A response of Livingston, E. (2024) ‘Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise,’ Human Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09770-1
The title of Livingston’s paper should read ‘Garfinkel’s broken promise’. EM has produced many studies of the type which Livingston complains are missing from Garfinkel’s oeuvre, some produced by Livingston himself. Nevertheless, Livingston is apparently upset that Garfinkel himself produced none. It is difficult to see why.
Livingston begins with a critique of the four themes identified by Maynard and Heritage in Garfinkel’s work.
- He is correct to assert that it is activities, rather than appearances which are “the primary phenomenon”, if only because it is activities, rather than individual perceptions which are the empirically available data.
- He is no doubt also correct to insist on the uncomfortable generality of ‘documentary method’ as a gloss for sense making activities, though he might acknowledge (as Maynard and Heritage hint, and especially as he references a particularly myopic review by Coleman) that much of the detail is supplied in other chapters of Studies. His claim that “Garfinkel’s Rendering Theorem is a more incisive characterization of the research and theorizing practices of disciplinary sociology,” which turns out to be central to his argument, is less certain.
- Maynard and Heritage themselves seem uncertain of their third theme, though it is worth pointing out that sequential analysis is not merely important to CA; any action, linguistic or not, derives meaning from the context of what has gone before it. It has always seemed to me that the notion of ‘first time through’ is a way of acknowledging this temporal aspect of social order. It is difficult to see how EM could ever abandon this approach.
- Finally, he is correct to point out the emptiness of “any […] first principle.” In a culture still dominated by an ideology of asocial individualism, it no doubt remains important to stress the social, indeed the “moral” nature of human life. But once the Hobbesian demon has been banished, there is no possible analytic role for the usage. After all, members continue to generate social order even when they do not (in the ordinary meaning of those words) understand or trust one another. “Trust” can only survive as a theoretical term if it takes on a purely philosophical complexion (i.e. if it ceases to mean anything much at all).
Maynard and Heritage’s paper then, is shown to be promoting something of a myth regarding the coherence and progressive development of the discipline. Livingston is proposing a much less sanguine version. He correctly identifies a lacuna in Garfinkel’s work: his unwillingness to engage in the production of detailed descriptive studies of work. This appears deeply ironic, since the whole thrust of his thinking was to reject theoretical speculation and focus on carefully observed naturalistic observation. Garfinkel correctly theorised the failures of theoretical sociology, but manifestly failed to escape the same theorising tendency. But does this amount to a ‘broken promise’? Garfinkel pointed to a direction in research. Others, including Livingston himself, would seem to have fruitfully pursued that direction. If, like Moses on the mountain, he cannot complete the journey, then should this in itself occasion disapprobation?
A review of Livingston, E. (2024) ‘Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise,’ Human Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09770-1
Livingston illustrates what he proposes to be the failure of Garfinkel’s studies primarily with reference to two chapters of Ethnomethodology’s Program, and the paper more recently edited by Lynch (Garfinkel 2022). An interesting feature of all these studies is that they were published long after the fieldwork had been completed. Livingston goes to some trouble to document this, stating for example that the ‘Galileo’ study was conducted “[s]ometime during the mid-1980s” (2024:12). This historical work does little to further Livingston’s argument, but it does highlight a possible further piece of progressive myth making: in her note to the ‘Galileo’ paper, Rawls suggests that: “Much later studies were done by Lynch and Livingston and others, and the emphasis on unique adequacy in science and other professions was carried through.” (2022:267:n6) It is not said what these later studies were, Lynch and Livingston’s fieldwork reports being published at around the same time.
Livingston doesn’t appear to understand the purpose of the ‘Galileo’ study. Garfinkel is not interested in the law of falling bodies (which was, after all, discovered a long time ago) but in the question of ‘the disappearing phenomenon’. It is precisely the reproduction of Galileo’s results (and not his scientific findings) which interests him. It is difficult to know what to make of Livingston’s further suggestion that “Galileo does not demonstrate a law of the “Real Motion of Free Falling Bodies,” (13). What then was the purpose of his experiment, if indeed that is what it was?
Nevertheless, all three papers amply demonstrate Livingston’s complaint: the lack of detailed uniquely adequate description. But is this a ‘broken promise’, or something of a more serious methodological nature? Livingston’s critique rests heavily on Garfinkel’s conception of rendering theorems. The idea is that [the uniquely adequate understanding of the phenomenon] is rendered as {a theoretical description of that phenomenon in which its constituent detail is lost}. This may seem to some to be an inadequate characterisation of the concept, but that’s merely part of the problem. The question is: in what sense is Livingston’s ‘[waiting for the lecture to begin]’, preferable to Garfinkel’s ‘the lecture hasn’t begun’? (9) Of course it isn’t. Livingston himself would not claim that it is. ‘[Waiting for the lecture to being]’ is merely a proxy for Garfinkel’s actual lived experience of waiting for the lecture to begin. But how should that be represented? And does it make any difference?
Livingston was lucky. His discovery, which excited Garfinkel, was that in mathematics, the putative mathematical description (the maths on the page) is a direct analogue to the performance of mathematics as a practical action: if you can read the mathematics on the page, you are performing the mathematical operations – a lebenswelt pair! For Garfinkel, the next task was to produce such a pair from a study of science. Such a description was, as far as I know, never achieved.
This is where the breach occurs. While Livingston continued to follow Garfinkel’s advice to produce careful detailed* descriptions, Garfinkel himself, discovering that such descriptions were never adequate, were always the product of a rendering theorem, or something akin to one (a descriptive technique), looked for another way of approaching the problem. This was clearly an embarrassment; Garfinkel’s ambivalence towards his studies, on the one hand delighted by his findings, while on the other reluctant to publish, may well have been motivated by his feeling that these findings were only ever provisional, there was always a deeper level to be achieved. Furthermore, the findings became increasingly context dependent and ephemeral.
The inadequacy of description, any and all description, presents a more serious difficulty. If descriptive techniques are merely distorting rendering theorems, then where else is there to go? The answer seems to have been that the best way to specify an ‘instructed action’ is through instruction. Garfinkel’s later works (and perhaps even the Studies papers) are best read as instructions as to how to find a phenomenon, rather than attempts to describe one. Ultimately, only by following these instructions and experiencing the phenomenon for oneself can one truly and fully understand it.
Livingston’s careful descriptions are not to be sneered at, but neither are Garfinkel’s attempts to research more recalcitrant topics. Rather than picking over Garfinkel’s corpse, we should be taking forward the many insights he gave us, extending the reach of the analytic techniques he developed, and eventually adding to them.
The work of Ludwig Wittgenstein will be very important to this blog. He demolished the philosophical theory that the sole function of language is to represent the world, pointing to the other vital uses that language has. Nevertheless, this disproven theory still has a powerful grip on much of our thinking, even (or perhaps especially) if we have never studied philosophy.
Wittgenstein suggested that it is more often appropriate to think of language as a tool that we use to do things in the world; its meaning is not determined by its reference to some external object or concept, but rather by its purpose. He pointed out that there are many different uses of language.
Some uses of Giving orders, and acting on them –
Describing an object by its appearance, or by its measurements –
Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) –
Reporting an event –
Speculating about the event –
Forming and testing a hypothesis –
Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams –
Making up a story; and reading one –
Acting in a play –
Singing rounds –
Guessing riddles –
Cracking a joke; telling one –
Solving a problem in applied arithmetic –
Translating from one language into another –
Requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.
Each of these activities can be represented as a language game, a rule governed model of the use of language in a particular context or situation. Several vital insights are gained through this approach:
- The social nature of language. A language exists when two or more individuals communicate.
- When people use language, they are performing an action. In order to understand them, we should ask what is they are doing, not merely what do they mean?
- The key role that context plays in determining meaning. A word or a sentence may change its meaning, if used in the context of a different language game.
- The correspondence of particular language games to particular ways of living. The game only makes sense in context the social activity which gives it meaning, and of which it is an integral part.
- Different instances of language use cannot be easily categorised: similarities between different uses are of a “family resemblance” type. Thus, if A shares characteristics with B, and B shares characteristics with C, it does not follow that C shares characteristics with A.
Wittgenstein applied his insight to solving the kinds of questions that interest philosophers (or, more properly, to showing how those questions arose from mistakes in language use). In Philosophical Investigations for instance he is very concerned with the question of whether we can know another persons mind? In this blog, I’ll be more concerned with the kinds of questions that interest sociologists, economists and political thinkers, as well as managers and organisers. The sociologist Harold Garfinkel came to similar conclusions for sociology, establishing the field of ethnomethodology, originally a study of research methods, though now having a broader application.
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