Ethnomethodology, to put it simply, means people methods- the study of the methods that people use to produce the social order in their interactions. Sociologist, Harold Garfinkel, coined the term ethnomethodology in 1967. He analysed the behaviour of people in their social interactions and realised that the interaction is not defined by external/internal constraining moral rules, but by undefined/ unwritten rules that have been established through previous interactions with people on a micro level.
Garfinkel's ethnomethodology was influenced by the work of Sociologists, Talcott Parson and Alfred Shutz, who also analysed the nature of social interactions. Parson's proposed that people do what is required of them to do by institutions. They are rational actors in society. However, Shutz proposed the opposite. He maintained that social interactions are not rational. There is no one instructing people how to interact. They are merely devising their social actions from partially formulated 'recipe knowledge' or past experiences.
So, it fell to Garfinkel to combine the two theorist's work- the 'moral' with the 'cognitive', which he established through a series of ingenious 'breaching' experiments. For the breaching experiments, Garfinkel asked people to act out of the ordinary during their interactions and he recorded how others reacted to these breaches of normal conduct. One of the most interesting experiments was the 'clarification of understanding' experiment. Garkfinkel asked the experimenters to clarify the mundane statements that their subjects made in their interactions. (This experiment was tested on the students in my class during a presentation. We were asked to write a sentence about the first thing we did in the morning and then add words, which would further clarify what we did. Eg: I went to the bathroom. [further clarification] I went to the bathroom and washed my face.) Garfinkel discovered that people would always be able to make sense out of senseless situations, even when there was no explanation given.
I found an interesting article that analysed 'breaching events' conducted by a feminist peace movement (Women in Black) in Israel, which are modelled on Garfinkel's breaching experiments. The 'breaching event' is defined as 'a publicly performed act of defiance that is composed of actual and/or symbolic violations of accepted social practices and definitions (Benski, 2005:58). Benski analysed the emotional reactions of the public to the movement's confronting signs and posters. The breaching event revealed how the mundane social order rests on the unquestioning acceptance of common assumptions. The emotional reactions of the public to the event to violations of these assumptions was dramatic.
References-
Heritage, John. 1984, 'The Morality of Cognition,' in Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.75-102.
Benski, T. 2005, 'Breaching Events and the Emotional Reactions of the Public: Women in Black in Israel,' in Emotions and Social Movements, Flam, H. & King, D (ed.), Routledge: New York.
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