u s a n Bjelic's study of Goethe's textual procedures for visually
demonstrating a theory of plant morphology (in Vol. 15, No. 3);
--David Bogen's description of the rhetorical practices employed by
a particular conversation analytic report (conversation analysis itself is often
said to be an offshoot of ethnomethodology) (Vol. 15, No. 3);
---Colin Clark and Trevor Pinch's analysis of the temporal production
of a deceptive sales routine (Vol. 15, No. 2);
2Many sociologists, and some secondary sources on ethnomethodology, use "reflexivity" as a
synonym for "self-reflection," ignoring the way the term is used in ethnomethodology to
describe the acausal and non-mentalistic determination of meaningful action-in-context. For
a discussion of the different uses of the term see Czyzewski (in press).

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---Gene Lerner's description of some collaborative procedures used

by story tellers and their recipients (Vol. 15, No. 3);
- - D o u g Macbeth's account of how teachers and students together
produce the organization of "classroom floors" (Vol. 15, No. 2);
- - D o u g Maynard and Courtney Marlaire's study of the discursive organization of clinical tests of linguistic competency (Vol. 15, No. 2); and
--Noelie Rodriguez and Alan Ryave's study of the "secrets" that persons in our society routinely confide (Vol. 15, No. 3).
We are hard pressed to say what these seven articles all have in common. All of them are representative of ethnomethodology in some fashion,
but each takes up a different topic and has a distinct style of analysis. Although all of the articles have some association with ethnomethodology,
they exemplify different 'strains' or 'genres' within the field, and some of
them also rely more or less heavily upon other traditions of social psychology and interpretive sociology. Some of the studies (e.g., Bjelic, Bogen)
describe tacit features of textual argumentation and demonstration, while
others focus on spoken and embodied actions. Of the latter, some (Lerner;
Rodriquez and Ryave) describe "ordinary" conversational activities, using
tape recordings and/or transcripts of naturally occurring talk, while others
(Macbeth; Maynard and Marlaire; Clark and Pinch) describe verbal and
non-verbal interaction in more or less formal or institutional settings.
We expect that readers with different theoretical and methodological interests will find some articles to be more interesting and relevant
than others. Keeping this in mind, we shall undertake a rather humble
task in the remainder of this essay. Rather than laying out an ideal type
of "ethnomethodology" that enables readers to identify a core meaning
that runs through each article in the collection, we shall briefly elaborate
a reader's guide that identifies some of the confusions, frustrations, and
other hazards that commonly arise in a first encounter with ethnomethodology.

HYPERREALISM
For many qualitative sociologists, realism is "out" these days, while
deconstructionism has grown ever more popular. Ethnomethodology, with
its emphasis on the local and reflexive constitution of social order is often
assumed to be a variant of constructivism, and like other constructivist approaches it has often been criticized for overemphasizing "subjective" matters, a criticism based on a fundamental misconception (Peyrot, 1982).
Consequently, many readers are likely to be surprised by the extent to
which the papers in this collection evince 'realist' commitments. For exam-

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117

ple, Lerner diligently works through tape recordings of actual conversational stories, Macbeth tries to recover the "material" presence of classroom organization; Clark and Pinch take their readers into the vividly
unfolding phases of a sales con; Rodriguez and Ryave speak of the actual
and not imagined way in which "secrets" are shared; and Maynard and
Marlaire discuss and evaluate specific examples of actual clinical examinations. Although Bjelic and Bogen both examine published texts, like the
others they attend closely to features of the specific textual excerpts reproduced in their articles. Given the early emphasis in ethnomethodology on
the problem of relevance and the reflexivity of descriptions of social actions,
it might seem that the field has slipped into a familiar "realist," "unreflexive," or "positivist" frame (Atkinson 1988; Pollner 1991).
The articles in the present collection do not express a single epistemological commitment or analytic tendency, and it would be a dubious
exercise to classify all of them (and ethnomethodology more generally)
under a single scholastic heading like "realism," "positivism," "rationalism," "materialism," "empiricism," "social constructivism," or "postmodernism." Nevertheless, it is worth pursuing what is distinctive about
ethnomethodology's orientation to "actual," "material," or "real-worldly"
phenomena. Contrary to the entrenched idea that science is about general
patterns and not singular events, and that scientists aim to uncover orders
of things that lie behind the apparent chaos of the sensual world, ethnomethodologists insist that the immediate, singular details of social actions are orderly and intelligible at their surface. This does not deny the
necessity of linguistic and practical competence for the production, recognition, and analytic explication of such action; rather, it is to insist that
persons who talk and act together necessarily make sense of each other's
action in "real time." For a recipient of a question to make a "sensible"
answer, or for a student to recognize when they have been called upon
by the teacher, requires that they anticipate and react reflexively to the
sense of what others are saying, intending, and projecting. Such "sense"
is not an ideal or otherwise intangible construct, since it is embodied in
what people overtly do and say. In other words, it is both reflexive and
material. The ethnomethodological variant of the Husserlian directive "to
the things themselves" attempts not to sacrifice the materiality of the lifeworld on the hermeneutic altar. This materialistic or realistic orientation
differs profoundly from the kind of realism which treats ordinary "appearances" as degraded versions of the real world described by science. It
might better be called a "hyperrealistic" orientation to the features of the
social world that are produced, recognized, and reproduced in commonsense as well as professional activities.

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SO WHAT?
The most difficult questions for any ethnomethodologist to address
are also the most naive: "So what?" and "What's the point?" Why, for
instance, does Macbeth go on at such length about classroom "floors?"
Why does Lerner care so much about the different ways in which people
tell stories together? And, why does Bjelic trouble himself to tell us about
the detailed makeup of Goethe's visual demonstrations? Different answers
to the "So what? question can be found in each article, and here we shall
only suggest a way to begin searching for such answers. The inclination to
ask "So what?" about ethnomethodological research often has to do with
the manifestly "trivial" subject matter of many studies. To say that something is trivial often connotes unimportance, but on the other hand it also
can suggest, as in logic, that a conclusion follows as a matter of course
from what has been given. In the latter sense, "trivial" matters have epistemic importance in the way they implicate a consensus that obviates further argument. For a discipline that has a programmatic interest in the
stable and predictable regularities of social life, what is most "trivial" in a
vernacular sense can also be treated as what is most law-like in a sociological sense. But rather than pursue an analogy with classical mechanics---replacing commonsense " n o t i o n s " with independently derived
definitions and mechanisms---ethnomethodologists have retained a grammar of ordinary action when explicating the logical grounds and mechanisms of social order. Rather than undermining "what everyone knows,"
ethnomethodologists have sought to exhibit the phenomenal complexity
and material embeddedness of conventional understandings. This accounts
for their use of recorded "materials" that enable constitutive features of
situated actions to be investigated in detail. By comparison, armchair "reflection" on ideal-typical aspects of social life yields thin, degraded, and
sometimes absurd versions of what "everybody knows")
A related lesson in much ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research is that actions and structures that are often viewed as coherent plans or texts are contingent productions of the concerted efforts of
different participants. As Lerner documents in his article, stories told in
conversation are conventionally organized by the way tellers and recipients
3Ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts prefer to use tape recordings as data rather
than imagined or recollected utterances and situations. See Schegloff (1988) for an elaborate
treatment of this issue. The issue is complicated, and it does not reduce to an ontological
difference between tape recorded data and idealized reconstructions. Coulter (1983) points
out that conversation analytic findings include a priori understandings exemplified by tape
recorded instances, and Garfinkel and Wieder (1992) demonstrate how tape recordings can
produce a kind of idealized rendering of interactional structures.

t 19

Introduction

together contribute to the unfolding details of the narrative text, and as

Clark and Pinch demonstrate, a pitchman's arts of deception depend upon
the audience's almost gleeful complicity. Despite relatively recent efforts
to develop epistemologies that take account of "the social," our dominant
conceptions of cognition, authorship, text, and morality tend to be mentaP
istic and individualistic. If we aim to go beyond programmatic slogans about
social cognition and social texts, it should be worth taking into account the
sorts of complex productions of joint activities that ethnomethodologists
describe.

JARGON
A common complaint about ethnomethodology is that the writing is
unnecessarily difficult to read. Readers will probably notice that some of
the articles in this collection are more difficult to read and understand than
others. Although we certainly prefer clear writing to murky prose, we hope
that readers will not take 'readability' as the sole criterion for judging the
relative quality of the articles. As guest editors, we undertook the job of
encouraging, persuading, and coercing the contributing authors to take account of the fact that many potentially interested readers of this journal
will not have had much prior acquaintance with ethnomethodology. Despite
our authors' good faith efforts to avoid gratuitous uses of multi-clausal sentences, neologisms, and other stigmata of a confused and twisted mind, we
fear that some of the articles will still be difficult to digest for many readers.
The question is, is such difficulty necessary?
Ethnomethodology requires painstaking study of particular social actions, and practitioners tend to develop sensitivities to phenomena and conceptual distinctions that are not readily presented in "plain language." As
with many other cultivated practices, a great deal of effort goes into composing descriptions that say more than we usually say about familiar matters. Although it would be pretentious of us to claim that none of the
articles in this collection could have been written more simply or clearly
without sacrificing "essential content," we hope that readers will not be
deterred by unfamiliar styles or dense prose. We recognize that it would
be sheer fantasy for anyone familiar with the short history of ethnomethodology to conclude that research in the field could possibly appeal to everyone, The larger discipline of sociology does not appeal to everyone, as
our undergraduates are quick to remind us. On the other hand, ethnomethodologists do not simply write "for each other." Experience has taught
us that interest in ethnomethodology often comes from unexpected quarters: computer scientists, art historians, philosophers, medical researchers,

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urban planners, logicians, historians, and literary theorists, among others.

It would be an interesting study in itself to investigate why and how such
diverse connections between writings and audiences are made, but it is clear
that interest in ethnomethodology does not respect disciplinary boundaries.
A more tangible difficulty with reading several of the papers has to
do with the transcripts of recorded dialogue. Conversation analytic transcripts make use of keyboard symbols to denote features of talk that are
not usually represented in writing. Odd spellings, punctuations, and markers of pace, overlap, amplitude, and intonation can make these transcripts
seem unintelligible. Fortunately, this sort of difficulty can be remedied in
a concrete way. In the appendix to this introduction, we have included a
glossary of transcription symbols. With practice, readers should be able to
read the transcripts with enough fluency to appreciate the analytic uses of
them in some of the articles.
As a final note, we should add that a full appreciation of what ethnomethodology is "about" comes less from reading the literature than from
engaging in the sorts of investigation exemplified in that literature. This
could perhaps be said of any organized practice, but it is an explicit--indeed obsessive--concern in ethnomethodology's pedagogy.
We would like to thank Charles and Victor Lidz, the former editors
of QS, for inviting us to guest edit the two issues of the journal. We also
owe Rosanna Hertz and Jonathan Imber our gratitude for lending their
encouragement and support after they assumed the editorship in 1991. We
would also like to thank the several reviewers who read and commented
upon the drafts we sent to them. They included Bob Anderson, Paul Atkinson, Beryl Bellman, Graham Button, Steve Clayman, Jeff Coulter, Paul
Drew, Carol Gardner, Chuck Goodwin, Christian Heath, Lena Jayyusi,
Brigitte Jordan, Greg Myers, Robert Prus, George Psathas, Howard
Schwartz, Wes Sharrock, Lucy Suchman, and D. Lawrence Wieder. In
some cases they wrote extensive and incisive comments that were worthy
of publication in their own right. And, not least, we thank the authors who
sent us their papers, waited patiently while we reviewed them, and responded to our editorial recommendations.
Appendix: Glossary of transcription symbols used by articles in the
special double issue.
The transcript conventions used by several of the articles in this special double issue were developed by Gail Jefferson. The following glossary
provides an abbreviated version of the notational conventions.
1. Numbers in parentheses, e. g., (0.8), indicated pauses, gaps, and
silences measured in seconds and tenths of seconds. A period enclosed in parentheses (.) denotes a "micropause" of less than onetenth second.

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2.

Letters, words, or phrases enclosed in single parentheses, e.g.

(tch), are sounds, words, or phrases that are indistinct or difficult
to make out from the recording.
3. Double parentheses (or brackets in Clark and Pinch's article),
e.g., ((throat clear)), contain transcribers' commentaries about extra-verbal activities and background or summary matters.
4. Degree sign or raised dot, e.g., yes indicates barely audible
sounds and words. In some cases, e.go, hh, a raised dot indicates
an inbreath.
5. Colons, e.g., you::, indicate that a prior sound is "stretched" or
prolonged. The number of colons gives a rough measure of the
length of the stretch.
6. Equal sign, e.g., =That's ..., means that an utterance follows unusually closely in time after the one preceding it.
7. Underlining of a word or sound, e.g., I d i d ..., indicates voiced
stress.
8. Dash, e.g., wr-, indicates a cut-off sound or word.
9. Bracket, e.g., [, or double slash marks, e.g.,//, mark the beginnings
of overlapping utterances by different speakers. Text in transcripts is aligned to show where one speaker's utterance begins
to overlap another's:
T: Okay: so, does everybody see tha w a y - S: /~'m jus' ssitten' on my butt lookin' at you.
10. Non-literal spelling of words, e.g., "ssitten'" is sometimes used to
convey a sense of how a speaker pronounces a word.

REFERENCES
Atkinson, Paul (1988) Ethnomethodology: A critical review. Annual Review of Sociology 14:
441-65.
Cicourel, Aaron (1964) Method and Measurement in Sociology. New York: Free Press,
Coulter, Jeff (1983) Contingent and a priori structures in sequential analysis. Human Studies
6: 361-76.
Czyzewski, Marek (in press) Reflexivity of actors and reflexivity of accounts. To appear in
Theory, Culture and Society.
Fehr, B. J., Stetson, J., and Mizukawa, Y. (1991) A bibliography for ethnomethodology. In
J. Coulter (Ed.) Ethnomethodologieat Sociology. London: Edward Elgar.
Garfinkel, Harold (1964) Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities. Social Problems
I1: 225-50. Reprinted in Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology: 35-75.
(1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
(1974) The origins of the term 'ethnomethodology'. In R. Turner (Ed.). Ethnomethodology:
Selected Readings. Pp. 15-18. Hammondsworth: Penguin.
Garfinkel, Harold, and Wieder, D. Lawrence (1992) Two incommensurable, asymmetrically
alternate technologies of social analysis. In G. Watson and R. M. Seller (Eds.). Text in
Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology. Pp. 175-206. London: Sage.

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Peyrot, Mark (1982) Understanding ethnomethodology: A remedy for some common

misconceptions. Human Studies 5: 261-83.
Pollner, Melvin (1991) Left of ethnomethodology: The rise and decline of radical reflexivity.
American Sociological Review 56: 370-80.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1988) Goffman and the analysis of conversation. In P. Drew and A.
Woottan (Eds.) Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Pp. 89-135. Boston:
Northeastern University Press.