pragmatism and ethnomethodology emirbayer and maynard qualitative sociology.final

7/30/2019 Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology Emirbayer and Maynard Qualitative Sociology.final

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Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology

by

Mustafa Emirbayer and Douglas W. Maynard*

Department of Sociology

University of Wisconsin at Madison

April 14, 2010

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


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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 Garfinkels 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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InExperience and Nature (1988 [1925], p. 17), John Dewey highlighted three failures of what he

called the non-empirical method of philosophy: First, he wrote, there is no verification, no effort even

to test and check. What is even worse, secondly, is that the things of ordinary experience do not get

enlargement and enrichment of meaning as they do when approached through the medium of scientific

principles and reasonings. This lack of function reacts, in the third place, back upon the philosophic

subject-matter in itself. Not tested by being employed to see what it leads to in ordinary experience and

what new meanings it contributes, this subject-matter becomes arbitrary, aloofwhat is called abstract

when that word is used in a bad sense to designate something which exclusively occupies a realm of its

own without contact with the things of ordinary experience. Dewey suggested that an empirical method is

needed to extend the insights of philosophy into empirical reality and to test them there, thereby preventing

philosophy itself from becoming overly theoretical and out of touch with concrete experience. He asserted:

The problems to which empirical method gives rise afford, in a word, opportunities for more

investigations yielding fruit in new and enriched experiences. But the problems to which non-empirical

method gives rise in philosophy are blocks to inquiry, blind alleys; they are puzzles rather than problems.

Philosophy requires modern science in order to advance beyond the realm of sheer abstract speculation and

argumentation and substantively to add to our understanding and grasp of the experiential world.

Dewey and the other classical pragmatistsCharles Sanders Peirce, William James, George

Herbert Meadwere all passionate believers in modern science. Their philosophy was centrally

concerned with applying scientific modes of reasoning and inquiry to the problems of human existence.

For their own part, however, these pragmatist thinkers largely refrained from engaging in empirical (at least


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social-scientific) investigation. In essence, they pointed the waybut did not or could not follow it

themselves. Much of the promise inherent in classical American pragmatism accordingly went unrealized.

To be sure, like-minded figures such as Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charles Horton Cooley were

pioneers of American social science, and pragmatism did profoundly influence the work of W.I. Thomas

and the Chicago School of sociology, not to mention, later, that of Herbert Blumer and symbolic

interactionists. including Morris Janowitz (1991). Economics felt pragmatisms influence, too, through

John R. Commonsand Marxism through the young Sidney Hookwhile C. Wright Mills kept the idea

of a pragmatist critical sociology alive in mid-century. Even now, however, two decades into a far-

reaching pragmatist revival, one is hard pressed to find many empirical research programs, other than

symbolic interactionism itself, that pursue an agenda either directly informed by pragmatist thinking or

bearing a close family resemblance to it. Research into civil society and the public sphere is influenced (by

way of Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas) only in a normative sense by the classical pragmatists. The

same is true of feminist and race theory (one thinks here of Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Shannon Sullivan,

Cornel West, and Nancy Fraser). And Hans Joass idea of the creativity of action has not inspired

extensive empirical investigation, at least not in the form of a systematic research enterprise, despite Joass

own persistent efforts in areas of macrosociology such as the study of modern wars and violence and the

sociology of religious phenomena.1 Meanwhile, philosophic investigations by Hilary Putnam, Richard

Bernstein, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom have remained firmly planted in the ground of abstract

reasoning, at least in the sense of refining pragmatist precepts rather than of extending them empirically.2

In our view, three features in particular of the thought of the classical American pragmatists remain

empirically underdeveloped or insufficiently explored: first, its call for a return to experience, a move that

entails, among other things, a recovery of concrete practices, an emphasis on what Harold Garfinkel has

described as the just-thisness of empirical everyday life as it is livedin situ; second, its idea of obstacles in


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experience giving rise to efforts at creative problem-solving, that is, to concrete practices aimed at resolving

difficulties and accomplishing, in real time, a revised or reconstructed social order; and third, 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. The classical pragmatists, philosophers engaged in relatively abstract theoretical discourse,

were unable to pursue these ideas deeply into the empirical domain, even as they saw the empirical efforts

of others as a means more completely to realize their philosophic ambitions (as in the above quotation by

Dewey). Among the key figures of the pragmatist revival, few besides Joas have sought to bridge the

divide between philosophy and social science, linking pragmatism-inspired action theory to theories of

social order and social change.

Our aim in this article is to show that there existsbesides symbolic interactionism, which this

paper does notset out to explore, even as it duly recognizes its importancea long-standing, theoretically

informed, and empirically rich research tradition whose guiding ideas bear a close affinity to classical and

contemporary pragmatism. This research tradition is ethnomethodology, defined broadly to include not

only the seminal investigations of Garfinkel but also closely related endeavors such as ethnomethodological

studies of work and science as well as conversation analysis. In important respects, ethnomethodology

goes far toward realizing pragmatisms original promise; it attends, in a phrase, to pragmatisms unfinished

business.3 We are notproposing here that ethnomethodology and allied endeavors are based upon or

justified by pragmatist thought. Like Bernsteins (2007, p. 12) point regarding contemporary philosophers

who, without direct influence from the pragmatist tradition, articulate insights and themes that deeply

articulate with and refine that tradition, our claim is that ethnomethodology extends pragmatism in

consistent and fruitful ways without any previous overt connection. This linkage between pragmatism and

ethnomethodology has gone largely unnoticed, and, indeed, would be disavowed by many, both from


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within and without the ethnomethodological enterprise. (As we discuss below, Garfinkels

ethnomethodology was actually constructed against, rather than with, classical American pragmatism.)

Ever since the publication ofStudies in Ethnomethodology (1967), it has been far more common to relate

Garfinkels work to three other major currents in mid-twentieth century thought: Parsonian structural-

functionalism, against whose theories of action and order Garfinkel is said to have developed his most

distinctive themes; Schutzian phenomenology, said to have been the most important source of Garfinkels

theoretical insights; and, in certain respects at least, Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy. With

the publication ofEthnomethodologys Program: Working Out Durkheims Aphorism (2002), yet another

intellectual reference point has been highlighted as well: Durkheims program of inquiry into the

concreteness of social facts. This program is said to have served as Garfinkels theoretical obsession for

well over half a century.

These suggestions regarding Garfinkel help to situate his work within larger traditions of thought

and shed light on what makes its research program so creative and powerful. We are not concerned here to

dispute them. By redrawing the map, howeveras Donald Levine (1995, p. 293) proposesand

pointing out neglected linkages between previously disconnected continents, we can illuminate not only

how the three pragmatist insights mentioned above can be empirically investigated, thereby dissolving the

aforementioned problem so presciently noted by Dewey, but also how ethnomethodology itself might be

differently understood, namely, as an arena in which pragmatist impulses for scientific investigation can

move forward, albeit in ways the originators foresaw only in dimly programmatic form. Our new

interpretation, accordingly, has the potential not only to change our map of the sociological terrain (Dewey

1988 [1925], p. 125) but also to stimulate new lines of investigation. Toward this end, we proceed in four

major steps. In the first, we present in bold strokes the classical pragmatist ideas of Peirce, James, Mead,

Dewey, plus Addams, focusing on the three themes we mentioned earlier. In the second, we show how


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Garfinkels work surpasses even that of the pragmatists in developing the larger implications and promise

of those themes. Then, in the third and fourth sections, 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. In the conclusion, we step back from this account to ponder the

broader significance of the connections we have explored between pragmatism and ethnomethodology.

Part One: Pragmatism

What are the key ideas of pragmatist thought, at least insofar as they bear upon our story regarding

Garfinkel and ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation analysis? What important

business does this tradition of thought leave unfinished? In what respects did it stall in its development,

conceptually as well as empirically, and why? What contributions do prominent figures of the pragmatist

revival make to completing the unfinished business of classical American pragmatism, and in what respects

do they, too, ultimately come short? To consider pragmatism in such a lightthat is, in terms of the

problems it leaves unresolvedis in itself already an endeavor in the pragmatist spirit. For pragmatism is

about nothing if not the creative solving of problems in experience through the application of reflective

intelligence. Blockages to habitual courses of thought and actionand creative or reconstructive ways of

addressing such blockages, typically in the medium of languageare among the core themes of the

pragmatist tradition. In this opening section, we discuss these same themes in broad outlines. We do not

falsely assume an across-the-board unity to the pragmatist tradition. There are many differences and

divergences among the pragmatists. For purposes of the present paper, however, it is less important to

probe into those discrepancies than to stress, in general terms, the overarching commonalities. We do not

mean, either, to restrict the universe of classical pragmatistsor their more recent followersin invidious


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fashion to the cast of characters mentioned above. We wish only to invoke the thinkers most necessary for

presenting the three sets of ideas we have highlighted, and, in so doing, also to suggest, in preliminary

fashion, how pragmatism fell short in developing them. Attending to these tasks sets up our discussionin

later sectionsof how the ethnomethodological tradition can be said to carry forward the original mission

of pragmatist thought.

The Return to Experience

The first of the topics of special relevance to us is the pragmatists return to experience. All

pragmatism proceeds from the notion that the Western tradition, which includes not only philosophy but

also the philosophic assumptions underpinning modern science (both natural and social), erroneously

directs us away from lived experience, from concrete practices, toward theoretical abstractions. In two of

the founding texts of pragmatism, The Fixation of Belief (1992 [1877]) and How to Make Our Ideas

Clear (1992 [1878]), Peirce asserted the primacy of this realm of practice. He argued that Doubt or

confusions arising in experience are what occasion thought in the first place and that, in turn, the results of

thought must always be subjected to the pragmatic test: Consider what effects, which might conceivably

have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these

effects is the whole of our conception of the object (Peirce 1992 [1878], p. 132). James reaffirmed this

basic thrust of Peirces pragmatic maxim, despite giving it a somewhat individualist slant in some of his

writings, including Pragmatism (1981 [1907]). In his view, practiceexperiencesupplies the impetus

for all inquiry; it also reveals the meaning of ideas and provides the ultimate test of their truth. The whole

originality of pragmatism, the whole point of it, is its concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness,

and returns and ends with it (James 1981 [1909], pp. 281-82). (In the subsequent section, we show how

this quotation aptly serves as an epigraph for Garfinkels ethnomethodology.) In later writings, James

supplemented these insights with what he termed a doctrine ofradical empiricism, according to which


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there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed again,

pure experience (James 2003 [1912], p. 2). As James conceived of it, pure experience encompasses not

only the things themselves but also the relations between things, not only material reality but also

consciousness, not only the objects of thought but thought itself. Thus, conceptual dualisms such as those

between subject and object, theory and practice, mind and nature, or ideal and material should be avoided

as pernicious and misleading. In so inveighing against the tendency to posit false divisions inside a

seamless pure experience, James sought to further pragmatisms aim of moving beyond the fruitless

abstractions so deeply engrained in the philosophy of his day.

Such an endeavor is central to Deweys work as well. InExperience and Nature (1988 [1925], pp.

18-19), he agreed emphatically with James that pure experience is double-barrelled: [I]t recognizes in

its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an

unanalyzed totality. Thing and thought . . . refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary

experience. (As we shall see, Garfinkel spoke in similar tones of the tendency among present-day

sociologists to focus on concepts at the expense of the situated details of practices.) Dewey was critical of

thinkers who remain caught up in such dualisms. What is required for an adequate grasp of experience, he

asserted, is a trans-actional approach, one that involves the seeing together, when research requires it, of

what before had been seen in separations and held severally apart (Dewey and Bentley 1991 [1949], p.

112).4 (In this specific respect, he diverged not at all from Jamess radical empiricism.) How, then, did

Dewey propose to do away with such longstanding divisions? The beginnings of an answer come in one of

his earliest major works. In a classic essay of the pragmatist tradition, The Reflex Arc Concept in

Psychology (1972 [1896], p. 97), Dewey suggested that experience is a comprehensive . . . organic

unity, a sensori-motor coordination, consisting at least as much in action as in knowledge, an organic

circuit in which the contributions of object and subject, stimulus and response, can be seen not as separate


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and complete entities in themselves, but as divisions of labor, functioning factors, within the single concrete

whole. He added that in most of the practices constituting ordinary lived experience, there is little

conscious separation among these elements, as the concrete practices in which we engage flow smoothly in

a continuously ordered sequence of acts, all adapted in themselves and in the order of their sequence, to

reach a certain objective end (Dewey 1972 [1896], p. 104). Sounding, in fact, one of the most distinctive

of pragmatist themes, he stressed the habitual and taken-for-granted nature of our practices, at least those

found in unproblematic circumstances lacking in uncertainty (e.g., what sort of a bright light have we

here?; how am I to complete the organic circuit?). When practices proceed uninterruptedly and without

resistance, their meaningfulness resides deep within them as part of an unbroken coordinated system of

activity, and the validity of objects forming part of those systems goes unquestioned as well.

It is one thing, of course, to call insistently for a return to experience, as Dewey and his fellow

classical pragmatists did. It is another thing entirely to indicate how this might be accomplished. The

classical pragmatists failed to demonstrate how one might actually move beyond the artificial issues they

decried and to return to the things of experienceincluding the very relations or trans-actions that are

also a feature of that experience. They provided lessons in principle but did not indicate a theoretically

informed method by which to proceed.5

Much the same can be said of the more recent figures of the

pragmatist revival. Hilary Putnam, Richard Bernstein, and Richard Rorty, for example, write extensively of

Jamesian radical empiricism and Deweyan trans-actionalism and devote much attention to subverting the

false distinctionse.g., facts and values; thought and actionthat continue to hamper philosophic and

social inquiry. They engage vigorously as well with a wide range of substantive issues in social thought.

However, as professional philosophers, they are unable to do more than point in the right direction by

means of reasoned argumentation. To be sure, Cornel West, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Shannon

Sullivan, and Nancy Fraser go considerably beyond the aforementioned thinkers in inquiring substantively


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the intentionality of action. In that account, habitual practices are oriented neither to the attainment of

externally determined goals, as in the rationalist means-end model of action, nor to the carrying out of rules

of action, as in the normativist model of Parsonian structural-functionalism, but to aspirations located, in

Joass (1996), p. 158) words, in our bodies. It is the bodys capabilities, habits, and ways of relating to the

environment which form the background to all conscious goal-setting, in other words, to our intentionality.

We extend Joass insight and ideas by suggesting how the latter can serve as a stimulus to empirical

research. As we show in the next section, pragmatist action theory anticipates something very much like

the perspective on real-time human conduct associated with Garfinkels writings.

Dewey recognized that an account of action restricted solely to habitual practices can only go so

far. Sometimes, he observed, habits come up against situations that present a blockage or a dilemma. In

respect to such circumstances, when the way to proceed is unclear, pragmatists came up with some of their

most important insights. When Peirce mentioned Belief, for instance, he counterposed it to a condition he

termed Doubt, an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the

state of [B]elief. The irritation of Doubt, he asserted, causes a struggle to attain a state of [B]elief. I shall

term this struggle inquiry (Peirce 1992 [1877], p. 114). Dewey, too, devoted careful attention to this state

of indecision. In The Logic of Judgments of Practice, he pointed out that all practical reasoning begins

with a problematic experience, a fork in the road, which it attempts experimentally to resolve. Thinking

is what occurs most especially in situations where regular channels of action no longer suffice, where

conflicts or ruptures in practice cause perplexity.6 [I]ncompleteness is not psychical, he (1985 [1915],

p.15) wrote. Something is there, but what is there does not constitute the entire objective situation. . . .

The logical implication is that of a subject-matter as yet unterminated, unfinished, or not wholly given.

Something must be donesome practical judgment arrived atthat will render the situation settled and

resolved. Actors must systematically examine the facts of their situation, critically observe what is before


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them, seek to clarify what is causing them perplexity, and attend to it. Such a thought process, Dewey

(1988 [1920], p. 161) remarked, is not aimless, random, miscellaneous, but purposeful, specific, and

limited by the character of the trouble undergone. By means of it, theory can be brought back into a more

meaningful connection with practice, such that the latter no longer proceeds by trial and error or in

accordance with custom or authority, but rather, calls for guidance upon a knowledge that has, for its part,

foresaken the quest for certainty. Creative problem-solving, wrote Dewey (1988 [1929], pp. 169-70),

effects an exchange of reason for intelligence. . . . A man is intelligent not in virtue of having reason which

grasps first and indemonstrable truths about fixed principles, . . . but in virtue of his capacity to estimate the

possibilities of a situation and to act in accordance with his estimate. (Or, as Cooley [1966 [1918], p. 351]

expressed it, The test of intelligence is the power to act successfully in new situations.) Intelligence is

brought to bear upon even the most mundane of everyday practices. Habits can themselves be made more

intelligent. And the social conditions of the production and reproduction of those habits can also be

reconstructed. This might entail an extended process of reform, one aided and abetted by a critical

pragmatic science.

While Dewey provided perhaps the most fully developed account of perplexity leading to

intelligent reconstruction, it was Jane Addams who investigated most deeply the phenomenon of perplexity

itself, turning it into a topic in its own right. For her, perplexity was not merely intellectual but emotional

and existential, not merely a problem out there, objective and actual, but an experience of internal strain,

bafflement, and puzzlement. InDemocracy and Social Ethics (2002 [1902]), she provided many examples

of such perplexity, centering around breakdowns in understanding that emerge when persons involved in

one course of life encounter others whose course is very different fromand alien totheir own. For

instance, when a charity worker visits her clients, she is bewildered by what she finds in the everyday lives

of these tenement dwellers; the charity worker finds herself still more perplexed when she comes to


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consider such problems as those of early marriage and child labor, for she cannot deal with them according

to economic theories, or according to the conventions which have regulated her own life (Addams 2002

[1902], p. 21). Such conditions of perplexity provoke inquiries meant somehow to address them, responses

that can be reflexive, mechanical, and dysfunctional, or, alternatively, intelligent and practically effective.

The latter category of responses entails putting ones pregiven morality to the pragmatic test and moving

forward with new taken-for-granteds, habits, and dispositions; it entails uniting practice with theory and

aiming genuinely to remove or resolve the original disturbance and to resume the flow of life. Thus, the

charity worker discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and it takes but a little time

to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class, which

fail to fit the bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people (Addams 2002 [1902], p. 33). It

should be plain here that what Addams described resonates deeply with the kinds of incongruities that have

been fruitful for ethnomethodological inquiry, a matter to be explored at greater length below. For what she

deemed specific troubles of moral adjustment are for ethnomethodology particular instances of a more

fundamental problem, that of a chasm between abstract rules, standards, and conventions, on the one hand,

and situated practices, on the other. This problem is one that neither Addams nor her fellow pragmatists

were equipped theoreticallyor methodologicallyto explore.

The Importance of Language

The final pragmatist theme of special significance to us is the theme of language orlinguistically

mediated problem-solving. Their engagement with the topic began, like almost everything else in that

tradition, with Peirce. Saussure (1959 [1916], p. 71) is well known for having propounded a dualistic

understanding of the sign, seeing it as a combination of signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept).

Not only did Saussure assign this double entity a bifurcated structure; he also depicted it as static and

inert, for signifiers, while arbitrarily related to signifieds, were, in his view, fixed, not free, with respect


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to the linguistic community that uses [them]. Peirce, by contrast, took as his unit of analysis not dyadic

structures but a triadic process of sign, object, and interpretant. A sign, he (1932 [c. 1897], p. 228)

wrote, is something which stands to somebody for something. . . . It addresses somebody, that is, creates in

the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign, in an unending chain or

succession of interpretations. With this focus on addressivity, Peirce made the theme of fundamental

sociality one of the key ideas of the pragmatist tradition. He also stimulated, with his emphasis on semiosis

as an ongoing, open-ended dynamic in which meaning is infinitely deferred (Searle 2005 [1994], p. 725),

important later work on indexical expressions, from Bar-Hillel (1954) to Garfinkel himself (1967;

Garfinkel and Sacks 1970); these expressions depend, for their very sense, on a grasp of their pragmatic

context, including knowledge of the persons saying them, their time and place of expression, and so forth.

Since Peirce restricted himself to logical or philosophical analyses, however, no tools were developed for

empirical inquiry into many key issues pertaining to such expressions. Finally, Peircessemiotic, with its

stress on both addressivity and indexical relations, led in the direction of a theory of linguistic-semiotic

community, a community of interpreters or inquirers (Peirce 1992 [1868], pp. 52, 54-55). In such a

community, dialogue can proceed in respect to the interpretation and adjudication of competing truth-

claims, and a settlement of opinion can ultimately be brought about as the result of investigation carried

sufficiently far (1992 [1878], p.139; see also 1992 [1868]). This communitarian dimension to Peirces

thought also remained primarily logical-philosophical in character. Importantly, however, it prefigured and

pointed the way to the more socially grounded arguments of the later pragmatists and pragmatism-inspired

thinkers, including Apel and Habermas, whose views of discourse ethics are influenced by Peirce. That

communitarian dimension also anticipated ethnomethodologys thrust into the empirical sphere of actual

social relations.

Dewey, too, developed prominently the idea of language as crucial to collective efforts to resolve


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perplexities and to arrive at more warranted and practically effective opinions. To begin with, language

made possible, in his (1988 [1925], p. 132) view, that preliminary discourse termed thinking which

allows actors to reconsider, revise, and reconstruct problematic contexts. Events when once they are

named lead an independent and double life. In addition to their original existence, they are subject to ideal

experimentation; their meanings may be infinitely combined and re-arranged in imagination, and the

outcome of this inner experimentationwhich is thoughtmay issue forth in interaction with crude or raw

events. Indeed, this internal discourse makes events infinitely more amenable to management. But, as

Dewey further pointed out, linguistically mediated problem-solving is at the core not only of thinking but

indeed of all association. It is much more than a vehicle for storing and communicating knowledge; it is an

ensemble of means for the coordination of activity oriented toward the reconstruction of incomplete or

indeterminate situations. Dewey made this clear, for example, when he (1988 [1922], p. 57) observed that

language first comes into the world as a form of interaction involved in making demands for food or social

contact, operat[ing] not to perpetuate the forces which produced it but to modify and redirect them. And

elsewhere (1988 [1925] p. 139), too, he declared: Language, signs and significance, come into existence

not by intent and mind but . . . in gestures and sound. The story of language is the story of the use made of

these occurrences; a use that is eventual as well as eventful. These assertions about language make

perfectly clear why he accorded it such significance in his writings on collective problem-resolution,

including his important work, The Public and its Problems (1988 [1927]). Notice, however, Deweys use

of the word eventual in the above quotation. It suggests that the meaning of utterances or language in use

develops in real time and is emergent. This seems to mean, by implication, that we need to understand

language as it exists in the concrete dynamic interactions of people actually speaking with one another.

Unfortunately, while Dewey highlighted the importance of concrete behavior and its temporal dimension,

one finds only illustrative examples in his writingscertainly no systematic investigations of actual


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linguistic or conversational practices. In other words, Dewey wished to elucidate how cooperative inquiry

and associative behavior are possible. However, after engagingly thematizing the important social

characteristics of language, he curiously abandoned the pursuit, even though it would have greatly furthered

his understanding of the activities with which he was so concerned (cf. Colapietro 2009, p. 3).

Language, finally, was central to Meads understanding of the capacity of humansthrough mind,

thought, and what he termed reflective intelligenceto control their responses and to adjust and redirect

their experience. Indeed, mind itself, as he pointed out inMind, Self, and Society (1934), has to do in its

fundamental nature with language. In a familiar passage of that work, Mead (1934, p. 76) addressed the

question as to how a sequence of acts can become a human and meaningful experience. His answer drew

from Peirces earlier triadic theory of semiosis, conceptualizing meaning as a relation among three phases

of the social act: a gesture of one organism, the adjustive response of another organism, then the completion

of a given act. This threefold relationship constitutes the matrix, Mead (1934, p. 77) wrote, within

which meaning arises, adding that in this threefold relationship, any gesture or linguistic sign has an action

component to it, insofar as its design indicates a response and a resultant collaborative social act: The act

or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning which it

has (Mead 1934, pp. 77-78). Meads insights were of great methodological import and, as we shall see,

conversation analysis would go on systematically to explore them. For his own part, Mead moved from

this account of meaning to a developmental view of language, as encapsulated by his famous metaphors of

play, the game, and the generalized other. Along the way, he also developed a theory of intelligent

conduct, using the term, much as Dewey did, to highlight delayed responses to signs in outward

experience, pauses that make possible the implicit initiation of a number of possible alternative responses .

. . [and] the exercise of intelligent or reflective choice in the acceptance of that one . . . which is to be carried

into overt effect (Mead 1934, p. 98). Finally, Mead (1934, p. 388) spoke, like James, Peirce and Dewey


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before him, of concrete interactional processes in which actors take each others interests into account and,

in light of those interests, collectively work out courses of action aimed at reconstructing their problematic

life-contexts. Despite these emphases on sociality and collaborative problem-solving, howeverand

somewhat like James failure to stress sufficiently the inescapable environment of social communication

in which human opinions and interests are embedded (Colapietro 2009, p. 3)he continued to struggle

against cognitivist tendencies in his thinking. He also remained, like the other pragmatists, content to dwell

at the level of abstractionfor instance, pointing toward a concrete investigation of language in use while

not following that path himself. In the pages ahead, we shall have occasion to explore these shortcomings.

Many pragmatists since the time of the classical generation have made important contributions to

our understanding of language and the accomplishment of social order. One is C. Wright Mills, who, in the

1940s, elaborated a theory of vocabularies of motives according to which the motives for human conduct,

when articulated to others or to oneself, always and necessarily are expressed in the terms of a common

language. Millss theory was a classic bridge to empirical sociology, although its core insights have been

more extensively developed, not by Mills himself, but by researchers in the ethnomethodologal tradition, as

we shall see. Pragmatist philosophers associated with what has been described as the linguistic turn in the

human sciences also made important contributions. One thinks here, for example, of the late Richard

Rorty, for whom language was a category of central importance. Even more salient is Robert Brandom,

whoseMaking It Explicit(1994) has been hailed as a work of signal importance to the contemporary

philosophy of language. As Bernstein (2007, p. 17) explains it, Ever since Charles Morris introduced his

famous distinction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, it has become a virtual dogma among analytic

philosophers that there is a clear hierarchal ordering among these three disciplines. . . . [P]ragmatics is

dependent on semantics, and semantics is dependent on syntax. Now Brandom radically challenges this

dogma and turns things upside down. His basic thesis is that pragmatics has explanatory primacy. . . . This


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demands developing a comprehensive understanding of social discursive practices. Brandom too,

however, remains in the end highly abstract; failing to cross the divide separating theoretical from empirical

investigation of language. We shall explore in greater depth below the contributions he makesand how

ethnomethodology and, in particular, conversation analysis can complement them.

Part Two: Garfinkel and Classical Ethnomethodology

The conventional story of twentieth-century philosophy has it that pragmatism went into eclipse

after World War II with the rise of analytic philosophy and the concomitant professionalization of the

discipline. Relatedly, the conventional story of twentieth-century sociology posits that, while pragmatism

exerted an early influence through the Chicago School, it too, by mid-century, was left largely behind, with

the partial exception of symbolic interactionism. Specifically, Parsonian structural-functionalism and a new

causalist approach to quantitative data analysis became hegemonic and relegated pragmatism-inspired

work to the status of a minor footnote in the history of sociological theory. In recent decades, these

declinist narratives have been vigorously disputed, as contributors to the pragmatist revival have

reinterpreted the internal histories of the two disciplines and found a continuing strength and vitality to

pragmatist impulses, a continuity and persistence of the pragmatic legacy (Bernstein 1992, p. 817). In the

case of philosophy, it is now argued that, rather than viewing the analytic movement as representing a

sharp rupture with pragmatism, we should understand that its most enduring significance is contributing to

an ongoing pragmatic legacy (Bernstein 1992, p. 823). And in the case of sociology, pragmatism is seen as

living on in several distinct currents of theory and research (as mentioned earlier in this article). We now

know that the story of pragmatist sociology after the late 1930s is a far richer one than at first realized.7 Not

everyone, however, can be said to be carrying the pragmatist torch in self-conscious fashion. Some only do


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so implicitly. And some pursue pragmatist themes only in the sense of gravitating intuitively toward the

same questions and same answers as the original pragmatists. In the case of Garfinkel, in fact, this

engagement with themes originally laid out by pragmatism unfolds in the midst of strenuous arguments

actually in criticism of the pragmatists themselves. While Garfinkel can be said to have been captivated by

the three key themes of pragmatism we have emphasized, he also recognized that pragmatism has some

unfinished business to attend to, a promise that will remain unrealized so long as its pronouncements,

abstract and philosophical as they generally are, fail to lead us, in good pragmatist fashion, to tangible forms

of inquiry. In the first part of the present section, we explore in depth Garfinkels own explicit responses to

pragmatism. In the remaining two parts, we turn to his actual agenda for ethnomethodological research,

stressing there its recovery of experience, the first of the themes developed above. Discussion of his

engagement with our two other themes is reserved for the later major sections of this essay.

Garfinkels Early Engagement with Pragmatism

The early period of Garfinkels intellectual formation, extending from the mid-1930s through the

early 1950s, coincides closely with the passing of the generation of the classical American pragmatists. 8

Between his college years at the University of Newark and his graduate studies at North Carolina and

Harvard, the halcyon days of pragmatism finally drew to a close and the ideas of Peirce and his successors

fell, if not into eclipse, then at least into a lower profile. How familiar was Garfinkel with pragmatism then?

It is difficult to imagine a well-read young sociologist, especially one with a taste for philosophy, not

feeling deeply the power of pragmatism during those years. But beyond such speculation, there is indirect

biographical reason to believe his knowledge was not inconsiderable, thanks in part to his relations with

certain mentors, teachers, and fellow students. From early on, for example, Garfinkel came into contact

with Philip Selznick, immersed himself in the writings of W.I. Thomas, and was captivated by Florian

Znanieckipragmatists all. He learned as well from Kenneth Burke, whose affinities with pragmatism are


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now being recognized.9 And while at the University of North Carolinas sociology department, he also

was exposed to the spirit of melioristic social reform so prevalent in that milieu.

Garfinkels earliest writings give added evidence of the influence of pragmatism upon his thinking.

They also reveal, however, a simultaneous interest in and growing appreciation of yet another body of

work, namely, Continental phenomenology.10 In his very first publication, Color Trouble (1940), an

observation-based study that won an award when subsequently published as a short story, Garfinkel

examined the dynamics of racial segregation in the Southin particular, the perplexities that arise when a

black woman passenger from New York City refuses to move to the back of the bus when the bus driver

orders her to do so. What Garfinkel (1941, p. 105) observed of a policeman on the scenethat certain

blockages had presented themselves with which he felt insecure in dealingapplies to his other characters

as well: they were forced to engage in situated reasoning when ordinary courses of action came to a halt.

The story became, in effect, a study of situated problem-solving undertaken by different characters as their

taken-for-granted habitual modes of conduct were disrupted. While showing an affinity with pragmatism

at least in this respect, Color Trouble may also indicate an emerging phenomenological orientation on

Garfinkels part. His preoccupation, like that of the pragmatists, was with disruption, its potential for

mutual accommodation and its actual consequences or how the drama is brought to a tragic close and the

participants restore an ordinary structure to the situation. But Garfinkel also added a phenomenological

dimension, treating the situation as an epoch or moment of suspension when taken-for-granted solidities

and the stance of unquestioned belief in them can no longer be held. As this happens, the prejudices of the

participants were thrown into relief.

Garfinkels embrace of phenomenology also became evident in his Masters thesis, which explored

differences in the treatment accorded in North Carolina to blacks and whites involved in homicides. The

Negro offender, noted Garfinkel (1949 [1942], p. 380), is an unproblematical figure as far as the white


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court is concerned[:] . . . You never know why one nigger kills another.11

By contrast, the white

offender is a problematical figure . . . in the sense that the court recognizes the legitimacy and necessity for

understanding why the white offender really killed his victim. Despite an arguably pragmatist interest in

(race-specific) perplexities and judgments, he (1949 [1942], p. 376) explicated courtroom reasoning more

directly in phenomenological terms, citing Husserl, Gurwtisch, Schtuz, Cairns, and others, while holding

that actors employ a system of procedures of definition and redefinition of social identities and

circumstances to arrive at their racialized patterns of sentencing.

In a text composed in 1948, just two years after his move to Harvard, Garfinkel (2005) explicitly

engaged with, and positioned himself in respect to, the pragmatist tradition, even as he also embraced, all

the more clearly, the phenomenological way of thinking.12

This difficult and abstract manuscript, which

lays out many of the key ideas of what would later become ethnomethodology, includes several passing

mentions of Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey. On one telling occasion, when Garfinkel was discussing

Parsonss theory of action, he made a quick but sympathetic reference to James. No more than a dozen

social scientists, he (2005 [1948], pp. 139-40) complained, have attempted to push . . . beyond the not

nearly so obvious obviousness of the division of objects as concrete and abstract, real and ideal . . . [,] to that

rational ground where Jamess promise of a radical empiricism is indeed fulfilled. Immediately thereafter,

however, he moved on to discuss ideas by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. In another passage,

Garfinkel (2005 [1948], pp. 145-46), referred in passing to Peirceagain, not unfavorablysuggesting

that his own views were in accordance with C.S. Peirces formula (i.e., the pragmatic maxim).

Specifically, he noted, much as a chairs identity consists in the physical manipulations and actions

directed toward it, so too are social identities symbolically constituted in and through the operations by

which [they are] manipulated as [objects] (e.g., oppose, attack, defend, insult, validate . . . ). However,

here as before, he (2005 [1948], pp. 147-48) moved on quickly to develop arguments of a


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phenomenological nature.13 Garfinkel explained that observers define social identities by accounting in

because of and in order to terms for the sequences of different signs that [these identities seem] capable

of generating . . . These termsbecause of and in order tocome directly from the phenomenology

of Alfred Schutz (1967 [1945]). Garfinkel wrestled during these years with Parsonss (1937) theory of the

structure of social action. He sought to provide for structures of experience of wider range than those found

in Parsonss work, to render the theory of action better able to deal with the full panorama of actual and

concrete experience (Heritage, 1984, ch. 2). Toward this end, he preferred phenomenology over

pragmatism, since the former provided him with conceptual tools for showing how the world actually looks

to actors, for revealing the actors universe as an experienced universe (Garfinkel 2005 [1948], p. 117).

It is as if, from Garfinkels own standpoint, pragmatism pointed in the right direction, but only

phenomenology could take us there. (We note later how phenomenology, at least in its cognitivist,

Schutzian, version, proved in the end not completely adequate for his purposes, either.)

Thus it appears that, in this text, Garfinkel moved largely within the intellectual universes of

Parsonian theory (which he criticized) and of Continental phenomenology (which he embraced)and that

only secondarily and slightly did he orient himself to pragmatist thought. On the few other occasions in

which he did make direct reference to pragmatism, he did so in markedly critical tones. Garfinkel

contended that pragmatism takes a non-social view of the motives attributed to actors, seeing them as a

property of individuals rather than of the situations in which they find themselves. For example, he (2005

[1948], pp. 167-68) suggested that Meads notion of the I has something essentialist about it, as if the I

were a kind of concrete biological organism or vessel of motive. Every social relationship will have

its peculiar order of motives that the actors assign to each other while engaged in sequences of action

(Garfinkel (2005 [1948], p. 169). Relatedly, Garfinkel argued that pragmatism accords a false reality to

social roles and to the role-taking process through which actors are said to determine their courses of


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conduct. Living in the vivid present in its ongoing working acts, he (2005 [1948], p. 116) pointed out,

the working self experiences itself as the originator of the ongoing acts, and thus as an undivided total self.

. . . [It is only] when the self in a reflective attitude turns back to the working acts performed [that] this unity

disappears, giving rise to the mistaken idea of role-taking as a contemplative process apart from and

antecedent to the practical realities of working acts. (In a similar vein, he (2005 [1948], p. 192) criticized

Dewey for advancing an erroneous view of the self as a mosaic of roles.) Garfinkel concluded that

pragmatisms approach to action is itself contemplative and theoretical, granting a false reality to

concepts when instead it ought to be investigating real interactions. He seemed, in these instances, not

simply to move from positive references to pragmatism to more systematic uses of phenomenology, but

specifically to express dissatisfaction with the former as a way of thinking about selves, identity,

motivation, and role-taking.14 What are we to make of these critiques, and what might explain them?

For one thing, Garfinkels way of addressing pragmatism in this early text was episodic and

incomplete. It lacked engagement with many of the latters most recognizable contributions, such as its call

for a return to experience, its understanding of habitual action, its concern with perplexity and intelligent

problem-solving (in which theory is brought back together with practice), its approach to language and

semiosis, and its vision of progressive social reform and reconstruction. To the extent that his (2005

[1948]) monograph can be read at all as a critique of pragmatist thought, the study was unsystematic and

avoided a comprehensive understanding of pragmatisms overall intellectual unity and cohesion. But more

importantly, there was something untenable about Garfinkels views of certain aspects of pragmatist

thought. The latter does not counterpose working acts to a purely contemplative orientation in which actors

do not act but merely think. Its point, rather, is that thinking is itself a mode of action, such that to separate

the two is a grievous error that prevents one from seeing how creative problem-solving actually is

undertaken. For Mead, the working self involved in action is aware of originating that action but is


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otherwise engaged in it unreflectively. Its reflective attitude only comes about when that action is

blocked; only then does the self become an object. Indeed, Mead (1964 [1903]) wrote disparagingly of

parallelistic psychology and of its view that psychic components always accompany behavioral action,

and he surely agreed that role-taking is not a contemplative process undertaken apart from and somehow

antecedent to the practical realities of working acts. Pragmatism, then, does not deem the individual rather

than trans-actions the unit of analysis. In fact, this charge better characterizes Blumers symbolic

interactionism, a subjectivistic abridgement of pragmatist thought gaining sway during Garfinkels early

years (and highly visible in his attention space), than it does pragmatism itself. And the direction in which

this line of argument can more fruitfully be developed is a methodological not a theoretical one, focusing

research on concrete in situ interactions rather than on internal processes of mind. Garfinkels arguments

confused, it might be said, the parents with their offspring. Indeed, it is for this reasonand not only on

account of the genuine strengths of Continental phenomenologythat he was possibly too quick to

dispense with the home-grown alternative.

Finally, there is the consideration that phenomenology itself, at least in the Schutzian variant with

which Garfinkel was engaged during these years, resonates with at least certain aspects of classical

American pragmatism. To take just one example, Schutz drew explicitly upon James when developing his

account, in On Multiple Realities (1967 [1945]), of finite provinces of meaning, while there and in

other essays (e.g., Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action [1967 (1953)]; Some

Leading Concepts of Phenomenology [1967 (1945)]), he developed connections as well between his

phenomenology of the life-world and Meads writings, although he also criticized those writings.15

Of

particular importance to Schutz was Meads recognition of the importance of the manipulatory area

(Schutz (1967[1945], pp. 223-226) and what Schutz called the world of working within ones reach. This

world was structured temporally in other ways that Schutz defined phenomenologically and cognitively


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and that Garfinkel came to examine empirically and in terms of embodiment. While phenomenology was

in many respects different from pragmatism, it should come as no surprise that the early Garfinkel moved

toward it even as he continued to hold onto insights bearing a deep affinity with classical pragmatist

thought.16

To grasp more fully the principles underlying his fateful move, of course, it would be necessary

to study Garfinkels development from a sociology of ideas perspective, mapping the state of the

sociological field during his formative years, investigating his locations within and trajectory across that

space, and reflecting on the choices then available to him for professional advancement and elaboration of

his intellectual perspective. That, however, is a topic for a very different kind of investigation than the one

we are essaying here.17

Members Methods and the Recovery of Practice

Despite Garfinkels impulse to downplay the overlap of his insights with those of pragmatism, he

actually went on in his subsequent writings to take up some of the fundamental concerns of the pragmatist

tradition, its unfinished conceptual and empirical business that requires attending to. Foremost among

these was the return to experience. Whereas the pragmatists failed to give us purchase on the actual

concrete procedures whereby actors accomplish the meaningful, patterned, and orderly character of

everyday life, Garfinkel began, after the mid-1950s, to analyze systematically the members methods

whereby the orderliness of everyday life is ongoingly achieved.18 The specification of these methods, the

systematic charting of lived experience, became the signal contribution of his lifes work. In a number of

papers published over the span of more than a decade, many of them collected in Studies in

Ethnomethodology, he enunciated this new program of research. In language strikingly reminiscent of

Dewey but drawing heavily on Schutz (1971 [1943], Garfinkel (1967, p. 277) insisted that the scientific

rationalities are neither properties of nor sanctionable ideals of choices exercised within the affairs governed

by the presuppositions of everyday life. Indeed, he continued, the problems encountered by [many


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conventional] researchers and theorists . . . may be troubles of their own devising. The[se] troubles would

be due . . . to the insistence on conceiving actions in accordance with scientific conceits instead of looking

to the actual rationalities that persons behaviors in fact exhibit in the course of managing their practical

affairs. If Garfinkel here was able simultaneously to draw heavily on Schutz and to sound themes

reminiscent of the pragmatists, it is because Schutz himself (1976 [1943], pp. 77, 84), in the very paper

cited, drew theoretical ideas from the classical American pragmatists. Garfinkel (1996, 2002) later

emphasized his own heterodox way of thinking as a return to Durkheim rather than to pragmatism, as a

recovery of the neglected wisdom in Durkheims aphorism regarding the concreteness of social facts.19

Drawing on the phenomenologists, he directed a powerful challenge to the two dominant sociological

perspectives of the post-war eraParsonian structural-functionalism and quantitative data analysis

claiming that both neglect the specific processes through which social facts are locally and endogenously

produced. In various places, however, Garfinkel (e.g., 1988) also effectively sounded pragmatist themes,

charging that these postwar sociologies elide practical action by conceptualizing it as unstable and

uncertain, as a stream of experience needing always to have order bestowed on it by means of theoretical

constructions such as rules or models, instead of its being an order already coeval with the very existence

and presence of social action. In his critical assessment, as in pragmatisms critiques of Reason, conceptual

sociological thought was seen as standing over and above experience and as claiming a false superiority to

it.

Garfinkel concurred with the pragmatists on another key point as well: The world of pure

experience cannot be understood in terms of the dualist frameworks of modern epistemology, ways of

thinking that draw a sharp dividing-line between subject and object. He acknowledged that actors

themselves have a dualist or objectivist view of the worldthat is, in their mundane reasoning (to invoke

Pollners [1987] phrase), they conceive the world before them as obdurately realbut he added that actors


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produce this sense of objectivity by means of various procedures or methods and that they do so all the

time, with no time out. Actors coordinate themselves, in other words, not by way of a common system of

symbols (i.e., by thinking alike), but by actively achieving a sense of knowing things in common and of

having the same perspective were they to change positions with one another. From a members point of

view, social facts are, indeed, objective, but paradoxically that facticity is the result of actors ongoing

concerted work. Objectivity is achieved. Garfinkel thus went to the roots of the objectivity of social facts.

He underscored the practical efforts, not only in everyday settings (the special province of Pollners

investigations), but also in collective enterprises such as modern science (including ethnomethodology

itself as a science), required to maintain the assumption of an external reality with transcendant properties.

Objective statements are generated in both everyday and scientific contexts, but they must be seen as

nothing other than indexical expressions whose verifiable sense is an achieved feature related to accounting

practices in the settings of which they are a part. Garfinkel specified a number of such practices, including

ad-hocing, which occurs when instructions are only partial and actors take the left-out steps on their own

to fulfill criteria of objectivityI cant categorize this particular paper, but Ill give it a Band

glossing, which occurs in the coding of ambiguous events, such as suicides. (Yet another practice

involves creating narratives to fit ones [scientific] data, as when one anticipates how a story will be used by

various parties: How do I have to write up the account for those who will read it?) In uncovering these

and other practices, Garfinkel showed how primordial divisions in pure experience are actually achieved.

His program of ethnomethodological inquiry emerged, in this sense, as an important elaboration upon

Jamesian (and Deweyan) radical empiricism.

Much like Dewey as well, Garfinkel supplemented these insights with a careful inquiry into the

ways in which actors continually interpret, contextualize, and find underlying patterns, meanings, and

unities in the objective facts before them. His inquiry was fully consistent, moreover, with Gurwitschs


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(1964, p. 234) appreciation of James (1890[1905], pp. 196ff.) injunction to avoid the psychologists

fallacythat is, in discussing a state of mind from the psychologists point of view, to avoid foisting into

its own ken matters that are only there for ours. Following gestalt theory and phenomenological

psychology, Gurwitsch (1964) explored how actors do not build things up in the natural and social worlds

piecemeal but assemble them into gestalt contextures. That is, they experience them as already there and

constituted; to take but a simple example (Gurwitsch, 1964, pp. 240-42), when a navigator discovers land, it

is first seen as a vague and somewhat indeterminate coastline or island and only secondarily and

progressively in terms of its detail. Actors accord to social objects, too, and to complex scenes of

interaction, a gestalt-like character. How does this happen? Garfinkel (1967, ch. 3) spoke here of a

documentary method of interpretation, in which an actual appearance [is treated] as the document of,

as pointing to, as standing on behalf of a presupposed underlying pattern. Not only is the underlying

pattern derived from its individual documentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in

their turn, are interpreted on the basis of what is known about the underlying pattern. Each is used to

elaborate the other. Garfinkel also recognized, as Wieder (1974, pp. 187-88, 200) has pointed out, that

these individual documentary evidences are often indexical expressions (e.g., accounts of actions) that,

accordingly, have no self-evident or self-explanatory sense. Instead, the utterances as pieces have a

sense as constituent parts of the setting in the manner that a constituent part of a gestalt-contexture has

functional significance. Achieving the gestalt requires actors work, of course, and it puts into question any

conventional dualism of account and setting, subject and object. One might recall here the Deweyan idea

of an organic circuit, in which the stimulus is not outside or external to the response. As Dewey made

clear, actors response is into the stimulus, helping to constitute it. In gestalt terminology, the constituted

whole provides forex post facto derivation of stimulus as well as response. What especially prefigures

hereand resonates withthe above insights of early ethnomethodology is the implication that the gestalt-


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like character of objects and interactions is a practical achievement. Indeed, it points even beyond early

ethnomethodology (and Schutzian phenomenology) in its view that this achievement has bodily and

concerted dimensions and is not merely cognitive.20 In his later writings, Garfinkel moved to embrace that

very insight. InEthnomethodologys Program (2002, chs. 1, 8), he stressed that actors orientation toward

objects (e.g., ringing phones), is an embodied orientation, and he coined such terms as oriented objects

and coherence of phenomenal fields to highlight, in his editors (Rawls 2002, p. 32) words, the

embodied character of . . . practices for producing and recognizing the coherence of perception.

One final (and related) feature of Garfinkels return to experience and practical action are his

insights into, not the cognitive coherence of the world, but its normative ordering. As a good Kantian,

Parsons before him had insisted that there is a lawfulness to the moral life, an order ensured by the

following of norms and rules. Garfinkel, by contrastand in this respect he followed Burke (1969 [1945])

and especially Mills (1940)contended that norms are best seen as features of settings and as parts of the

very organization of conduct of those settings, not as causes of that organization in the first place. Settings

teach what one needs to know, practices get done according to what those settings need done, and this takes

place irrespective of what the prevailing norms might be: the ordering capacities embodied in actors

practicesand not the rules themselvesare what is most important (Hilbert 1981). Social settings are

thus already intelligible and orderly, not chaotic and disorganized, and an autochthonous order is already

there, albeit one always and ever in the process of being achieved. From Garfinkels perspective, the

problem with norms and rules was that they are decontextualized: in actual social life, even predictable

activity requires judgmental work. Those who do not undertake such work and operate without common

sensee.g., the actors in Parsonss frameworkare judgmental dopes (Garfinkel 1967, pp. 66-67).

Garfinkel (2002, chs. 1, 5-6) did speak of how actors use rules to help others to learn a procedure. These

instructed actions, however, have praxeological validity only insofar as they pass what can be


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construed as a pragmatic testthat is, insofar as they work or make senseand this is so regardless of

whether activities have been in accord with the rules along the way. (For example, actors drive on the

highway as a profoundly practical matter rather than follow the rules of the road in some mechanical

fashion). Garfinkel suggested that actors use norms and rules to realize whatever organizational purposes

they can be fitted into. As judgmental workers, they tolerate violations to keep the work flow going; they

make exceptions just this time and suspend (rather than break) the rules putatively governing their

actions. (Zimmermans [1970] important early inquiries are dedicated to working out this proposition.)

Norms and rules are significant, in fact, as a way, or set of ways, of causing activities to be seen as

morally, repetitively, and constrainedly organized (Weider 1974, p. 175); they are a constitutive part of the

very activities they purportedly regulate. As such, they manifest the property Garfinkel (1967, ch. 1)

termed reflexivity. In pragmatist terms, norms and rules are important only insofar as they are invokedor

used. Garfinkel went well beyond what the classical American pragmatists were able to achieve in this

regard. Conceptually, he generalized from formal institutionsto which Mills (1940), in particular, had

confined himselfto all putatively norm-governed settings, and substantively, he set up a highly fruitful

and wide-ranging empirical research program. We shall soon see how Sacks and his collaborators (Sacks,

Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) followed him down this path in their own work on turn-taking.

Two Implications of the Recovery of Practice

Throughout all the above discussions, Garfinkel developed two other important themes, one

theoretical and the other methodological. In a theoretical vein, he maintained that the proceduresor

members methodsthrough which social order is produced are themselves nearly always lost sight of by

the actors who engage in them. In this respect, members methods are very much like the tacit, habitual,

and taken-for-granted practices highlighted by the pragmatists (especially Peirce, Dewey, and Mead),

practices that come under conscious reflective scrutiny only when blocked, thwarted, or rendered


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ineffectual.21 The reflexivity accruing to objective properties of settings is uninteresting (Garfinkel

1967, p. 7) to the actors themselves; they remove such properties from visibility. Actors consider the

everyday world objective or just out there; they do not ask ethnomethodological questions. Indeed, if

they did ask such questions about their procedures or otherwise attempted to stabilize them, nothing

would get accomplished and the anomic features of settings would be multiplied (Garfinkel 1967, p.

270).22 So too with moral order and the use of norms and rules. Garfinkel reacted here against the

teleological model of action (Joas 1996) shared by structural-functionalism and rational actor theory, as

well as by various quantitative approaches, which, for lack of having a theory of action of their own, often

formulate their hypotheses in ad hoc fashion. Both structural-functionalism and rational actor theory

ascribe to actors modes of relation to the world something of their own mode of relation to the actors:

namely, an intellectualist orientation. In a manner foretold by Dewey in The Quest for Certainty, these

approaches judge actors rationality by the superior criterion of the theorists own rationality, assigning to

actions that lack sufficient facts or scientificity the character of being emotional or value-driven, that is,

non-rational. (This is evident enough in the case of rational actor approaches. But it applies as well to

Parsonian theory, as Heritage [1984, 1987] has extensively and persuasively argued.) What both

approaches disregard is the distinctive logic of practice, to invoke Bourdieus (1990 [1980]) famous

phrase, a corporeal and unthinking logic that remains wholly outside the terms of a means-end schema or

theoretical reason. While it is true that most sociology depends on various degrees of abstraction or formal

analysis (Garfinkel 1996; 2002, chs. 1, 5), as soon as one moves in that direction one leaves behind the

world of concrete experience, a world that ethnomethodology, like pragmatism, wishes to recover.

Garfinkel took very seriously the workings of practical action. Conceiving of action as comprising an array

of members actual methodic procedures, which in Deweyan terminology are trans-actional, he moved

even beyondpragmatist thinking, since the latter has rather little to say empirically about the practices


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whereby social orderis actively accomplished.

Methodologically, Garfinkel also made a crucial contribution: he developed an actual program for

doing ethnomethodology and for empirically identifying the aforementioned procedures for producing

social order. His great achievement was to convert the Jamesian metaphysics of radical empiricism into a

highly elaborated research agenda, one that maintained, with Heidegger, that the most fruitful approach is

not to ask, What is metaphysics?[,] so that we would then begin by talking aboutmetaphysics, [but]

instead [to] ask a metaphysical question and thereby land ourselves in the midst of metaphysics (Garfinkel

2002, p. 199).23 How did Garfinkel envision empirically exploring the world of haecceities and of

concrete experience? He stressed, above all, that one has to be doing, as a competent participant or

member, what other members of a concrete setting are doing. It is only in this way that one can see what

the practices are that make up the setting and that are features of it by being observable as features. Generic

(or formal) analysise.g., the students were noddingis insufficient. How does one know that they

are students? How does one know that they are nodding? Garfinkel admonished: Do not explain what

others do as a collectivity; first-person narratives are better. Do not say sometimes or usually. Do not

speak in generalities (Garfinkel 2002, p. 203), even when using ethnomethodological terms. Do not say,

even in respect to a single actor, He gestures whenever he makes points. Say instead: When he stated

such-and-such a thing, he made a gesture that could be interpreted as a point. The gestures meaning is

indexical to whatever else is going on in particular in that setting. So if you have a schema in your head of

what certain things mean, it will not get you anywhere in terms of understanding how people do what they

do. Get down to the rich details and the skill involved in the practices. Go for the lively features. Isolate

elements that have some prominence and then describe how they get concretely achieved as

intersubjectively real for the participants. Get hold of their specifics, as opposed to their generics. Such

were Garfinkels practical admonishments. Much about them, again, is reminiscent of the pragmatists


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sensibility. But whereas classical American pragmatism maintained, even in its most empirical moments, a

certain distance from concrete details, Garfinkel moved beyond any lingering theoreticism. Indeed, he

produced a wide variety of recommendations for getting at practices in lived experience that would

otherwise be hard to detect or analyze. It is this contribution that constitutes his enduring legacyand the

most significant means whereby he can be said to have carried forward the unfulfilled agenda of pragmatist

philosophy.

Part Three: Ethnomethodological Studies of Work in the Professions and Science

The above topic of Garfinkels methodological policies leads us directly to the second of the three

pragmatist themes we originally identified: problems and creative problem-solving. Following Schutz

(1967 [1953]), Garfinkel (1963, p. 188) proposed, in his seminal paper, A Conception of, and Experiments

with, Trust as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions, that the perceived normality of events in the

everyday world reflects actors investment in certain tacit and unreflective presumptions, that is, in the

commonsense knowledge made possible by adherence to the attitude of daily life. When actors do notor

cannotinvest in these presumptions, they experience profound difficulties in maintaining the everyday

social scene. Garfinkel also owed a debt to Burke on this score, and hence, indirectly, to the pragmatistsa

fact that became apparent in a much later work (2002, p. 211), in which he spoke approvingly of Burkes

[1969 (1945)] idea of perspective by incongruity. In similar spirit to Burke, he (1963, p. 187) asked in his

Trust paper, what can be done to make for trouble[?] Garfinkel devised social-scientific procedures for

rendering members work visible: the most famous of these were his breaching experiments, which he

originally presented as tutorial exercises or teaching demonstrations for students. These experiments

brought about in participants of social scenes a state of profound disorientationor, to use a term from


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Deweys and Addamss vocabulary, perplexityand yielded the unanticipated additional result (which

might have surprised even the pragmatists) that the regular workings of taken-for-granted practices are

experienced not only as a cognitive but also as a moral obligation (hence the word trust in the essay title).

In Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel introduced yet another approach to the uncovering and

specification of ethno-methods. Examining a real-life situation, that of an intersexed person in pursuit of

a gender changing operation, he argued that blockages to the ordinary unrecognized operation of everyday

practices arise, not from experimental contrivances, but from features already built into (and naturally

occurring in) that situation. Thus, Agnes, who seeks to pass as a woman despite male features to her

anatomy and biography, is forced to act as a practical ethnomethodologist (Garfinkel 1967, p. 180),

thereby experiencing the ordinary taken-for-granted worldspecifically, the dichotomous sex composition

of the normative gender orderas already and profoundly breached and thereby providing unique

insights into how the visibility of anyones gender status is ongoingly accomplished. The model of inquiry

established in this case study became increasingly prevalent, as investigators more and more eschewed

inducing breaches in favor of examining obstructions arising spontaneously in social situations. But in

either case, the similarities between pragmatism and ethnomethodology were highly evident. We focus on

more of these similarities in what follows, contending that pragmatist views on perplexity have a close

analogue in what Garfinkeland later ethnomethodologists of work and sciencerefer to as the shop

floor problem.

The Shop Floor Problem

In the pragmatist tradition, as we have seen, perplexities represent a kind of moral fissure that arises

when one way of life runs up against another, indexing a breach in social relations. For example, when

examining disruptions to common-sense knowledge, Addams directed special attention to sexual, class,

ethnic and other categorical differences between people, along with the disparities in power these can


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involve. She exposed the perplexities that arise, for example, when children (especially daughters, in her

account) become educated and depart from obligations of filial piety to embrace wider social ideals; when

household members employ domestic helpers; when any actor in an industrial or educational enterprise

depreciates the social experience of those who labor to earn wages or become educated; orin the example

we discussed earlierwhen a social worker of one class and educational background confronts a family of

a lower stratum. Garfinkel went about the problem of investigating perplexities in a significantly different

way. He examined instances in which one way of life is articulated in bureaucratic requirements,

procedural specifications, or management plans, while another is what actually happens on the shop floor,

with all its unanticipated circumstances and contingencies. From an ethnomethodological point of view,

any workplace can be filled with the kinds of contingencies, circumstances, particularities, and exigencies

that preoccupied Addamss charity workers, difficulties that defy the abstract plans and expectations of

theorists, managers, designers, and others concerned to stipulate how shop floor courses of action should

flow: the disparity between plans and situated actions, to invoke Suchmans (1987) phrase, is not always

class-based, but it canbe. What Garfinkel emphasized is that this disparity is better conceived as a function

of the shop floor problem than as a discordance between different kinds of social experiences or

backgrounds. That is, he stressed that the source of perplexity is best understood as a discrepancy between

managerially approved ways of recording and tracking performance and the actual skills in detail and

locally organized, lived work of doing a job in real time with the materials and personnel at hand. The

pragmatists fell short in probing empirically the situated methods and practices whereby participants

actually handle such discrepancies and produce order at the local level. Following Garfinkel, by contrast,

ethnomethodologists of work and science have investigated and documented the particular, concrete,

collaborative, and real-time ways in which actors manage, in face of manifold contingencies and

unanticipated circumstances, to carry out the abstract versions of whatever it is that their occupational


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responsibilities might require.24

Before we turn to an assessment of these various ethnomethodological investigations, let us briefy

review Garfinkels own inquiries into the shop floor problem. He began to elucidate the issue (without

specifically labelling it as such) as early as Studies in Ethnomethodology, where he directed close attention

to actors concrete worksite-specific practices, whether these be found in jury rooms, outpatient psychiatric

clinics, or suicide prevention centers. In a later article, The Work of a Discovering Science Construed

with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar, he turned to the nights work, as he called it, of

astronomers engaged in discovering activities. We didnotexamine, he and his co-authors (Garfinkel,

Lynch, and Livingston 1981, pp. 137, 139-41, italics in original) observed, and we want notto examine

the end-point object [i.e., the discovered pulsar] for its correspondence to an original plan. We want to

disregard, we want notto take seriously, how closely or how badly the object corresponds to some original

designparticularly to some cognitive expectancy or to some theoretical modelthat is independent of

their embodied works particular occasions as of which the objects productionthe objectconsists,

only and entirely. Garfinkel and his associates devoted themselves instead to specifying these embodied

practices first time through, local production properties.25 It was only in Ethnomethodologys

Program that Garfinkel discussed the shop floor problem explicitly and at length.26 Dubbing it

Ethnomethodologys discovered topic, he observed there that the practices found in works places, just

there, and with just what equipment and instruments are at hand, in just this building, and in just these

rooms, with just who is there, in just the time that is marked by clock (Garfinkel 2002, pp. 95, 249), can be

the object of tutorial exercises, which attend to the phenomenal field properties of common occurrences

(Garfinkel 2002, pp. 95, 249, 100). Or, he added, they can drive hybrid studies, which are concerned

with properties of work in densely recurrent structures . . . , not occasionally but systematically, and therein

ubiquitously (Garfinkel 2002, p. 100, italics ours). The latter studies require investigators to immerse


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themselves in the work settings they are studying, to become so competent at the work at hand that their

findings will be taken seriously by those occupationally or professionally engaged in it.27 Even with these

recent elaborations, however, Garfinkels insights into the shop floor problem evinced a remarkable

consistency over the decades. Together, they opened up an ambitious new agenda for substantive research.

Garfinkel brought togetherunder one conceptual rubrica wealth of new empirical q

pragmatism and ethnomethodology emirbayer and maynard qualitative sociology.final

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