Ethnomethodology

• Harold Garfinkel


  is interested in how social order is maintained

  unlike interactionists who are interested in the effects of the meanings; he is interested in how people construct the common sense knowledge and the rules and processes we use to produce the meanings in the first place
• social order


  is created from the members of society creating and applying common sense knowledge to their everyday lives
• ethnomethodology

  studies the process of creating the meanings by which we make sense of the world and the rules and methods used to create the meanings
• indexicality


  nothing has a fixed meaning; everything is dependent on context
• reflexicality


  the use of common sense knowledge to interpret everyday situations to construct a sense of meaning and order
• breaching experiments - what are they

  Garfinkel got his students to either act as lodgers in their own home (overly polite, avoiding getting personal) or they haggled over the price of groceries at the checkout of a supermarket
• breaching experiments - what is their purpose

  experiments which aim to disrupt peoples sense of order and challenge their reflexivity by undermining assumptions about a situation
• breaching experiments - what did Garfinkel conclude

  by challenging the taken for granted assumptions he was able to show that the orderliness of everyday situations is not fixed but an accomplishment of those who took part

  social order is 'participant produced'
• evaluation - Carib

  findings of the breaching experiments were trivial as Ethnomethodologists spend a lot of time uncovering 'taken for granted rules' which are of no surprise to anyone

  EM denies the existence of wider society suggesting instead that it is a 'shared fiction' but functionalists would argue that norms and values are not fiction but a social fact

  Marxists would are that the 'shared common sense knowledge' is in fact the ruling class ideology + the order that it creates serves the interest of capitalism not the individual