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Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology

  • SYMPOSIUM ON EMIRBAYER AND MAYNARD’S “PRAGMATISM AND ETHNOMETHODOLOGY”
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Abstract

Three features of pragmatist thought remain empirically underdeveloped or insufficiently explored: its call for a return to experience or recovery of concrete practices; its idea that obstacles in experience give rise to efforts at creative problem-solving; and its understanding of language in use, including conversational interaction, as an order of empirical practices in and through which problem-solving efforts are undertaken and social order ongoingly and collaboratively accomplished. Our aim in this article is to show that there exists a long-standing, theoretically informed, and empirically rich research tradition in which these pragmatist themes are further developed, albeit in ways the originators might have foreseen only in dimly programmatic form. This research tradition is ethnomethodology. We present in bold strokes the classical pragmatist ideas of Peirce, James, Mead, Dewey, plus Addams, focusing on the three themes mentioned above. We show how Garfinkel’s work surpasses even that of the pragmatists in developing the larger implications and promise of those themes. We demonstrate how ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation analysis, respectively, continue as well to develop the original pragmatist impulse in unsuspected ways. Finally, we step back from this account to ponder the broader significance of the connections we have explored between pragmatism and ethnomethodology.

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Notes

  1. In the final chapter of The Creativity of Action (1996), Joas lays out some of the implications of his theoretical ideas regarding action for theories of social order and social change, focusing, among other things, on theories of collective action and differentiation. He focuses on economic sociology in a brief essay co-authored with Jens Beckert (2002). Intriguing as well is the attempt by Josh Whitford (2002) to bridge Joas’s theoretical insights with the empirical research program of Charles Sabel (see fn. 2). For Joas’s studies on war and religion, respectively, see Joas (2000, 2003); on the question of the genesis of values, see Joas (2000). For a close look at his major work, The Creativity of Action, see Colapietro (2009); for a broad overview of his life’s work to date, see Joas and Knobl (2009, pp. 512–28). Interestingly, in a chapter on ethnomethodology in that latter work (Ch. VII, p. 152; cf. Joas 1996, p. 162), the authors allude briefly to certain action-theoretic similarities between Garfinkel and pragmatism. Our aim is to pursue these linkages more extensively and systematically.

  2. We cannot claim, of course, that the above list of mid-century and contemporary thinkers influenced by pragmatism is anywhere near exhaustive. Nor can it be our goal to cover, in the limited space available, everyone who fits such a description. There are severe constraints upon what we can do. Perhaps the most notable omission is Erving Goffman, who was deeply influenced in his thinking by George Herbert Mead. A highly complex, sui generis thinker, the specific respects in which his ideas were inspired by pragmatism nonetheless place him, for the purposes at hand, within the category of symbolic interactionism. More recent thinkers also not mentioned include Charles Sabel (1994); Roberto Unger (2007); and Richard Posner (1991). One concentric circle further removed, moreover, are pragmatist fellow-travellers such as Charles Tilly, who asserts in Why? (2006, p. x) that “If this were an academic treatise, I would surely trace my line of argument back through American pragmatism via John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.”

  3. Again, to prevent misunderstanding, we underscore that other ways do exist of attending to pragmatism’s unfinished business; we focus here on only one of these, rather than attempt to discuss them all. Besides ethnomethodology and conversation analysis there is also symbolic interactionism, the most venerable, influential, and important of all pragmatism-inspired research programs in sociology. Prior to this, there was also the work of the first Chicago School; see also the work mentioned in fns. 1 and 2.

  4. He expresses this perhaps most eloquently in Experience and Nature (1988c [1925], p. 372): “When the varied constituents of the wide universe, the unfavorable, the precarious, uncertain, irrational, hateful, receive the same attention that is accorded the noble, honorable, and true, then philosophy may conceivably dispense with the conception of experience. But till that day arrives, we need a cautionary and directive word, like experience, to remind us that the world which is lived, suffered, and enjoyed as well as logically thought of, has the last word in all human inquiries and surmises.”

  5. We leave aside here the question of James’s (1987 [1902]) empirical investigations into the phenomenology of religious experience.

  6. In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1988f [1938], ch. VI), Dewey coined the phrase “indeterminate situation” to describe such circumstances.

  7. For surveys of pragmatism’s influence on twentieth century sociology (and social thought, more generally), see Shalin (1986); West (1989); Joas (1993); Levine (1995); Seigfried (1996); and Dickstein (1998). On the later incarnations of the Chicago School, see Fine (1995).

  8. It is during these years that Garfinkel attended college at the University of Newark, earned a Master’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, did his military service in World War II, and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard (under the supervision of Talcott Parsons). Biographical material for this paragraph is taken from Rawls (2002, 2005) and Garfinkel (2002, pp. 77–87).

  9. On Selznick’s relation to pragmatism, see Joas (1998, p. 193); on W. I. Thomas’s, see Joas (1993, pp. 29–32); on Znaniecki’s, see, in addition to the aforementioned source on Thomas, Znaniecki (1919, pp. xiii–xiv); on Burke’s, see Hildebrand (1995). Although C. Wright Mills’s early pragmatism-influenced writings were already appearing in prominent venues, Garfinkel was not yet familiar with them; on Mills’s relation to pragmatism, see Horowitz (1966).

  10. Biographically speaking, Garfinkel was familiar with Continental phenomenology since his very earliest years at UNC. In addition, during his time at Harvard, he interacted frequently with Alfred Schutz at the New School for Social Research and with Aron Gurwitsch at Brandeis. (See, again, Rawls [2002], [2005]; and Garfinkel [2002, pp. 77–87].)

  11. In the quotation within this quotation, Garfinkel used the language of the court and was not speaking for himself.

  12. For a detailed discussion of Garfinkel’s engagement with pragmatist themes in this work, one that takes a different tack than that which is pursued here, see the introduction by Rawls (2005), e.g., pp. 59–61. Rawls documents a sustained dialogue on Garfinkel’s part with pragmatist authors and ideas, although, as we shall suggest in what follows, that dialogue was not very complete or systematic from a pragmatist perspective.

  13. Phenomenological arguments came before his references to the pragmatists as well. For instance, his aforementioned reference to Peirce appeared in the context of Garfinkel’s describing how, from an actor’s point of view, objects are real things even if analytically they can be decomposed into temporally successive acts and “noemata,” a Husserlian term that connotes perceptual adumbrations through which actors produce the sense of facticity to things. Such “working acts,” as Garfinkel (2005 [1948], p. 144) argued, form the “structural makeup” that gives definition and meaning to social objects, including selves and identities.

  14. Garfinkel’s embrace of phenomenology, both in terms of theorizing and of data, was complete by the time of his (still unpublished) Ph.D. dissertation (1952). However, we refrain from discussing this work in the present context, as our aim here is not to present a complete account of Garfinkel’s intellectual development but rather to chart briefly the trajectory of his early engagement with pragmatism. On ethnomethodology’s relation to phenomenology, however, see Heritage (1984, ch. 3) and Lynch (1993, ch. 4).

  15. For his part, Husserl, too, was influenced by James, although, according to Spiegelberg (1956), he was more impressed with James’ Principles of Psychology (1905 [1890]) than with Pragmatism. (1981a [1907]).

  16. The relations between phenomenology and pragmatism, and how they affect sociological views of language and the self, are an important topic in their own right, which we cannot address here. Kestenbaum (1977) explores the possible connection between Dewey’s notion of habit and phenomenological approaches to intentionality; Spiegelberg (1956) compares Pierce’s and Husserl’s “phenomenologies,” rejecting the idea that they reflect mutual influence but suggesting that there are at least coincidental areas of agreement.

  17. For a comprehensive survey of the new sociology of ideas, see Camic and Gross (2001).

  18. On the origins of the term “ethnomethodology” and how the term was originally meant to capture the availability of commonsense knowledge and “methods” whereby “members” of a society hold one another accountable to that knowledge as a practical matter, see Garfinkel (1974, pp. 16–17).

  19. Specifically, this Durkheimian aphorism consists of a reference, in The Rules of Sociological Method (1982 [1895], p. 45), to “our basic principle, that of the objective reality of social facts.” Durkheim declared: “It is...upon this principle that in the end everything rests, and everything comes back to it.” Garfinkel invoked this aphorism in the opening pages of Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967, pp. vii–viii), and he underscored it all the more forcefully in his second collection, Ethnomethodology’s Program (2002), which bears the subtitle, Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism.

  20. On the way in which actions and not just “objects” of perceptions are gestalt-type accomplishments, see Maynard (2005).

  21. Perhaps Garfinkel and the pragmatists converged on this theoretical position because there are logically only so many theoretical positions possible in the space of theories of action; see Levine (1995).

  22. Garfinkel (1967, p. 173) observed: “In the conduct of his everyday affairs[,] in order for the person to treat rationally the one-tenth of [his] situation that, like an iceberg appears above the water, he must be able to treat the nine-tenths that lies below as an unquestioned and, perhaps even more interestingly, as an unquestionable background of matters...which appear without even being noticed.”

  23. This affinity on Garfinkel’s part with Heidegger, at least with the latter’s way of rejecting conventional approaches to philosophizing, is unsurprising in light of Rorty’s (1979, pp. 6–7) observation that it was Heidegger, along with Dewey (he also mentions Wittgenstein), who “brought us into a period of ‘revolutionary’ philosophy...by introducing new maps of the terrain (viz., of the whole panorama of human activities) which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate.”

  24. Garfinkel recounted in Ethnomethodology’s Program (2002, pp. 80, 95 fn. 7; see also Garfinkel 2004a; Garfinkel 2004b, p. x) the circumstances in which he initially used the term “shop floor problem.” He recalled that, in 1994, he attended, at Beryl Bellman’s invitation, a conference on workplace difficulties at McDonnell Douglas. Bellman and his colleagues (the latter all aerospace engineers) served as consultants to that firm, and it was they who labelled its quandaries—specifically, the disparity between the actual work of those building its C-47 airplanes and the firm’s “front office protocol accounts of production costs, protocols that ha[d] lost sight of [that work]” (Garfinkel 2004b, p. x)—“The Shop Floor Problem.” Garfinkel indicated that it was from this team of consultants that he appropriated the term, generalizing it to subsume a much wider range of sociological phenomena.

  25. Garfinkel’s (2002, ch. 9) still later-published work on Galileo’s inclined plane demonstration—much of it undertaken, however, around the same time as the pulsar study—covered (in this respect) similar ground.

  26. To be more precise here, the term “shop floor problem” first appeared—with a brief discussion—in Garfinkel’s Cooley-Mead Lecture, “Ethnomethodology’s Program” (1996; the contents of this paper are reprinted in Ethnomethodology’s Program [2002, chs. 1 and 5]). Garfinkel (1996, p. 9) wrote in that paper: “[Ethnomethodology’s] findings are found [in ethnomethodological studies of work and science] in the phenomena of two constitutents of the Shop Floor Problem: (1) shop floor achievements and their accompanying careful* descriptions, and (2) shop floor theorizing.” (“Careful*” denotes the concrete practices of order production with which ethnomethodology, by contrast to formal analysis, is concerned.) It is only in the 2002 work, however, that the idea of a shop floor problem received sustained attention.

  27. Garfinkel and Wieder (1992, pp. 182–84) termed this the “unique adequacy requirement.” Interestingly, Pollner and Emerson (2001, p. 123) observe in respect to it: “As EM focuses more intensely on specialized settings, the earlier methodological goal of making the familiar strange is replaced by efforts to make the strange familiar. For this recent development in EM, the fusion of local and analytic knowledge and competencies is not a ‘problem,’ but a goal.”

  28. Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston (1981, p. 133) distinguish the discovering from the social sciences in the following manner: “The social sciences are talking sciences, and achieve in texts, not elsewhere, the observability and practical objectivity of their phenomena....Social sciences are not discovering sciences. Unlike ‘hard sciences’ they cannot ‘lose’ their phenomena; they cannot undertake the search for a phenomenon as a problem to be solved, finally be unable to do so, and thus have ‘wasted time’; they do not know the indispensability of bricolage expertise; and these are never local conditions of their inquiries and theorizing.”

  29. Arguably, Lynch’s inquiry falls a bit short in terms of qualifying as a hybrid study of work, since, as he (1985, p. 2) himself confesses, he “never approached a practitioner’s skills” and was “unable to participate in the lab’s researches,” although he did achieve “limited competences.”

  30. A metaphor that Black (1962, p. 520) invoked is that of the automobile: to know how its gears contribute to the whole machine, it is not necessary to point to the “work of the gears” literally. One can observe the actions of the automobile in relation to the turning of the gears and in terms of their consequences; the gears are a feature of what the automobile does as a vehicle in action. By extension, Dewey could have been implying an ethnomethodological theme: that words cannot be defined by their consequences so much as they are understandable in reflexive relation to the accounting practices in which they are embedded.

  31. For examples, see Sacks (1992, pp. 300–305); Pomerantz (1980, 1984); ten Have (1999); Heritage (1984); Clayman and Gill (2004); and Arminen (2005).

  32. For recent work on “conversation and cognition,” see te Molder and Potter (2005) and, especially, Potter and te Molder’s (2005) introduction to that collection; see also van Dijk (2006).

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Correspondence to Mustafa Emirbayer.

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This paper is equally co-authored. The order given is alphabetical only.

This article was accepted by the former editor-in-chief Javier Auyero. The current editor, David Smilde, has approved of its publication.

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Emirbayer, M., Maynard, D.W. Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology. Qual Sociol 34, 221–261 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9183-8

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