This time Livingston Nails It
Posted by jalfro on 2025-09-11
I was not very impressed by Livingston’s (2024) critique (Rooke 2025), but his subsequent exchange with Mike Lynch has brought out the best in him (Lynch 2025, Livingston 2025). It’s odd that both Lynch and I mistook his main target as Harold Garfinkel, but let that pass. Now that he has made clear that his critique is aimed primarily at the current state of ethnomethodology, I find myself much more sympathetic to his position. It’s true that he leaves unanswered, many questions about his attitude to Garfinkel’s work, and especially Studies of Work in the Sciences, but what he does do is present a clear and concise summary of the nature of the ethnomethodological enterprise. For this, much can be forgiven.
He offers a distinction which had not been entirely clear to me before, but which is immediately recognisable on being pointed out, between describing ‘the day-to-day, moment-to-moment work of participants in various activities’ or ‘the ongoing, intrinsic organization of activities’. The former, he dismisses as mind-numbingly boring. The real prize is the latter: it consists in true ethnomethodological insights; coherently and realistically accounts for observable activities; is potentially useful to others; and is endlessly fascinating. It’s study reveals the fundamental, local and temporal principles of human organisation.
The distinction is not offered merely as a principle, or a piece of methodological advice, but as an ethnomethodological finding, identical with a research practice, which is in turn identical with a mundane activity:
I gave undergraduate first-year sociology students an assignment that made me deal with the fundamentals of ethnomethodological research. The assignment asked students to pick an ordinary, observable, everyday activity and describe how people are continually organizing that activity as they are doing it. When the homework assignments came in, a few markers and I faced an onslaught of several hundred papers on all sorts of activities—mowing the lawn, pinning laundry to clotheslines, changing a tire, organizing the family refrigerator, finding a parking place at the supermarket, picking the best fruit and vegetables, arranging items in the shopping trolley, loading the dishwasher, finding a seat on a bus, driving through a roundabout, eating dinner with friends in a restaurant, and on and on.
Our job was not to praise the students—“yes, you captured the ordinariness of it all,” “talk about mundanity!,” “high distinction”. For me and the markers, our aim was to suggest something distinctive about the work of producing the activity that a student chose.” (Livingston 2025)
That is what they did. What they found is the ongoing intrinsic organisation of activities. But at this point in his account, Livingston’s report is incomplete. Since it is an account of ethnomethodological practice, it requires a more precise specification. A description of marking “several hundred papers” will not do. What is needed is a description of marking one paper, treated as a unique process, revealing a unique finding:
For example, when eating out with friends, diners engage in the collaborative tasks of getting ready to give their dinner orders. Next, possibly as part of the same process, there are the tasks of actually placing the orders: even when the order of the ordering seems clear, people will change their minds—“can I have the potato, too, instead of the salad?” And as the orders are given, a diner might ask the waiter to come back to them later. When the waiter returns, the pressure is on. If you want to see unhappy faces, tell the waiter that you need a little more time.
Waiters do not take a single diner’s order to the kitchen and come back to get another. The diners and waiter work together to produce the table’s order. Throughout, the thematic heart of the activity is that the order comes from the table, it is the table’s order. (Livingston 2025)
Of course, the finding is not a discovery, in the sense of a discovery in the discovering sciences. It is known to waiters and their colleagues, though likely unremarkable except in the occasional difficulties of its achievement. It is no doubt available to anyone who seriously thought about the process, though who would seriously think about such a thing? It is uninteresting to sociologists, and even (as Livingston remarks) to some ethnomethodologists. But to those who take unique adequacy seriously, it is vital, identical to the principle (finding, advice, call it what you will) that there is a reportable, ongoing, intrinsic organization to be discovered.
Ah, ‘unique adequacy’, that old bugbear! But Livingston cuts through the myth and misunderstanding that surrounds the requirement:
The mystery of “unique adequacy” disappears if ethnomethodology is understood as the study of the ongoing, intrinsic organization of activities. It is a claim about the relationship between a method of analyzing an activity and finding the local, witnessable, identifying orderlinesses of the organizational work of producing it. (Livingston 2025)
Competence is necessary to this achievement, but it is not the point. Training can be helpful (and sometimes necessary) but is not a fundamental requirement. What is absolutely necessary for the fulfilment of the requirement is that we are competent to (a) collaborate in the putting together of an order in a restaurant, and (b) understand the necessity of delivering orders to the kitchen in the form of complete table orders. Not so difficult really.
References
Livingston, E. (2024) ‘Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise,’ Human Studies 48(2):327-349 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09770-1
Livingston, E. (2025) ‘Rejoinder to Michael Lynch’s “Promise and Silence: A Comment on Livingston’s ‘Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise,’” Human Studies 10-13https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-025-09811-3
Lynch, M. (2025) ‘Promise and Silence: A Comment on Livingston’s “Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise,”’ Human Studies 48:351–366 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-025-09803-3
Rooke, J. A. (2025) ‘Picking over Garfinkel’s corpse’, Determined Inquiry: notes on ethnomethodology, production theory and moral economy, https://jalfro.noblogs.org/post/2025/03/06/picking-over-garfinkels-corpse-part-1-of-2/
Filed under Ethnomethodology Unique Adequacy