Abstract
This chapter will position ethnomethodology in the praxis of sociology and phenomenology to trace Garfinkel’s theoretical heritage and highlight his intellectual innovation. With this historical investigation, I will outline the pathways along which individual social actor’s order-producing and -maintaining work (including but not limited to languaging and communicating efforts) comes to take centre stage in Garfinkel’s thought. Ethnomethodology, even in its heyday, was never recognised as the mainstream of sociological thinking. However, as accounted by Garfinkel (2002), ethnomethodology claims to be the heir to Emile Durkheim—the father of sociology, and its project is to carry on with the study of ‘social facts’ which is famously contained in the aphorism by Durkheim (1895/1982, p. 60): ‘The first and fundamental rule [of sociology] is to consider social facts as things’. There are many different interpretations of Garfinkel’s program and its status in both sociology and philosophy; my view is that, despite that ethnomethodology represents a radical way to do sociology, its concern is still a sociological one though phenomenology fuelled its innovative power. I will explain this in the following.
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Notes
- 1.
Earlier in the same book, Durkheim defines social facts in the following words: ‘A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting that is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations’ (1895/1982, p. 60).
- 2.
I mainly follow Heritage’s (1984) interpretation, which sees ethnomethodology as a creative solution to the sociological problem of order by drawing upon phenomenological resources. Hilbert (1992) provides valuable insights concerning the roots of Garfinkel’s thinking: Parsons’s theory suppressed the very classical ideas in Durkheim and Weber’s theories; by correcting Parsons’s theory of social action, Garfinkel resurrected the very core of classical sociology. He offers detailed arguments that linked up classical ideas in Durkheim and Weber with empirical ethnomethodological studies.
- 3.
Following Durkheim, Garfinkel defines ‘immortal, ordinary society’ as ‘the society that is there prior to and independent of the methods and discourse for describing it’ (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 143).
- 4.
Psathas (2004) gives a detailed documentation of their exchanges during 1950s–1960s.
- 5.
It is based on Husserl’s two concepts called ‘and so forth’ and ‘one can always again’. (Husserl, 1969, p. 189).
- 6.
Schütz makes a distinction between first-order constructs of lay people and second-order constructs of social scientists: ‘The thought objects constructed by the social scientist, in order to grasp this social reality, have to be founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thinking of men, living their daily life within their social world. Thus, the constructs of the social sciences are, so-to-speak, constructs of the second degree, that is, constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene’ (1962, p. 59).
- 7.
The problem lies in Husserl’s understanding of ‘constitution’, a fundamental concept explaining how the objective world with its spatio-temporal conditions, which occupies a central place in our everyday lifeworld, is constituted intersubjectively. Schütz engages with the deep ambiguity in Husserl’s conception of ‘constitution’. He comments: ‘But unobstrusively, and almost unaware, it seems to me, the idea of constitution has changed from a clarification of sense-structure, from an explication of the sense of being, into the foundation of the structure of being; it has changed from explication to creation […]’(quoted in Natanson 1973, p. 28). For Schütz, this accounts for Husserl’s failure to work out his theory of empathy and resolve the problem of the other selves.
- 8.
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Zhou, F. (2020). From Durkheim to Garfinkel: Social Facts and Social Order. In: Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_9
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