Abstract
Having analyzed in detail the empirical work done by ethnomethodologists, I will in this chapter situate Garfinkel’s theoretical conception of social order and individual members in the praxis of modern societies. Some recent publications (Hilbert, 1992; Kim, 2003; Pollner, 2012; Rawls, 2001) point out that the ethnomethodological view of man responds to the blessings and woes brought by modernity. Pollner’s article (2012) posthumously edited by Emerson and Holstein provides fresh readings of Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology’s Program (2002) and ethnomethodology in general. Garfinkel was born in a Newark lower middle class Jewish family. When it came to deciding what profession would best suit him, his parents consulted a non-Jewish relative because for them who lived in a shtetl-like community the outside world was both strange and foreign. Drawing on this biographical information and following John Cuddihy (1974), Pollner attempts to read Garfinkel as a Jewish intellectual sensitive to the boundaries between the insider and outsider. He writes,
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Notes
- 1.
This term comes from the following quotation in Weber: ‘In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage’ (Weber, 1904). It means the increased rationalization experienced in everyday social life in Western capitalist societies.
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Zhou, F. (2020). Social Order, Rationality and Modernity. In: Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_13
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