Abstract
This paper examines whether social workers and other direct service practitioners can find utility in ethnomethodology despite or even because of the policy of “indifference”. Garfinkel, the father of ethnomethodology (EM), sets out “ethnomethodological indifference” (EM-I) to insist that EM studies do not supplement, formulate remedies, develop humanistic arguments, or encourage discussions of theory. While at first blush such limits on EM might appear to be a barrier for most social workers this paper argues against first impressions. It is argued that EM provides an important redirection for social work practice and research. Additionally, it is proposed that by approaching EM through Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography social workers can bridge Garfinkel’s quest for haeccities (“just thisness; just here, just now”) with extended social relations and actual courses of actions to find congruence between EM and accomplished professional practice.
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Notes
Flynn (1991) describes this passage as a moment of "purity" work wherein Garfinkel sets out boundaries between EM and standard sociology.
Although what Garfinkel identified as ‘humanism’ was likely the speculative excursus into abstract and essential orders I propose a humanism which is a celebration of people in interaction. This is a humanism which focuses on people, and their living interactions, as work and play. This is a living celebratory humanism, as with Levinas (1979), which is posited as a corrective to the dehumanization and the inhumanity of structural approaches.
That which they call “constructive analysis” appears to be referred to as “formal analysis” in Ethnomethodology’s Program. I suspect following Lynch's detailed ethnomethodological analysis of constructivist approaches to science that ‘constructive’ was likely dropped to differentiate ethnomethodology from social constructionist approaches (Lynch 1993).
Garfinkel also refers to formal analysis and EM as “incommensurable, asymmetrically alternate technologies” (1992).
The English distinction between practise (verb) and practice (noun) is not simply a matter of grammar. The distinction points to the temporal dislocation between moments, between work and the product of work, between action and its reflection. Just how and when we practise this or that (art) and how and when we account for doing it as such are composite moments, what Garfinkel calls ‘Lebenswelt pairs’ (Garfinkel et al. 1992) for realization of sensible and accountable forms of action. For social workers the question is, how do we for practical purposes disattend the indexicality of this activity, in this place, with these people, such that we formulate this moment as social work ‘interviewing,’ ‘counselling,’ ‘treating,’ ‘intervening,’ etc.
I seek to differentiate ‘radical’ from ‘critical’ methods. The radical move signals a redirection toward ‘practice’ and its effects, while a ‘critical’ approach while recognizing insights from a radical approach simultaneously suggests that there are alternative forms or ways of acting and action, e.g., the performance of gender, gender relationships, social work practice, authority, etc.
Smith outlined that what she meant by “standpoint of women” was not an extra-local abstraction or formalized position, but rather an experience which allowed for work and for discovery of place as “speaking, knowing subjects in our experience as women” (1992: 88). Addressing the concept of standpoint, she lamented that “formalization is inevitable” and the “concept is moved upstairs” (1992: 89). Smith’s project was to talk, share, and explore lived experience of women, in their sexed bodies, their experiences of violence, rape, and lack of control, biological determinism, essentialism, domination, and oppression. Her focus was on “the embodied group of our experiencing as women”—note the gerund verb form.
Smith (1992) uses the idea of ‘standpoint’ though she is careful to differentiate her approach from Harding’s.
Garfinkel and Sacks provided the following homey narration of ethnomethodological phenomena, “[i]f, whenever housewives were let into a room, each one on her own went to the same spot and started to clean it, one might conclude that the spot surely needed cleaning. On the other hand, one might conclude that there is something about the spot and about the housewives that makes the encounter of one by the other and occasion for cleaning, in which case the fact of the cleaning, instead of being evidence of dirt, would be itself a phenomenon” (1970: 347). Unlike Garfinkel and Sacks Smith, working from her standpoint as a women could see that the “fact of (housewives) cleaning” relied on taken-for-granted enactments and enforcements of gender which she and other women experienced as trivializing and oppressive.
Agency function was identified by Jessica Taft (1937) and Virginia Robinson (1949), the mothers of the Functional Approach in Social Work. Functional social work was rooted in Otto Rank’s postulation of a “reality principle” in contradistinction to the Freudian Approach, which as adapted to social work became known as the Diagnostic Approach. Where a Diagnostic Approach led social workers to focus on psychodynamic elements of fantasy, defenses, impulses, and the unconscious, a Functional Approach instructed social workers to focus on the reality of lived time and the helping process that is beginning, middle, and endings, knowledge of the agency function, service, or mandate, the ways practice is shaped by function, and the importance of the worker client relationship (Smalley 1967).
Of course such understandings provide an important resource and set of instructions directing the assembling of ‘information’ and generating cognate accounts of activities as sensibly this or that form of social work, e.g., welfare work, child protection, mental health, etc.
When Smith refers to “non-local determinations” she is linking practitioners’ accomplishment of a here-and-now to their living involvement in extended social relations with people beyond the local setting. It must be noted that Smith’s reading of Marx is decidedly not structural, she is not referring to structural determinations, nor does she see structures as ‘acting’. Rather she advises, “[w]e might imagine institutions as nodes or knots of relations…that coordinate multiple strands of action into a functional complex” (1987: 160). What matters are relations between people and the interactive practices for producing order and sense over time across multiple life and work sites.
It must be recognized that the very possibility of the transcription systems created by Jefferson presuppose the availability of audio-recordings of talk in interaction. The emergence of CA is dependent on the ready availability of audio-recordings, which revealed the in vivo rather than recalled densities of talk-in-interaction. This technology in turn emerged from mass production of audio-recording equipment, which evolved from reel-to-reel, to cassettes, to digital recording, and transcription machines, that allowed segments of talk on tape to be reversed and re-played.
Anderson and Goolishian reference Gadamer’s “infinity of the unsaid” which in turn was based on Hans Lipps’ observation that “any linguistic account carries with it a ‘circle of the unexpressed’" (1988: 6).
Sudnow’s (2001) justifiably revered account of learning to play Jazz traces the process of learning from a teacher –scales, jazz chords, directed repetition, timing, incorporation into embodied movement—the hand—singing the melody, and so on. To be a member of a jazz ensemble, being able to play competently, presents for ethnomethodology the task of explaining how this is done.
Smith having noted the similarity with EM hastens to differentiate her approach, countering that unlike EM she begins and stays with member’s knowledge rather than lifting it and externalizing it, second that she is concerned with understanding the actualities of science rather than creating a generalizing science, and third, to access macro social relations through the micro-social.
Ethnomethodology, Institutional Ethnography, Participant Observation, Symbolic Interactionism, Grounded Theory, and so on.
Shulman provides the following instruction, “[t]he social worker’s task is not to decide what the client should be working on. Instead, using sessional contracting skills, the worker attempts to discover what the client is working on (1979: 45f.). It needs to be noted that Shulman’s directive, is similar to Sudnow’s jazz teacher’s directive to sing the melody. Such instructions are members’ gloss for complex arrays of practices, e.g., tuning into feelings, sessional contracting skills, elaborating skills, listening skills, empathic skills, and so forth.
A colleague who works as a social worker in Canada’s far north noted that he has had to intervene in serious situations, e.g., when a woman had to be medivaced from the community after being beaten by her spouse, in ways that violate his principled attachment to a strengths approach (Saleebey 1996). Thus he was compelled to focus on the man’s problems, alcoholism, rage, violence, and abuse rather than his strengths. However, even Saleebey, who promoted a strengths based approach to social work observed: “The conceptual and linguistic distance between a pathology-focused model and one built on the idea of strengths and assets to some seems too immense to span. These should not be seen as opposites but rather as complements; one incomplete without the other” (2001: 13). Curiously we see a parallel here with Garfinkel’s insistence that EM and FA are “unavoidably related” (2002: 115).
James Heap in a study of children’s reading “performances” in a classroom asked, “what counts as reading when reading counts” (1980: 265). This relatively simple question opens the door to phenomena of order, by directing attention to counting or accountability in situ. To Heap’s question, I also add, “who is counting,” as this directs us to differential power and authority to count, and to have one’s count counted as more authoritative than that of the other. Of course the question is what counts as authority?
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de Montigny, G. Ethnomethodological Indifference: Just a Passing Phase?. Hum Stud 40, 331–364 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-016-9405-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-016-9405-5