Ethnomethodology is an approach within sociology that focuses on the way people, as rational actors, make sense of their everyday world by employing practical reasoning rather than formal logic. It  is a recent development in sociology. Its existence as a publicly identified approach dates only from the publication of Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethno methodology in 1967.

Ethno-methodology has attracted considerable attention and criticism within sociology. The impact of Ethno-methodology has stemmed from the radical nature of its ideas. The ideas of ethnomethodology are in a general similar to those of the Symbolic Interactionists. Ethnomethodology draws from and extends the concerns of interactionists such as Blumer and Goffman and the phenomenological projects of Husserl and Schutz

Concept of Ethnomethodology 

Ethnomethodology is concerned with taken for granted aspects of the social world. It concentrates on how people make sense of the everyday aspects of their world and how they make their social environment accountable to themselves. Social actors adopt different roles and different frameworks of meaning in different situations and in so doing construct a variety of rationalities for different situations.

Ethnomethodologists argue that in order to understand the actor’s conception of objects and events, the sociologist must examine the routine, practical activities of everyday life.

Ethnomethodology is a development from symbolic interactionism, particularly Goffman. It attempts to bring together the phenomenology of Schutz and the sociology of Talcott Parsons. Garfinkel introduced the term Ethnomethodology and published his first book ‘Studies in Ethnomethodology’ in 1967. Ethnomethodology can be located very specifically. It started in the 1960s in Berkeley through a series of seminars. Growing out of ‘late’ symbolic interactionism it was more influenced by Goffman than the ageing and less influential Blumer.

Bogdan and Taylor (1975) state that ethnomethodology is about the process by which people make sense out of the situations in which they find themselves. For ethnomethodologists the meanings of actions are always ambiguous and problematic for people in specific situations. Ethnomethodologists examine the ways people apply abstract rules and commonsense understandings in situations in order to make actions appear routine, explicable and ambiguous. Meanings are then practical accomplishments on the part of members of a society.

Douglas (1967) has studied how coroners designate deaths as suicides. This requires the use of commonsense understandings by coroners to establish intention on the part of the victim. Coroners put together certain clues and come up with a ‘suicide for all practical purposes’.

Ethnomethodologists bracket or suspend their own common-sense assumptions to study how common-sense is used in everyday life. (e.g. Garfinkel’s experiment). Through an examination of common-sense the ethnomethodologists hope to understand how people ‘go about the task of seeing, describing, and explaining order in the world in which they live’

Ethnomethodology uses a variety of ethnographic techniques. Usually direct observation is via non-participant observation. Conservational Analysis, the ‘documentary method’ and ‘ethnomethodological experiments’ are also used.

Ethnomethodology has tended to use ‘experiments’ to prove its relevance.

The aim of the experiments were to show that,

(a) People interacted on the basis of a shared set of presuppositions

(b) They became frustrated when these did not operate

(c) The world was made accountable to the subject in terms of these taken-for-granted

(d) People operated with different rationalities in different contexts, i.e. the notion of multiple rationalities

Analytical view of Ethnomethodology 

• The accumulated commonsense of generation results in pattern of behavioral topicalities. Social order is dependent upon people behaving in a commonsense way. Thus, social interaction must be interpreted in terms of these commonsense meanings, however for ethnomethodologist the basic problem of Sociology goes back even further than this.
• They begin with the assumption that society exists only in so far as members perceive its existence. So member’s view of social reality must be understood. But sociologists must also be concerned with processes by which people come to establish meanings in social phenomena.
• They say that the aim of sociology should not be simply to identify and record the meanings that people have ascribed to situation but to understand the ways in which they generate those meanings in the first place.
• The idea that it is important to understand how the world looks to those who live in it is approved of by these sociologists, but they argue that the final emphasis should be on the ways in which the members of society come to see their world in the ways they do.
• Harold Garfinkel and Circourel are some of the important Ethnomethodologists. Since most meanings are transmitted through symbols, sociologists who want to study the interpreted procedures which members of the society use to attribute meaning typically focus their attention upon speech exchanges in which the participants are involve in making sense of each other talk.
• The emphasis is upon the study of ways in which people in actual situation of interaction come to see what the other person is meaning. Circourel’s study of Juvenile Delinquency is an example where he traces the way in which young people come to be categorized as juvenile delinquents by the police, probationary officers and courts so on.