Ethnomethodology — survey: origins, its relation to ethnography, and development

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id	marginalia-013
title	Ethnomethodology — survey: origins, its relation to ethnography, and development
date	2026-08-21
published	2026-08-21
kind	survey (literature survey)
issue	30

Ethnomethodology

A survey note. The question: where did ethnomethodology come from? What exactly is its relationship to "ethnography" (same ethno- prefix, yet the two have long refused to get along)? And how did it develop afterwards? The answer, up front: it is not a "method" but a research programme about how social members locally produce social order; its name is borrowed directly from ethnoscience (it studies "folk" classifications and practices, much like ethnobotany); it shares the interpretive tradition with ethnography but has long stood opposed to it over disputes such as "method vs. phenomenon" and "indexicality vs. durable symbols," only recently moving toward a compromise called "ethnomethodological ethnography."

1. Origins: Garfinkel and the birth of ethnomethodology

• The founder is Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011), an American sociologist who taught at UCLA from 1954 to 1987 and remained an emeritus professor until his death in 2011. The foundational text is Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967).
• The term was coined in 1954, while Garfinkel was preparing a paper for the American Sociological Association (ASA) annual meeting on jury deliberations. The backdrop was the University of Chicago's "American Jury Project" (led by Fred Strodtbeck). The famous anecdote: Strodtbeck wanted to apply Bales' small-group interaction coding, but committee member Edward Shils objected — "with Bales' coding we'll certainly learn what makes a jury a small group; but we want to know what makes them a jury." Garfinkel's ethnomethodology was precisely a response to that complaint: it studies the common-sense methods by which members locally produce "being a jury" (establishing facts, chaining evidence, judging witness reliability, organising speaking order, deciding guilt or innocence…).
• The critique of Parsons: Already in his Harvard dissertation (1952, supervised by Talcott Parsons), Garfinkel sought to sidestep Parsons' grand theory of "deriving a general social system from analysis of experience structures." Ethnomethodology does not presume the "objective reality of social facts"; it treats that very objective reality as the phenomenon to be studied.
• Schutz's phenomenology: The deepest influence was Alfred Schutz — for the actor, intersubjectivity is first and foremost a practical problem to be solved continuously in interaction. Garfinkel later revised much of Schutz.
• The accounting background: Garfinkel read economics as an undergraduate at the University of Newark (now Rutgers), majoring in accounting; a course on the "Theory of Accounts" first made him realise that "official categories" are socially constructed. This directly gave rise to the core EM concept of accountability — social action is organised so that it is "observable-and-reportable."
• The etymology ethno–method–ology: ethno = a specific socio-cultural group (say, a local community of surfers); method = the methods and practices that group uses in everyday activity; ology = the systematic description of those methods and practices. The key analogy is ethnoscience — ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, ethnomathematics, ethnomusicology — which studies "folk"/native classifications and practices without presuming modern academic categories are the template.
• Marginality and "double consciousness": Turowetz & Rawls (2020) argue that Garfinkel's marginal experience as a Jew in a white-dominated world made him aware early on that "two social worlds follow different rules," and that an outsider cannot transport the expectations of one world into the other. This underwrites EM's epistemology of "rules as members' methods" (echoing Du Bois' double consciousness).
• Durkheim's aphorism: Durkheim declared the "objective reality of social facts" sociology's first principle; Garfinkel's "misreading" of it is to treat that objective reality as the object of study rather than its premise — this is EM's respecification.

2. Ethnomethodology vs. ethnography

Both share the interpretive tradition, concern for the lifeworld, and respect for the actor's point of view (hence the ethno- prefix), and typically eschew quantitative and grand-theoretical approaches — from a distance (the heights of macro- or historical sociology) the family resemblance is striking. Yet the relationship has long been uncongenial:

• The most fundamental naming dispute: ethnography is typically a method (or a family of methods); but ethnomethodology is not a method — it is the name of a field of study, and more importantly the name of the phenomenon it studies (the methods members use to make sense of the world). Garfinkel's analogy to ethnoscience emphasises the study of "folk" classifications, not the provision of a research method.
• Durable symbols vs. fragile achievements: Traditional ethnography often starts from the assumption that a culturally coherent group is organised around relatively durable significant symbols and conceptual oppositions, from which "patterns," "maps," and "taxonomies" of a culture can be abstracted. Ethnomethodology treats cultural categories/symbols as fragile achievements, accomplished in and through interaction on actual occasions, stressing indexicality and reflexivity: meaning is made anew "each next moment, through each cooperative turn."
• Geertz vs. Garfinkel: Geertz treats ritual as symbolic of established cultural meanings; ethnomethodology (and CA) treats interactional practices as achieving meaning on the spot, independently of durable cultural/symbolic meanings.
• The critique of ethnography (Pollner & Emerson 2001; see Meier zu Verl 2022): ethnomethodology charges ethnography with being (1) too involved, (2) yet too removed, and (3) ignoring the problematic of its own effort to represent the world. Ethnography seeks a correspondence between description and reality; ethnomethodology holds that such a direct correspondence is fictitious.
• Compromise and convergence: Over 30 years the boundaries have blurred. "Ethnomethodologically informed ethnography" appeared (Randall et al. 1995), with integration attempts (Gubrium & Holstein 1997; Silverman 1993). Recent ethnomethodological ethnography (Meier zu Verl et al. 2022, Qualitative Research, DOI 10.1177/14687941221129798; from the 2019 Mannheim IEMCA conference volume) proposes five methodological principles:
• ethnomethodological indifference: deliberate agnosticism toward received sociological theories and prejudices;
• the rendering theorem;
• the unique adequacy requirement of methods: the researcher must themselves be a competent member able to recognise and adequately describe the phenomenon of order, generating descriptions with the same ethno-methods the members use;
• at least two forms of adequate description;
• the praxeological validity of instructed action: the validity of a description is not decided sociologically but proven in practice.
• In one sentence: ethnography "writes" the social world into a text; ethnomethodology "re-presents" and "re-enacts" an already orderly phenomenon. Garfinkel himself frequently used ethnographic-style deep immersion (roughly "going native").

3. Development

1. Coined in 1954 → Studies in Ethnomethodology published in 1967, introducing breaching experiments: deliberately "making trouble" in ordinary settings (acting like a stranger in one's own home, driving the wrong way down a one-way street) to expose the common-sense work members do to sustain a recognizable shared order, and how that order is "restored" once breached. A related experiment on "trust" dates to 1963.
2. Two lines diverged from the start:
3. (a) Classic ethnomethodology (Garfinkel): the organisation of practical action and practical reasoning;
4. (b) Conversation Analysis (CA): founded by Harvey Sacks (Garfinkel's student at UCLA's Centre for the Scientific Study of Suicide, whom he met in 1963) together with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Sacks' Lectures on Conversation circulated as mimeographs from 1964 and were published in 1992; the foundational paper Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) on turn-taking appeared in Language 50(4): 696–735 (DOI 10.2307/412243). Sacks died in a car accident in 1975. CA advanced "order-at-all-points," treating even the smallest detail as potentially relevant.
5. Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA): also from Sacks' MCD (Membership Categorization Device) — how "the baby cried. The mommy picked it up" is heard as "mommy is the baby's mother." Categories are "inference-rich."
6. Psathas (1995) distinguishes five approaches: ① organisation of practical actions and practical reasoning; ② organisation of talk-in-interaction (CA); ③ talk-in-interaction in institutional/organisational settings; ④ the study of work; ⑤ the haecceity of work — what makes a test a test, a competition a competition.
7. Later shift toward workplace studies: Lucy Suchman's Plans and Situated Actions (1987) used ethnomethodology to critique the "planning" paradigm in HCI/AI; Michael Lynch's Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science (1985) and Eric Livingston's The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics (1986).
8. The standard secondary source: Heritage (1984), Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology.
9. Application to HCI / CSCW (echoing entry 002 in this site): Dourish & Button proposed technomethodology, in their CHI 1996 paper "Technomethodology: Paradoxes and Possibilities", drawing a "foundational relationship" between EM's accountability and system design's abstraction; Dourish's Where the Action Is (2001/2021) grounds "embodied interaction" in phenomenology (Heidegger/Wittgenstein) and ethnomethodology. Related: see Writing like Dourish.
10. The EMCA label and recent directions: ethnomethodology + conversation analysis are jointly called EMCA; video-based studies of interaction (Goodwin, Heath, Mondada); science & technology studies (Lynch); and ethnomethodology in AI / human–machine interaction (2022 special issue). For a review, see Maynard & Heritage (2024, Annual Review of Sociology 50, DOI 10.1146/annurev-soc-020321-033738).

4. Core concepts at a glance

Concept	Meaning
accountability	social action is organised to be "observable-and-reportable"
indexicality	the meaning of an expression/action depends on the immediate context
reflexivity	action simultaneously produces and describes the social order it occurs in
breaching experiment	deliberately breaking order to expose its maintenance machinery
judgemental dope	Garfinkel's jibe at traditional sociology for treating people as rule-blind dupes
unique adequacy requirement	the researcher must be a competent member who can recognise the phenomenon
order-at-all-points	CA's premise: every detail of interaction may be relevant

Reference index

1. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall / Polity.
2. Garfinkel, H. (1974). "The origins of the term ethnomethodology." In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology. Penguin, pp. 15–18.
3. Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Polity Press.
4. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). "A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation." Language 50(4): 696–735. DOI 10.2307/412243
5. Pollner, M. & Emerson, R. M. (2001). "Ethnomethodology and Ethnography." In P. Atkinson et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Ethnography. Sage.
6. Psathas, G. (1995). Conversation Analysis: The Study of Talk-in-Interaction. Sage.
7. Maynard, D. W. & Heritage, J. (2024). "Ethnomethodology's Legacies and Prospects." Annual Review of Sociology 50. DOI 10.1146/annurev-soc-020321-033738
8. Meier zu Verl, C. et al. (2022). "Ethnomethodological ethnography." Qualitative Research. DOI 10.1177/14687941221129798
9. Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge University Press.
10. Dourish, P. & Button, G. (1996). "Technomethodology: Paradoxes and Possibilities." Proc. CHI '96, pp. 337–344.
11. Lynch, M. (1985). Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science. Routledge.
12. Livingston, E. (1986). The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. Routledge.
13. Turowetz, J. & Rawls, A. (2020). "Garfinkel's life in the archives: The marginality of a sociological visionary." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences.

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