An Invitation to Ethnomethodology

Language, Society and Interaction

David Francis, Stephen Hester

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446228364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a new and rigorous approach to observational sociology that is grounded in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

Throughout the authors encourage the reader to explore the social world at first hand, beginning with the immediate family context and then moving out into the public realm and organizational life. Examples of observational analysis are given with reference to topic areas such as family life, education, medicine, crime and deviance, and the reader is shown how to conduct their own inquiries, using methods and materials that are readily and ordinarily available.

Drawing on both original material and published studies, Francis and Hester demonstrate how observational sociology can be carried out with an attention to detail typically overlooked by more traditional ethonographic approaches.

1

Social Interaction, Language and Society

This book is about how society is accomplished in and through social interaction, how language is central to this accomplishment and how the interactional nature of social life may be investigated. We invite the reader to share in not only a particular vision of social life, as constituted in and through language and social interaction, but also a form of sociological inquiry that is consistent with and follows from this vision. This form of inquiry is known as ethnomethodology. In this chapter we outline the nature of our conception of social life by considering in turn its three key ideas or components: social interaction, language and society. In the next chapter we explain what we mean by ethnomethodology. In the chapters to follow, various aspects of social life are considered from the point of view we propose. We present analysis and discuss studies consistent with this approach and explain how they implement the form of sociological inquiry that we are recommending. Our overall aim is not just to show what is involved in doing ethnomethodology, but also to invite the reader to try for him- or herself this way of doing sociology.

Social interaction

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What we refer to as ‘society’ is made up of social activities of many different kinds. What makes these activities ‘social’ is that they are done with or in relation to others. Some activities are collective activities – these are done by several or many persons acting together. Examples of such collective activities are a family meal, a business meeting, a football match or a political election. Other activities may be done by a single individual but with reference to others, or in a context that involves and is made possible by other people. Examples of this are getting dressed in the morning, walking along the street, reading a book or writing a letter. Such activities can be referred to as ‘individual’ activities so long as it is remembered that, like collective activities, what is done and how it is done is shaped by the fact that the activity is part of a shared social life, a life that we lead with others. This is confirmed by the fact that such individual activities are recognizable as the activity they are, not simply to the person who happens to be performing them but to other members of society. In other words, for something done by an individual (or by a number of persons acting together) to be identifiable and describable as ‘this’ activity (for example, waiting at a streetcorner, reading a newspaper, running to catch a bus) means that the activity in question forms part of a ‘grammar’ of activities known by and recognizable to the society’s members. Consequently, using the term ‘individual’ to refer to activities done by a single person acting alone does not mean that such activities are somehow less social than others done by persons acting together. Even if an activity is being done by an individual acting entirely alone, it is none the less a social activity in the sense that we intend here.

Another way of putting this is to say that our activities as members of society are fundamentally interactional in character. By this we mean not simply that much we do is done through face-to-face interaction with others, nor even that we do many things through ‘mediated interaction’, for example, talking on the telephone, communicating by letter or e-mail. More than this, our point is that even things we do alone are informed by our membership of society and our social relationships with others. As we have already indicated, the very possibility of recognizably engaging in this or that activity is provided by such membership. Furthermore, the circumstances in which we are able to be alone and do things by ourselves are socially organized and the things we are entitled to do by ourselves are socially sanctioned. Not only this, but we have learned how to do things – from speaking our native language to using the Internet – through interaction with other people. We can be held accountable by other people for how we do these things, whether we do them in socially acceptable ways or in appropriate circumstances. In this sense everything we do, from the most obviously collective actions to the most ‘individual’ ones, are made possible by the interactional nature of our social lives. In relation to this point, then, it is not an incidental fact about us that we are members of society, rather it is a fundamental one with regard to who we are and what we do – to all that we are and everything we do.

Later in this chapter we expand upon what we mean by ‘membership of society’. For the moment we will observe that social interaction takes place in many settings: on the street, in the home, at work, in institutions such as hospitals, schools and prisons, and in the corridors of government and the boardrooms of transnational companies, to name but a few. In all these settings, and many more, persons interact with one another to get social activities done. The activities may be as ostensibly simple and commonplace as asking the time or for directions to the railway station, or as complex and momentous as deciding the interest rate of the Bank of England (and therefore the national level of interest rates in the UK). Nevertheless, whether the participants to the interaction are strangers on a city street or the members of the Monetary Policy Committee, their interaction has some general features. Two of these features common to all social interaction are the structured character of interaction and the contextual availability of meaning. We discuss these two features in turn.

The structured character of interaction

It is often assumed that interaction between people can be explained in terms of individuals and their characteristics. Indeed, this view has a long and illustrious history in theories of human behaviour. Anyone who has not studied social interaction could be forgiven for thinking that the course of any interaction depends entirely on what the persons involved decide to do or say, based on their individual desires, intentions and predispositions. Since interaction takes place between persons, it is tempting to think that there is nothing more to it but what individuals happen to do. Therefore interaction, one might think, is simply a product of individuals and the ‘choices’ they make, where these choices are to a degree unrestricted. After all, much interaction has a highly spontaneous character; one does not know what someone is going to say or do until they say or do it. To call interaction ‘social’, on this view, is to refer simply to the fact that it occurs between individuals. It implies nothing about the organization of what is done.

Through much of its history as a discipline, sociology has sought to establish the inadequacy of such an individualist account of human behaviour. Typically it has done so by arguing that behaviour is nowhere near as unrestricted as individualist accounts assume. Sociologists have insisted that how persons act towards one another is constrained in significant ways by their membership of society. In other words, and putting things very simplistically, whereas individualist theories locate the determinants of behaviour ‘inside’ the individual, sociological theories traditionally have located them ‘outside’ in the structure of society. Social interaction, from this point of view, is an arena within which the social forces that constrain individuals and shape their behaviour are played out.

The view we argue for in this book differs from both of these conceptions. Both the individualist and traditional sociological approaches are to be rejected, since each treats the interactional character of human behaviour as ‘epi-phenomenal’, that is, as the product of some more basic factors and therefore of secondary interest. In both approaches, whatever order is to be found in social interaction is explained as the result of something else. Both its origin and character comes about either because of the ‘inner’ make up of individuals or the ‘outer’ determinants of society (or some combination of the two). Social interaction has no intrinsic orderliness in its own right; it only has the orderly features that are imposed upon it by such inner or outer factors.

Against this view we will argue that all social interaction is ‘intrinsically socially structured’. What we are referring to as social interaction involves any situation in which a person produces an action addressed or directed towards another and/or which invites or makes possible a response from another. All such actions are ‘structured’ in the sense that the character of the action produced by Person A ‘conditions’ what can be done in response to it by Person B. Let us look at some simple examples:

Example 1

A:	Hi, my name’s Brian.
B:	Hi, I’m John.

Example 2

A:	Excuse me?
B:	Yes?

Example 3

A:	[wringing his hand] SHIT!
B:	Are you OK?

Note the links between the first utterance and the second in each of the examples. In Example 1 A introduces himself to B, whereupon B produces a return introduction. The two actions go together as a pair; they constitute an ‘introduction exchange’. This exchange exemplifies what conversation analysts call an ‘adjacency pair’, in that A’s utterance performs a first action which makes relevant a responding second action by B in the next utterance. (We will discuss adjacency pairs in more detail in Chapter 3). In Example 2 the structure is a little more complex. Again the two utterances form an adjacency pair, but here the structure extends into the third (not as yet produced) slot. A’s ‘Excuse me?’ is responded to by B with a ‘Yes’, which does two things. First, it indicates that B has heard it as what we might call a ‘pre-question marker’, and second it responds to A’s utterance as such a marker by returning the interactional floor to A with ‘permission’ to ask the question or make the request that A has in mind. In both these first two examples person B is ‘selected’ to speak by person A addressing an utterance to him/her. Example 3 illustrates how an action that is not actually addressed to another (A’s ‘SHIT’ is an expletive on hurting his hand) can nevertheless occasion an interactional response. Although B is not ‘selected’ to speak by speaker A, it is clear that B’s response is the proper (‘natural’) one in the circumstances. When someone near to us suffers a sudden hurt or injury a response such as B’s is the expectable (and expected) one. Ironically, were B to have not acted in response to A’s hurt, he/she would most likely be found to have acted improperly by ignoring someone in trouble. Thus Example 3 also illustrates how not responding to another can be a kind of action – ‘doing nothing’.

To say that interaction is intrinsically socially structured, then, is to note that the actions of the participants are ‘tied’ together in intelligible and appropriate ways. An action projects the kind of thing that can or should be done next, while this in turn, in so far as it is recognizable as a responding action, fits with what has been projected. The structures involved are not invented on the spot by the individuals that happen to be engaged in this particular interaction, but neither are they reproduced ‘mechanically’ by such persons. One’s social competence consists in the ability to use these structures in producing and making sense of social interaction.

The contextual availability of meaning

What the examples above also show is that mutual intelligibility is fundamental to interaction. Obviously for person B to respond in an appropriate way to person A, it requires that B understands what A has said or done. For persons to interact with one another requires that each has some grasp of what the other is doing or saying. Once again, the individualistic perspective might suggest that the meaning of persons’ actions is highly problematic. Presumably the only person who knows definitively what is meant by something said is the individual saying it. Along not dissimilar lines, some recent sociological theorizing, associated with postmodernism and radical reflexivity, holds that all meaning is problematic and relative and that therefore ‘common understanding’ is at best arbitrary and at worst impossible. In so far as common understandings obtain in social life, such sociologies suggest that they do so largely as a result of the exercise of power. Of course, we would not disagree that the meaning of a word, an action or a situation can be problematic. Thus, we have all experienced situations where someone has said or done something and we have been unsure what they meant by it. But equally, we are all familiar with occasions where it is perfectly plain what someone means. Furthermore, it is a massively observable fact that members of society interact with one another with little apparent difficulty in mutual understanding.

In our view, any adequate account of such mutual understanding has to recognize the role that ‘context’ plays in the comprehension of meaning in interaction. Taken out of its context of use, just about any phrase or sentence can be viewed as puzzling or ambiguous. Within that context, however, what is meant is normally quite transparent. Thus, while even the most plain and clear meaning can be rendered problematic if one so chooses, such problematizing of meaning involves removing the contextual specifics that make meaning clear. Those sociologists and philosophers who argue for the ‘indeterminacy of meaning’ do so on theoretical grounds that have little to do with how members of society actually comprehend the meaning of what is said or done. Furthermore, it is only within the confines of academic discourse that the possibility of questioning every common and plain understanding is a legitimate activity. In ordinary social life, in actual contexts of interaction, persons are not given license to systematically doubt the meanings of words and actions. In this sense, then, the skeptical character of post-modernism and radical reflexivity would seem to have little relevance for how people understand one another in everyday social life.

We have hinted above that the individualist view of interaction is associated with a ‘mentalistic’ view of meaning. According to this view, meaning is something created in the mind of the individual. Proponents of this mentalistic view of meaning argue that since one does not have access to the mind of the other, one can never really know what is meant by their actions. There are three noteworthy problems with this mentalistic view of meaning. The first is that problems of understanding are not ubiquitous: they are the exception rather than the rule. Second, when we experience a problem about what someone means, it is almost never an ‘open-ended’ difficulty (that is, where one has no idea at all what could be meant). Usually the problem of understanding is quite specific – one is not sure whether what is meant in this context is this or that. Third, when we have such a problem we have ways of dealing with it – by asking for explanation or clarification. For example:

Example 4

Mother:	Who else is going to this party?
Teenage daughter:	What do you mean?

Here the daughter asks her mother to explain what she means by the question about the party. What might the problem of understanding be here? Is it that the daughter has no idea what her mother means by the question, in the sense that she has no notion of what the words mean? This seems a remote possibility. A more plausible one is that the daughter’s problem concerns her mother’s motive in asking the question. Grasping the motive provides a way of understanding what is being asked and thus what an appropriate kind of answer might be. For example, is the mother asking for a list of all those who are due to attend the party? But what reason could she have for wanting to know this? Asking who will be present at a party can be one way of judging what kind of party it will be. Perhaps the question is not about all who will be at the party, but just certain specific persons. The speaker is, after all, a mother, and what is more, a mother of a teenage daughter. Typically, mothers of teenage daughters are known to be concerned about who their daughters associate with, wanting to avoid her getting ‘in with the wrong crowd’. This possibility suggests that the daughter’s problem may not really be to do with understanding at all, but is more about the mother’s right to ask such a question. ‘What do you mean?’ may be used to express not a problem of comprehension but of entitlement: what right has the mother got to question her daughter about who she associates with?

Of course, with ingenuity (and a tolerance for implausibility) one could come up with an infinite list of possible things that the mother in the above example might have meant by what she said. One can construct these possibilities by introducing other contextual features and thereby attributing all sorts of (weird and wonderful) possible motives to her. For example, perhaps she is really asking because she would like to come to the party herself: she is jealous of her daughter’s teenage status and would like to relive her own adolescent years. Alternatively, perhaps she is an extreme evangelical Christian and sees the party as a possible opportunity for religious activity: she is interested to know who will be at the party because she is thinking of coming along to distribute religious literature and appeal to the non-Christians present to ‘see the light’. The reader may invent other possibilities for him- or herself.

In the absence of any actual contextual information supporting these interpretations, they amount to idle, groundless speculation. However, participants in social interaction seldom have the freedom to engage in this kind of idle speculation about the motives behind the actions of others. The fundamental constraint that operates in all interaction is that persons should, wherever possible, take things ‘at face value’. In other words, one should respond to the actions of others on the basis of what those actions seem, obviously or most plausibly, to be. If something seems quite obviously to be a question addressed to oneself, then respond to it as such. The same holds for the meaning of what is said. If the meaning of the question is clear, then respond to it on that basis.

Against the mentalistic theory, then, we suggest that there is no general problem of meaning or understanding in interaction, therefore nothing for a general theory to explain. Rather, problems of understanding are ‘occasional’. They arise in specific interactional contexts, and the particular difficulties they involve exist by virtue of that context. It is the contextual availability of meaning that provides the background against which specific actions may on a specific occasion be found puzzling. The occasioned nature of problems of understanding has implications for how meaning is conceptualized. Ever since the writings of Weber, it has been common for sociologists to emphasize the importance of meaning by talking about the ‘interpretive’ nature of interaction. The term ‘interpretation’ is useful in emphasizing that participants in interaction have to make sense of what others are doing. Interaction is not a mechanical process of stimulus and response. However, the use of the term ‘interpretation’ as a general description can misleadingly suggest that interaction involves persons in a kind of continual puzzle-solving: that everything an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Social Interaction, Language and Society
• 2 Doing Ethnomethodology
• 3 Ethnomethodology and Self-Reflection
• 4 Family Life and Everyday Conversation
• 5 Going Public
• 6 Using Talk to Get Help
• 7 Observing Education
• 8 Going to the Doctor
• 9 Working in an Organization
• 10 Observing Science
• 11 The Primitive Character of Ethnomethodology
• Bibliography
• Index