Abstract
This article discusses some empirical materials from a collaborative study of “lecturing’s work” which the author conducted with Harold Garfinkel. The paper shows Garfinkel at work by presenting a history of the collaboration and discussing what we found. The article also considers some larger implications of our research for understanding how ethnomethodological studies can recover and discover the material regularities of everyday life as they are practiced in distinct settings. The paper reports on a program of ethnomethodological inquiry for discovering in situ what the produced orderliness of any setting’s endogenous tasks, competent courses of action and organizational objects could possibly be. The promise is that just what is identifying of social order, action and meaning is to be found massively, as the routine grounds of everyday activities, and in every case, as something worldly and embodied.
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Notes
The following is a chronological list of documents related to the collaboration on LW which I reviewed and drew upon in preparing this article:
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a.
Garfinkel, H. and Burns, S. October 27, 1977, “Collection tapes and revising say-shows” (transcribed discussion and accompanying reflections)
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b.
Harold Garfinkel, December 10, 1977. Transcribed tape of discussion of Burns’ videotaped presentation to Sociology 251, fall 1977.
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c.
Burns, S. and Garfinkel, H “Lecturing’s Work, Abstract and Plan of the Paper,” March 14, 1978;
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d.
Garfinkel, H. Lecture, Sociology, 148, May 16, 1978, UCLA Department of Sociology;
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e.
Burns, S. “Lecturing’s work: First version,” May 28, 1978, practice version of lecture to be given in Sociology 148, Normal Environments.
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f.
Garfinkel, H. and Burns, S. May 28, 1978 review of SB's videotaped lecture to Sociology 148.
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g.
Garfinkel, H. and Burns, S. August 26, 1978. Transcribed discussion of Uppsala Presentation to the World Congress of Sociology in Uppsala, Sweden in August 1978.
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h.
Burns, S. “The Lived Orderliness of Lecturing,” Manuscript, UCLA Department of Sociology, October, 1978; and
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i.
Lecture Notes from Harold Garfinkel’s Informal Seminar, Spring 1988 (transcribed discussion).
I also reviewed an undated and unpublished manuscript by Garfinkel and David Sudnow, “A Study of the Work of Teaching Undergraduate Chemistry in Lecture Format”.
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a.
In their work on informant-made visual records, Bellman and Jules-Rosette (1977) address the issue of whether and how the camera and/or observer’s presence in the classroom can be disruptive or altering of the ongoing events. The authors note that it is surprising how rarely participants to a setting actually engage in posing or performing for the camera when they are deeply “engrossed” in activity (see Goffman 1974 on “engrossment”). Perhaps more telling, if the observer's presence is methodologically inadmissible, then surveillance is the only alternative.
In Sjoberg 1960, the author characterizes modern society as an “urban-industrial” type.
Although not specific to LW, the following instance describes another gestural pun which occurred in the course of lecturing and could not have been anticipated beforehand, but became visible to us, the lecturer, and the students through the lecturer’s identifiable embodied work:
The lecturer looks at the blackboard and, after that, there is a shift in his face from a serious facial expression into a smile, concurrent with the movement of his right hand which starts scratching his head, seemingly in wonder, upon finding the fieldworker’s camera in the course of filming him. Next, there is a slight hearable laugh and hesitation and then the lecturer’s face shifts back to his previous serious expression and he removes his hand from his head, resuming the prior rhythmicity as the lecturer continues to introduce the day’s topics. Notably, the camera is not treated by the lecturer as relevant until his gaze comes upon it. The lecturer says, ‘Today I want to review with you four different views, four different ways of looking at revolts…’ Just then, the directional properties of his glance become relevant to the material content of his lecture topic and his glance terminates at just that place on the blackboard where the four theories he is about to review are listed. At that point, ‘review’ means that he plans to go over with the class the material his eyes are making available and which are listed in the place where his glance is witnessably terminating. But, with ‘you,’ the lecturer’s head arrives at the camera which is recording him. Suddenly, the matter takes on an entirely different sense that is embedded in the whole interactional ensemble. While seconds earlier, the lecturer had meant by ‘review’ to go over these topics with the class, upon arriving at the camera head-wise, he is suddenly in the midst of doing a gestural pun. A pun emerges in reference to what he is then talking about and when he looks at the camera, ‘review’ takes on its pun sense, as does ‘with you.’ What he is saying no longer means to go over the material with the locally-present audience, but upon noticing the camera and saying ‘review,’ the possibility of someone else being able to watch the lecturer at work again at some later time is evoked. The lecturer’s head meets the camera and we have the smile, the head scratch, the laugh, and the audio hesitation which all stand as an account of the emergent relevance of the camera as a pun on the immediately preceding matter that the lecturer was talking about. The technical content of the pun is not different from his embodied work. It only emerges as a humorous pun by way of its interactional origins and the timing wherein the lecturer’s gaze made contact with the camera and therein re-cast the matter he was talking about. As Harold explained, “[W]e have him [the lecturer] talking of reviewing and we have multiple meanings and rather than being confounded by the multiple meanings, we find ourselves attending the deepened sense of their co-presence” (Garfinkel, April 21, 1988, Informal Seminar, p. 14). Such findings and their descriptions are possible when ethnomethodological interests are brought to real–time records.
Such naturally theoretic approaches might begin the analysis of lecturing’s work with common sense formulations of schooling, teaching or learning, and then elaborate them with formal analytic treatments of things such as such as teacher-student roles (Parsons and Platt 1968); lecturer interest (Stevens and Van Houtte 2010; Voth 1975); lecturer motivation and preparation (Sass 1989; Darling-Hammond, et al. 2005); or lecturer responsiveness to student feedback (Davis 1999; Geller 1975: 31–34).
In the ringing phones (“RP’s”) exercise, Garfinkel asks students to collect audiotapes of various instances of RP’s, including ‘a phone summoning just you,’ ‘a phone summoning anybody but you,’ etc. In collecting the instances of different RP’s, the students rely upon an array of features which are exclusively produced, available and recognized in context (e.g., based on whose premises the call comes to; the direction from which the ring comes relative to the person’s embodied location on scene; whether the recipient is expecting a call; what the phones in the next room or down the hall in the office sound like; how loud the ring is and its particular sound; etc.). The students have no difficulty finding and collecting examples of the different ringing phones, but the definiteness of sense and reference of the calls are lost to a subsequent, disengaged and de-contexted hearing of the taped record. Records of ringing phones can be interesting occasions on which real–time records can lose the phenomenon too. On the tape, this ringing phone can sound like any ringing phone.
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Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Doug Macbeth for his many helpful suggestions on this paper.
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Burns, S.L. ‘Lecturing’s Work’: A Collaborative Study with Harold Garfinkel. Hum Stud 35, 175–192 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9228-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9228-y