Ethno 2005

Ethnography & Ethnomethodology
Overview
Personal background: using ethnomethodlogicallyinformed ethnography in IT research What is ethnography? An ethnomethodological reading Questions and short break The radical studies of work programme A rough and ready example: studying homes Questions
Andy Crabtree axc@cs.nott.ac.uk Ethnography & Ethnomethodology
A Cautionary Word
Ethnomethodology (EM) does not cast social phenomenon in terms of conventional social science distinctions and practices. For example,
EM does not exploit objective/subjective dichotomy Or agency and structure Or macro and micro
You will find these and other staple topics of the social sciences discussed within the EM literature but they are treated critically and dispensed with as EM has no use for them, no work for them to do
See Wes Sharrock and Rod Watson Autonomy among social theories; the incarnation of social structures, Actions and Structure (ed. Fielding, N.), pp. 56-77, Sage, 1988. Wes Sharrock and Graham Button The social actor: social action in real time, Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences (ed. Button, G.), pp. 137-175, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Andy Crabtree axc@cs.nott.ac.uk
Square Pegs and Round Holes

So you cant align EM with conventional social science
A strange kind of Californian subjectivity its not Garfinkels slogans
EM is asymmetrically alternate EM is incommensurable EM is not available to conventional social science
Of course you can try to make EM answerable to conventional social science but you will only end up losing what it is about, you will misread it
See Harold Garfinkel and Lawrence Wieder Two incommensurable, asymmetrically alternate technologies of social analysis, Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology (eds. Watson, G. and Seiler, S.M.), pp.175-206, Sage, 1992.
Setting Caution Aside

Im not going to tell you why EM has no use for the conventional distinctions and practices of social science
Dealing with these issues would take many lectures And they are well documented - see Button, G. (ed.) Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 1991 for a comprehensive introduction and treatment So why tell you, beyond inviting you to read into the matter? EM requires that you suspend the educated ways in which you have been taught to make sense of the social (Sacks 1992) - to suspend talking about life in terms of agency, structures, and the like - and demands that you step outside the box
Harvey Sacks On exchanging glances, in Lectures on Conversation (ed. Jefferson, G.), Volume 1, Part 1, Fall 1964 Spring 1965), pp. 81-94, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.
Moving On: What is Ethnography?

Put 20 different ethnographers in a room and you will get 20 different answers
So what does that tell us? That ethnography is a diverse enterprise consisting of heterogeneous conceptions and practices Ethnography cannot be commonly defined - it has the characteristics alluded to in Wittgensteins aphorism about games:
What is common to them all? - Dont say: There must be something common, or they would not be called games - but look and see whether there is anything common to all. - For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that To repeat: dont think, but look!
To understand something of the salience of Wittgensteinian thought to EM see, Jeff Coulter The
Social Construction of Mind: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Linguistic Philosophy, Rowan and Littlefield, 1979.
No Commonality?
But what about method?
Surely ethnography minimally requires first-hand observation, the immersion of a fieldworker in some setting of social action?
[When doing ethnographic research one] thing is needful; first-hand observation. Go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and the slum shakedowns; sit in the orchestra hall and in the Star and Garter burlesque. In short, gentlemen, go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research. Robert Ezra Park, cited in Robert Prus Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research: Intersubjectivity and the Study of Human Lived Experience, State University of New York Press, 1996.
The problem is, what is meant by observation, setting and immersion? Is a fieldworker who investigates news paper reports by reading them doing observation by immersion in a setting?
See, for example, Lena Jayyusi The equivocal text and the objective world: an ethnomethodological analysis of a news report, The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, vol. 5 (1), 1991. http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/ 5.1/Jayyusi.html
Well, yes. The point is that there is no commonality of methods. Ethnography cannot be pinned down. There is no definitive version. Furthermore, old versions fall out of use and new ones get created all the time (hence similarities and relationships)
So Where Does That Leave Us?

Trading in (competing) versions: an ethnomethodological version (one of many, EM not a unified field)
There is nothing special about ethnography Ethnographies are a staple feature of everyday life
the
member in the midst of witnessed actual settings recognizes that witnessed settings have an accomplished sense, an accomplished facticity, an accomplished accountability That accomplishment consists of members doing, recognizing, and using ethnographies.
Harold Garfinkel Studies in Ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Forget the terminology (close encounters with difficult words), the point is that Garfinkel sees ethnography as something that members do all of the time (some examples) Ethnography is a members method for investigating, observing, querying, articulating, understanding, recognizing, etc., social settings from within the flow of activities and events that populate those settings What the method of the matter consists of is EMs central concern Andy Crabtree axc@cs.nott.ac.uk we will return to Ethnography & Ethnomethodology and an issue that
Lay and Professional Ethnographies

If ethnography is a ubiquitous feature of everyday life, something ordinary members do, why is it part of the social science research armoury?
A distinction between lay and professional ethnographies: a recognizable difference exists as to the ways in which ethnographic materials are analyzed It is not that in our capacity as ordinary members we do not analyze ethnographic materials - clearly an account of whats happening at work or a family members account of his or her day is open to analysis - but that as members (at home, at work, at play, etc.) we do so in different ways to professional ethnographers. For example, classifying descriptions or treating family members objectively - professional approaches and methods have no place in members analyses and are not answerable to them
See Harold Garfinkel Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities, Studies in Ethnomethodology, pp. 35-75, Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Professional Analysis
Marked by different approaches and practices
They come packaged in reports - i.e. professional ethnographies are textually rendered Even visual ethnographys rely on texts and, following the postmodern turn, rightly or wrongly, may be construed of in textual ways More importantly, those texts are rendered or constructed in one of two fundamental ways
Through formal analysis, which renders ethnographic materials in terms of coding schemes, taxonomies, grand theories or narratives, models and other situationally absent descriptions.
See Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks On formal structures of practical action, Theoretical Sociology (eds. McKinney, J.C. and Tiryakian, E.), pp. 160-193, Apple-Century-Crofts, 1970.
Ethnomethodologically, through thick description of the practical action and practical reasoning exhibited by members in the unfolding course of their activities together. That is thick description pace Gilbert Ryle who coined the phrase, but not Clifford Geertz who popularized it and made it answerable to formal analysis.
See Gilbert Ryle The thinking of thoughts, University Lectures No. 18, University of Saskatchewan 1971. http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/CSACSIA/Vol14/Papers/ryle_1.html Wes Sharrock and Robert Anderson Epistemology, Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences (ed. Button, G.), pp. 51-76, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
The Primacy of Description in Analysis

Both approaches recognize that analysis is intimately bound up with description - that the way in which you describe something is reflexively connected to your analysis.
For example, consider the following sentence: The baby cried. The astronaut picked it up. When you read this sentence the chances are that they hear something strange, that something is not right about it. What is wrong is that the method of description does not fit the scene. The method at work here is one of membership categorization devices or MCDs (Sacks 1972).
Harvey SacksThe baby cried. The mommy picked it up, Lectures on Conversation (ed. Jefferson, G.), Volume 1, Lecture 1, Spring 1966, pp. 236-242, Blackwell Publishers, 1992.
Description and Analysis

MCDs come in families: quite literally we might speak of mother, father, brother, aunt, cousin, etc., as belonging to a family of categories. Similarly, the categories protestant, catholic, buddhist, etc., belong to the religious family of categories. The example The baby cried. The astronaut picked it up. violates this ordinary members method of description, however (as you might intuitively recognize). The descriptive categories baby and astronaut are incongruent within the context of the sentence and the scene it describes. Baby and astronaut do not belong to the same family of MCDs, they do not fit together, and so they sound strange. If we substitute astronaut for mommy, however, the sentence starts to make sense, as the categories mommy and baby belong to the same MCD.
See Jeff Coulter Logic: ethnomethodology and the logic of language, Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences (ed. Button, G.), pp. 20-50, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Description and Analysis?

Of course it might asked if we are really analyzing anything here? In response to that we might briefly consider Sacks account of the sentences properly construed.
When I hear The baby cried. The mommy picked it up. one of the things I hear is that the mommy who picks the baby up is the mommy of the baby. Now its not only the case that I hear it that way - and of course theres no genitive there to say its mommy picked it up, his mommy, her mommy - when I hear it that way a kind of interesting thing is that I also feel pretty confident that all of you, at least the natives among you, hear that also. Is that magic?
Its not magic of course but a matter of methods of description and MCDs in this case, which as natural language speakers or natives we all share and exploit to reason about - to analyze - the events we attend to. So, the way in which things are described - the methods employed, whether lay or professional - are intimately bound up with how things are analyzed then, and this has a consequence for how ethnographies get done.
Reflexivity of Description and Analysis

In producing ethnographic texts, both formal analysis and ethnomethodology have an abiding concern with reflexivity, but in very different ways.
Formal analysis is largely concerned with analytic reflexivity, a notion which came into focus following the crisis of representation that marked the post-modern turn in the social sciences Analytic reflexivity (and its variants, e.g., positional reflexivity, textual reflexivity) is directed towards critical self-reflection in order to understand the ways in which the very act of ethnography and ethnographic reportage shapes our understanding of the social And is concerned to find solutions to the professional belief that there is an inevitable degree of cultural and subjective bias built into the act ethnography and ethnographic reportage
See Doug Macbeth On reflexivity in qualitative research: two readings, and a third, Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 7, pp. 35-68, 2001.
Analytic Reflexivity and EM

EM respects the good sense and tradition of critical reflection
It does not except what Egon Bittner calls the the selfindulgent concentration that marks analytic reflexivity Concern with the ethnographers cultural context, position, influence, bias, textual practices, etc., pre-dates the post-modern turn And Bittner was fiercely critical of it then as ethnomethodologists are now, suggesting that such forms of self-absorption represent a pallid ideology of cultural relativism
Egon Bittner Objectivity and realism in sociology, Phenomenological Sociology (ed. Psathas, G.), pp. 109-125, John Wiley, 1973. Mike Lynch Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge, Theory, Culture, and Society vol. 17, pp. 27-53, 2000.
So What is EMs Interest in Reflexivity?

We are not now interested in professional beliefs but in that outlook which takes over when something must be done, for example, when someone must do what needs doing to successfully take a plane across the country. The point here is that when someone has business with the world, or any part of it, he must be prepared to deal on the worlds terms. What these terms are is not reliably taken from what the timid have to say. Instead, the terms are, from case to case, in what even the most radical of the radical comes to see when he sees that sometimes some things have to be done, and sometimes there is no getting around certain things, no matter what, in spite of all rational considerations. Egon Bittner
EM is interested in the practical achievement of social phenomenon

In how things are done by parties to them, by members, and done congregationally, collaboratively, in concert with others I.e., in how things are done as the socially organized affairs of everyday life Reflexivity is an essential and indispensable feature of this achievement
Reflexivity in Ethnomethodology
The reflexivity of accounts
We offer the observation that persons, in that they are heard to be speaking a natural language, somehow are heard to be engaged in the objective production and objective display of everyday activities as observable and reportable phenomena What is it about natural language that makes these phenomena observable-reportable, i.e., account-able phenomena? The interests of ethnomethodological research are directed to provide, through detailed analyses, that account-able phenomena are through and through practical accomplishments. We shall speak of the work of that accomplishment in order to gain the emphasis for it of an ongoing course of action. Garfinkel and Sacks (1970)
Accounts are features of talk and talk is a feature of all social settings Ethnomethodology suggests that it is through talking - through the ongoing production of accounts - that members reflexively produce the social settings they inhabit as objective features of everyday life EM is exclusively dedicated to uncovering how in the ongoing production of their accounts - in their work together - members come to organize everyday life and reflexively produce the everyday settings they inhabit It is here, however, that ethnomethodologists start to fall out
Orienting to the Reflexivity of Accounts

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
EM developed by Garfinkel, CA by Sacks Often spoken about in the same breathe, as if they were concerned with the same things To some extent they are but there are fundamental differences between the two, which impact on analytic treatment of the reflexivity of accounts The difference revolves around formulations Formulations are integral features of talk, when we talk we formulate remarks, questions, greetings, disputes, etc. Formulation is a pervasive moment-by-moment feature of talk that never stops - open your mouth and you are doing it again (and you need not even do that much)
Handling Formulations
CA takes it that the work of everyday life is to be found in members formulations and has, over the years, uncovered a turn-taking machinery organizing the production of talk and the organized affairs of everyday life
Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation, Language, vol. 50, pp. 696-735, 1974.
EM takes it that while an accountable feature of everyday life, formulations do not make the work of everyday life and thus the socially organized production of everyday settings - available Instead the work of everyday life becomes a feature of the turn-taking machinery: the work of everyday life has been substituted by CA for an analytic apparatus then
Mike Lynch, M. Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodological and Social Studies of Science, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Mike Lynch and Dave Bogen Harvey Sacks primitive natural science, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 11, pp. 65-104, 1994.
EM Treatment of Formulations
While formulations do work - i.e., are constituent features of greetings, questions, disputes, and the rest - they are not the work of setting
Rather, formulations make the work of a setting observable and reportable or account-able. What the work is - what members practical achievement of congregationally produced everyday settings (workplaces, homes, football matches, etc.) consists of - is not shown by examining members formulations then, even if those formulations are part and parcel of the settings ongoing production here and now So, while EM recognizes formulations and pays foundational attention to them, it is not in the same way as CA For EM, analytic attention is not to be directed towards members formulations per se - and work attributed to the workings of an analytic apparatus - but to the practical actions and activities accomplished by
members over the unfolding course of doing and recognizing formulations.
It might otherwise be said that while members formulations provide the initial focus for EM study and analysis, the work they accomplish is the primary object of analysis, as it is in the work that formulations do that the social organization of everyday settings becomes visible.
Making Work Visible

So EM is different to CA in that is concerned to uncover what work talk accomplishes rather than how talk works
How does EM go about uncovering work - i.e., the practical, socially organized achievement of everyday life? Like social science research generally, by consulting or eliciting information from members. The question is, how is consultation done? Fundamentally, essentially, without evasion, EM suspends the use of social science methods as a means of consultation - and that includes theorising Why? Because EM sees theorising not only as a means of representation but reflexively as a method of description, which involves rendering everyday life in terms of a priori, situationally absent formulations
Harvey Sacks Sociological description, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 8, pp. 1-16, 1963. Melinda Baccus Sociological indication and the visibility criterion of real world social theorising, Ethnomethodological Studies of Work (ed. Garfinkel, H.), pp. 1-19, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.
And what EM wants to get at in the first instance is members formulations, and in the second
Methods and EM
Whose methods?
As Garfinkel and Wieder (1992) put it,
Just in any actual case a phenomenon of order [be it paid labour, domestic life, play, education, prison, driving, walking down the street, etc.] already possesses whatever as methods methods could be
Or as Lynch (1993) describes EMs position on methods,

Methods (whether avowedly scientific or not) do not provide a priori guarantees, and the initial requirement for an ethnomethodological investigator is to find ways to elucidate methods from within the relevant competence systems to which they are bound.
As far as EM is concerned, whatever method might be is not to found in the academy, in social science tutorials, seminars, lectures, textbooks, and the like Other than as objects of EM study, as the academy is an everyday setting possessed of its own methods just as every other setting in everyday life is possessed So you know as a member what sorts of methods are at work in your academic and/or research setting, but what methods are at work in the everyday settings you are researching? That is the animal in the foliage EM is after - members methods Consequently, EM has no work for methods to do - that is, textbook methods and the like - so it dispenses with them
Abandoning Method
But surely methods are required?
The point is that no special methods are required to uncover members methods - nothing that requires a social science degree You may, however, require a degree in some other discipline If you want to uncover members methods in mathematics, for example
See Eric Livingstone The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 986. Harold Garfinkel An ethnomethodological study of the work of Galileos inclined plane demonstration of the real motion of free falling bodies, Ethnomethodologys Program: Working Out Durkheims Aphorism, pp. 263-285, Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
Why? Because uncovering the methods with which everyday activities are possessed requires that you have a vulgar competence in those very methods
Developing Vulgar Competence

The unique adequacy requirement of methods
for analysts to recognize, or identify, or follow the development of, or describe phenomena of order in local production of coherent detail the analyst must be vulgarly competent in the local production and reflexively natural accountability of the phenomena of order he is studying. We will replace the abbreviation studying with the specific requirement that the analyst be, with others, in a concerted competence of methods with which to recognize, identify, follow, display, and describe phenomena of order in local productions of coherent detail. These are uniquely possessed in, and as of, the objects endogenous local production and natural accountability. (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992)
Vulgar competence means that you can understand how what it is that members are doing is being done so as to reflexively produce the organized affairs of everyday life That how consists of the work of the matter and methods organizing the works production, and it is as Garfinkel puts it EMs distinctive prize We shall consider what that prize consists of in the next section on radical studies of work
Ethnomethodologys Prize
Radical studies of work
What are they? Develop an answer to that question by looking at their origins Edmund Husserls phenomenology
The Idea of Phenomenology (trans. Hardy, L.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.
Concerned with the production of objective or positive knowledge in the natural sciences Husserl wanted to understand how positive knowledge is possible Not questioning truth or correctness, that is for the sciences themselves to do. Instead, wants to understand on what foundations positive knowledge stands and emerges from EM not doing phenomenology but inspired by Husserls studies and those of his protgs, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty because the focus of their studies, because of what it is they are oriented to
Phenomenological Origins
The possibility of objective knowledge
Foundations: positive knowledge originates from the natural attitude where objects are given in various ways to experience as objects-existing-in-a-world-out-there, independent of the particular observer. Husserls problem: To say that positive knowledge is, in the various technical ways of the natural sciences, given by an objects availability to experience is not enough to account for objective knowledge. Husserl wants to know how it is possible for objective knowledge to be given in the first place? More precisely, Husserl wants to know how it is possible for knowledge to make contact with an objective world and so transcend individual experience
Making Contact with a Transcendent

Sources of knowing
what is unclear is the contact with a transcendent that is ascribed to knowledge, to knowing knowing is something other than the known object How can I understand this possibility? Naturally, the answer is: I could only understand it if the relation itself could be given, as something that could be seen.
Positive knowledge is given in the relationship between the knowing subject and known object What does that relationship consist of? Natural science account: formal methods described in scientific texts The problem with formal methods descriptions:
[Formal] methods and descriptions are certainly not useless, and learning to compose step-by-step instructions is an important point of scientific training, but such accounts do not provide the stable grounds for reproducing a practice. Although it is possible to reproduce an observation from a written description, a text can only allude to what eventually may count as a replication of the observation It might be more advisable to say that methods accounts are part and parcel of the concerted practices that enable them to be descriptive and instructive. Mike Lynch Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action
Formal methods rely on some unspecified phenomenon - the relationship between knowing and known object consists, then, of undocumented sources of knowing
Documenting the Undocumented

Unpacking the knowing-known relationship
The optical discovery of pulsar NP 0532 Done by astronomers John Cocke and Michael Disney on the evening of January 16th 1969
John Cocke, Michael Disney and Don Taylor Discovery of optical signals from pulsar NP 0532, Nature, vol. 221, February 8th, 1969.
Imagine the situation in the astronomy community in 1968. A graduate student doing some ordinary measurements of radio stars has come across a phenomenon that is truly extraordinary. A star is blinking on and off ten times per second. How could this be? How could a star turn its radio emissions on and off so rapidly? In any star there exists a fire of incredible temperature - hotter than the largest furnace on earth. How could it turn on, then off, over and over again? Astronomers all over the world begin to look for other pulsars, and sure enough, such objects are everywhere in the skies All, however, can only be detected by their radio waves Would anyone locate a pulsar which emitted so much energy that it could be observed with ordinary light? Some of the most famous astronomers enter the race, equipped with the world's largest telescopes. The winners, however, are two unknown young scientists who had only recently met. Whats more, they had never before operated a telescope. The American Institute of Physics
http://www.aip.org/history/mod/pulsar/pulsar1/01.html
So how did Cocke and Disney come to know pulsar NP 0532?

Optical Discovery of Pulsar NP 0532

Studying the nights work
Garfinkel, Livingston and Lynch got their hands on audio tape recordings of the nights work from the American Institute of Physics They examined the tapes to see how Cocke and Disneys observations were shaped over the night in their work together and in the company of another astronomer, Bob McCallister
Harold Garfinkel, Eric Livingston and Mike Lynch The work of a discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 11, pp. 131-158, 1981.
Having examined the tapes they focused particularly on how the astronomers work evolved from identifying a vague object-of-sorts (which had neither demonstrable sense nor concrete astronomical reference in the first instance), to identifying a transcendent Independent Galilean Object (IGO) - a pulsar - available to the scrutiny of the wider scientific community. In details of the astronomers talk together, the tapes documented an unfolding series of observations or scientific episodes over the course of which pulsar NP 0532 came into view. How?
Unpacking the Observations

Examining account-able features
Observation #18. McCallister: Theres a nice dip on the side of that sky. Im going to turn this thing [the oscilloscope] down. Disney: Weve got a bleeding pulse here. Cocke: Hey! Wow! You dont suppose thats really it, do you? Cant be. Disney: Its right bang in the middle of the period. Look, I mean right bang in the middle of the scale [on the screen]. It really looks like something from here to at the moment to me. Cocke: Hmm. Disney: And its growing too. I wont believe it until we get a second one [pulse]. Cocke: I wont believe it until we get the second one and until the thing has shifted somewhere else [on the horizontal axis of the screen].
Account-able Features of Obs. 18

Working up a sense of the known object
a nice dip on the side of that sky reveals a pulse but it is not a given pulse, not a practically observable and practically objective pulse, but a dubitable pulse, one whose facticity, which although suspected, is doubted at this point in time. The pulse represents a potential Independent Galilean Object, which in the current flow of their talk assumes the status of a vague object-of-sorts: an object whose facticity stands in need of verification. Consequently, Cocke and Disney formulate technical conditions providing for the prima facie facticity of the object to-hand. These conditions include
#1) reproducing the Observation such that a second pulse is detected, and #2) looking for a shift in the objects on-screen representation.
This latter condition is predicated on the suspicion that the visibility of the object right bang in the middle of the scale may be an artefact of the technology: a subsequent correct reading should place the object elsewhere on the screen.
Verifying the Object

Observation #19.
Disney: Beginning. Disney: My God, its still there. Its as good as it was, or better than it was last time. Cocke: It disturbs me, thats right in the middle of the screen. Disney: It isnt John, look. Cocke: Its moved a little bit. McCallister: If you get the right frequency then itll be more or less the same place, wouldnt it? Disney: It should be more or less, you wont be exactly the same place. Disney: Thats a bloody pulse isnt it. Cocke: Lets move off that position and do somewhere else and see if we get the same thing. I hope to God this isnt some sort of artefact of the instrumentation.
Doing Verification Work

Reproducing the contingencies observation, subject to emerging
Condition #1 is readily satisfied in this Observation, indeed its better than it was last time. The satisfaction of Condition #2 is still in dispute, however. Although the on-screen representation of the pulse has shifted a little, it is not enough to determine whether or not the pulse is some sort of artefact of the instrumentation. Judgements as to the facticity of the object to-hand are suspended and a further technical condition is formulated. Condition #3 specifies moving the telescope (.25 of a millimetre northwards). This positional check confirms that the equipment is working properly and results, in the following Observation, in the reproduction of the pulse and a shift in its on-screen position corresponding to the movement of the telescope The readings have been verified to their satisfaction and they conclude that a pulsar has been observed.
Formalising the Object

Observation #22
Disney: We should be able to work out how many photons coming in per second to this pulse, right? Cocke: Well, we should be, yeah. Disney: Can we get the actual number; can we read off digitally the number of photons in each channel subsequent to this? Cocke: Oh yeah. Disney: Now the fun begins, weve got to write out some sort of programme to reduce this tape and have the whole lot go in so Cocke: I dont think we need to reduce the damn tape. Disney: No. Cocke: We have wed have to reduce the tape only if we saw nothing or just a bare little hint of something.
Making the Object Available

Measurement
Having established the facticity of the object, the astronomers formulate ways in which the the object may be found and verified by other members of the astronomical community. In order to achieve this, they examine their data for its measurable properties (such as photons per second). With these exact measures, other astronomers may reproduce the observation, and in the technical ways of their discipline, see Pulsar NP 0532 for themselves.
The Crab Pulsar, discovered by radio astronomers in November 1968, was seen to
pulsate in optical light in January 1969 (Cocke et al. 1969) by three groups within a matter of days. Brian Kern (2002), PhD Thesis, Optical Pulse-Phased Observations of Faint Pulsars with a Phase-Binning CCD Camera
The Knowing-Known Relationship

Lived work
Examining the accountable features of the nights work revealed the lived work whereby Cocke and Disney came to know pulsar NP 5302 That work consisted of an unfolding series of observations populated by a host of concerted practical activities The nights work was socially organized in terms of configuring the equipment, doing verification work (including reproducing observations subject emergent contingencies), formalising the object, and so on It was through this unfolding, socially organized, course of lived work that a vague object-of-sorts came into view and was transformed into a definite astronomical object having properties that exist independent of the people, the place and the equipment with which it was discovered and which make it available to others
So What?
The lived account and the formal account
At no point in Cocke and Disneys account of NP 0532 does the lived work of the objects production and recognition - its discovery - figure The lived work of the discovery - of how they come to see and know NP 0532 - is completely absent from their account (as it is absent from scientific accounts generally) The source of knowing - the lived work - is entirely absent, yet it is through this work that the relationship between knowing and known object is given (and account-ably so) The lived work is substituted for the formal account and divorced from what Husserl called the vital practices from which the possibility of knowledge emerges There is, then, what Garfinkel calls a gap in the literature, not only of scientific practice, but of everyday activities generally and it is towards filling this gap that the radical studies of work programme is directed
Why Radical?
Inverting the accounting relationship
Suspending the use of formal methods to account for everyday activities And instead orienting to, focusing on, and treating as a topic in their own right, the vital practices organizing the lived work of a setting as made available in members accounts Natural organization instead of formal organization then: how things are organized on the ground by parties to them (not dispensing with the formal (e.g., method, procedure, rules, etc.) but, where it is an issue, unpacking how it is concertedly achieved A note on vital practices and members methods: the two terms are different ways of speaking about the same thing and that is the visibly and materially embodied ways in which people concert their everyday activities and get them done There are other terms too: work-practice is very common these days and, a phrase that propelled the radical studies of work programme, the missing interactional what of formal studies
The Missing Interactional What

The orientation of EM studies
Harvey Sacks speaks of a curiosity in the work and history of the social sciences: the missing interactional what in lay and professional studies of organization. Several observable phenomena make specific what he is talking about. 1) Available for observation is the omnipresence of accountable organizations of commonplace activities like families, faculties, traffic, welfare agencies, hospitals, manufacturing plants, city governments, or street gangs. 2) It is a matter for observation too that endlessly many inquiries accompany these accountable organizations as constituent features of them. It is to be observed in these accountable organizations and their inquiries that the occasioned, embodied, interactional just-so just-what of ordinary activities remains ignored, unknown, unsuspected, and unmissed as technical phenomena. 3) Finally, there is to be observed that 1) and 2) taken together compose a technical phenomenon that is discoverable, is consequential, and for the study of naturally organized activities is criterial. The phenomenon consists of the essential, used, and ignored relevance to the collaborated production of the orderliness in, of, and as ordinary activities, of the occasioned, embodied, interactional just-so-and-just-what of ordinary activities. Harold Garfinkel, unpublished manuscript
Working the Orientation

Studying and representing naturally organized activities
Focus on lived work as articulated in members accounts, or shopwork and shoptalk as Garfinkel puts it
Harold Garfinkel Ethnomethodologys program, Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 59 (1), pp. 5-21, 1996.
Examine shopwork and shoptalk to identify its endogenous socially organized features - i.e., the organizational features that are internal to and exhibited by that shopwork and shoptalk (e.g., configuring the equipment, doing verification, and formalising objects in astronomical work) Representing the social organization of everyday activities in terms of their witnessable haecceities - i.e., the specific details of everyday activities that make them the activities that they recognizably are So, not just doing verification, for example, but doing verification by formulating verification conditions, reproducing the observation in accordance with those conditions, and formulating further verification conditions to rule in or out artefacts of the technology Through description of haecceities EM seeks to exhibit the ways in which everyday activities are naturally organized by parties to them
Exhibiting Social Organization

Durkheims social facts
Social structures that exist above and beyond the individual and shape his or her everyday activities (IGOs) These structures of action are formally specified in the social sciences (e.g., Marxs model of capital, Webers bureaucratic model, Parsons social system, and more recently, actor-network theory) Formal studies seek to explain social facts but not do not show how they come into existence as lived features of members everyday activities, recognized, produced and shaped by them in their work together Distinctively, EM does not attempt to explain Durkheimanian social facts, but to show or exhibit them as and in details of their concerted, real world, real time achievement
[EM studies] do NOT correspond to Durkheims social facts. Nor do they copy Durkheims social facts. Nor do they imitate, represent, write in place of, offer as a plan, schema, essence, or model for Durkheims social facts. Instead they exhibit Durkheims social facts Described from the bottom up each study specifies the particular social facts identifying orderliness
Harold Garfinkel Autochthonous order properties of formatted queues, Ethnomethodologys Program: Working Out Durkheims Aphorism, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.istinctive constituents
Generalizing Exhibits
EM doesnt
Generalization is part of the formal social science machinery that EM eschews Generalization begs the question of validity, which EM addresses not by formalising its findings (through quantitative methods, for example), but by the availability of its studies to members EM studies are corrigible sketches of social organization, and may as such, be agreed with or contested by members (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992) EM studies are also studies of situated action and do not set out to make claims about the society at large (so again, we have no work for generalization to do) That is not to say that there is no ubiquity to EM studies, that EM is micro social science - e.g., CA and the turn-taking machine
Other Ubiquitous Settings

Understanding work, organization and technology
Propelled by early studies (e.g., of the nature of rules and procedures in organizations)
Egon Bittner The concept of organization, Social Research, vol. 32, pp. 239-255, 1965. Don Zimmerman The practicalities of rule use, Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge (ed. Douglas, J.D.), pp. 221-238, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
Lead to adoption of EM in industrial IT research labs (Xerox, Intel, Microsoft and many other companies besides)
Lucy Suchman Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, Cambridge University Press, 1987. Graham Button (ed.) Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, Routledge, 1992.
Instrumental in development of Computer Supported Cooperative Work

See the Association of Computing Machinerys digital library http://portal.acm.org
Now a diverse field of study both in terms of IT research and the new domains that computing is moving into (domestic life, health, science, education, etc.) Driven by the need to understand how people actually work together and organize everyday activities in diverse settings
A Final Word: Either/Or?

The law of the excluded middle
With its rejection of formal machinery at all points, EM is often construed as being antithetical to formal social science research And ethnomethodology certainly provides the grounds for making a sustained critique, one which sets up an either/or choice While it is true that you cannot do EM studies through formal means without losing EMs prize, that does not mean that FA and EM need be at loggerheads Rather than see EM as competing with FA, it might be more profitable to see EM as complementary to FA EM will always be alternate an incommensurable as a research approach, but in exhibiting social facts EM provides insights that FA cannot and never will be able to (and, of course, the inverse is true) The only choice to be made is whether or not to repair the gap in the literature and extend social science knowledge of everyday life
A copy of this presentation, including references, is available online @ www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/~axc/EM_presentation.pdf

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