Brief Notes on Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is usually defined by its interest in the explication of the ways in which members, through their practices, produce the social structure of everyday activities, the aim being to describe those practices and show how they work.

Phenomenological base of ethnomethodology

1. Most writers would agree that ethnomethodology has a very strong link with phenomenology. But some disagreed (e.g. see Mary F. Rogers (1983), "Sociology, ethnomethodology, and experience : A phenomenological critique, Cambridge University Press),115-133).
2. The attainment of truth is inhibited by the fact that human experience is spatially and temporally bounded, a product of history, culture and society, and, hence, subject to the various distortions of prejudice, interest, incompleteness, cognitive preselection, and more.
3. The sum total of objects and occurrences within the social cultural world as experienced by the commonsense thinking of men living their daily lives among their fellow men, connected with them in manifold relations of interaction. It is the world of cultural objects and social institutions into which we are all born, within which we have to find our bearings, and with which we have to come to terms. From the outset, we, the actors on the social scene, experience the world we live in as a world both of nature and of culture, not as a private but as an intersubjective one, that is , as a world common to all of us, either actually given or potentially accessible to everyone; and this involves intercommunication and language. (Schutz, A. (1962) Concepts and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences, Collected Papers, Vol 1., 53)

Humanistic and Phenomenological assumptions

1. Human beings are not merely acted upon by social facts or social forces but are constantly shaping and creating their own social worlds in interaction with others.
2. Methods have to be related to the "subjective" dimension, primarily meaning and formation of meaning, of the phenomenon.
3. Social actions as mutually co-ordinated productions. The orderliness an activity displays is an accomplishment of members doing that activity and not the result of some disembodied systemic operation.
4. Social action is practical not rational.