Our project is both ethnographic in
the sense that we immerse ourselves in the social worlds of those we study, but
it is also 'ethnomethodological' in the way we approach the analysis of our
data. In a sense then our method of study could be described as
'ethno, ethno'. This approach, emphasised by the Lancaster school in the
U.K., and the work of Lucy Suchman and colleagues at Xerox Parc, and Richard
Harper and Graham Button in Europe, was developed substantially by Garfinkel,
Lynch and Livingstone. It is predicated on what Harold Garfinkel termed the
‘missing what’ of most sociological enquiry into work. Indeed, as Garfinkel
explains, to carry out an ethnomethodological study is to:
"...treat
practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical .. reasoning as
topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of
daily life the attention usually accorded extraordinary events, seeks to learn
about them as phenomena in their own right."
Harold Garfinkel
(1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
So for instance, the sociology of work, much though it might have contributed to
our understanding of broad socio-political and economic changes in society,
actually tells us little about the nature of work itself - the nature of work as
moment-by-moment ‘lived experience’.
In contrast, the
ethnomethodological studies of work programme takes as its only topic, how
members accomplish their work tasks. The emphasis on 'members' is important, for it implies no commitments of any kind to the merits
or otherwise of members’ world views, attitudes, assumptions and so on. Hence:
a. Most sociology investigates the social world from a set of
prior categories, e.g. Conflict; Class; Gender; Control and so on. In contrast
ethnomethodology is interested in the 'common sense' categories that members
themselves deploy.
b. Ethnomethodology brackets ontology. That is, it is not
interested in the truth of members' claims, but in how they arrive at those
claims. That is, it treats accounts of daily life and practical action as versions.
c. Ethnomethodology is not interested in the fact that the
social world is ordered but in how it becomes ordered in and through the
processes of interaction. The focus of ethnomethodological work is thus processual in a very specific sense. In a nutshell, it treats all social
situations as the accomplishment of members. In the context of work, it focuses
on how people actually order their working activities through mutual
attentiveness to what has to be done. Indeed, as the sociologist Erving Goffman
has said of this kind of attention to members activities and the social
organization of daily life:
“Any group of persons - prisoners,
primitives, pilots or patients - develop a life of
their own that
becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it, and … a
good way to learn about any of these worlds is to
submit oneself in the company of the members to the daily
round of petty contingencies to which they are subject.”
(Goffman, 1961: ix)
Erving Goffman (1961ix) Asylums. Penguin Books: England
That is, and put it simply, to do an ethnomethodologically-informed-ethnographic
study (phew!) means to study people's own common-sense
methods of making sense of daily life. It involves seeing things from the point of view of participants and
trying to understand how their 'form of life' can be construed as the outcome
and accomplishment of their interactions. Taken together, these points indicate
what an ethnomethodologically informed ethnography would look like. They suggest
it would be an analysis which is interested in how people conduct working life
in real settings, doing what they do in the mutual accomplishment of sometimes
divergent intentions, treating work as socially organised and interested above
all in how it is socially organised in that setting. This means looking at the
actual working division of labour as routinely manifested in peoples' meaningful
orientation to their work, not an idealised conception. One important feature of
this is that it would not treat work and technology as analytically separable.
It would treat technology as technology-in-use. In our own study of the everyday
methods of practically accomplishing everyday leadership, we are also interested
in the role information and communications technology and management information
in supporting and enabling various kinds of work activity.
For more on
ethnography and ethnomethodology you go visit some of the websites listed in our
Social Science links page ... click here.
