Abstract
Garfinkel’s dissertation, “The Perception of the Other,” was completed and defended 15 years prior to the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology. This essay seeks hints of the familiar ethnomethodological themes (indexicality, reflexivity, accountability) within his thesis. It begins by examining the contributions of earlier social theorists, particularly Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schütz, to Garfinkel’s thought. It then examines the dissertation itself seeking evidence to support the claim that Garfinkel was already moving in the direction of an ‘incommensurable, asymmetric, and alternate’ program of sociological inquiry well before the term ‘ethnomethodology’ had even been coined.
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Notes
See also Garfinkel’s (1937) discussion of ‘trust’ in social relations.
Scott and Lyman (1968), in an early and influential article, described accounts as “a statement by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior” (1968: 46). For Scott and Lyman, accounts only come into play as justifications or excuses for normative violations. For Garfinkel, anything that can be observed and reported is account-able. It is, therefore, a much broader concept.
A revised version of this presentation subsequently appeared in Economica (Schütz 1943).
Parsons (1937) argued that it asked too much of the theory of rationality. He wrote:
[Hobbes’ solution] involves stretching, at a critical point, the conception of rationality beyond its scope in the rest of the theory, to a point where the actors come to realize the situation as a whole instead of pursuing their won ends in terms of their immediate situation, and then take the action necessary to eliminate force and fraud, and, purchasing security at the sacrifice of the advantages to be gained by their future employment. (1937: 93)
Garfinkel refers to this interchangeably as “the attitude of daily life” or the “attitude of common sense” (PO: 45).
Schütz did lay some of the groundwork for this critique in a talk presented at a workshop organized by Garfinkel at Princeton in March of 1952. Garfinkel quoted at length from this presentation, though a published version of Schütz’s (1953) paper was not to appear until after the dissertation was finished. Though Schütz’s paper does not mention Parsons’ work except in the most anodyne terms, all of the elements of Garfinkel’s critique can be found in it.
Two of the problem areas, “the invariant elements of social action” and “the nature of social relationships” were dropped from the mimeo (Garfinkel 1960) later circulated at UCLA.
“All these questions can be clarified by a radical analysis of social intersubjectivity” (Grathoff 1978: 104). In his prospectus, Garfinkel (2006) also chided Parsons for not being “radical enough” (2006: 137) in his position. Both Schütz and Garfinkel seemed to be employing the term in the same way.
Though of different types. He wrote: “In the Kantian tradition, Parsons asks: How can we believe our eyes? Schütz, in the Husserlian tradition, asks instead: How do we believe our eyes?” (PO: 91, emphasis in the original).
As Garfinkel recounted:
In a conversation that I had one day with a mathematician he told me that geometry means to him the study of those properties of a space that remain invariant through the various operations performed upon that space. And by a space he referred to “a set of points.” A moment’s reflection shows the admirable fitness of this definition as the definer of the object of study that we seek. We are not interested in the study of such properties of triangles-as-sets-of-points as equal angles give us equal lengths of sides, a property within the rules of a Euclidean space that remains invariant regardless of the operations of twisting, lifting from one place to another, fitting, reducing, expanding, and so on. But we are extremely interested in the point sets of such things as “interviewer,” “ideal candidate,” “actual candidate,” “insolent attitude,” “real motives,” “possibility of admission to medical school” and so on, and in the properties of these as they are possible constructions for the actor-as-geometrician, properties that remain invariant under the operations that our “geometrican” performs upon them, operations like comparing, classifying, separating, joining, ranking, equating, and so on. (PO: 518–519)
This quote closely follows a similar complaint voiced in Schütz (1945: 572).
Much effort was expended to reduce variance in the experiment. Some of the concerns in this regard were a bit surprising. Students from Radcliffe were excluded, for example, effectively limiting participation to male subjects only. Catholic students were also excluded on the grounds that “they could be expected to exhibit rather uniform attitudes of respect for the established order” (PO: 453). Special consideration was paid to stereotyping by Jewish and non-Jewish students. Initially there was a plan to separate those with Jewish-sounding names from the others but this was eventually abandoned due to attrition in the subject pool.
As Garfinkel explained in an extended footnote (PO: 454–456), the recording technology with which he had to work was extremely finicky. The recordings of the test materials and the recordings of the interviews with the subjects were all made with a “Wagner-Nichols Micro-Groove Recorder,” a commercial device for cutting high-fidelity vinyl discs. When Garfinkel attempted to economize by using media from a different manufacturer, he ended up damaging the recorder, which was also his playback device, resulting in the loss of 15 of his completed interviews.
The medical student interviewees were played by two faculty members in the Department of Social Relations. The interviewer, in both cases, was Garfinkel himself.
One can imagine the response of an Institutional Review Board to a proposal to conduct such a study today!
His method of operationalizing subject anxiety was quite complex. Evidence of anxiety was noted after the subject’s first listening to the recording of the second candidate, during the informational session, and later, after the second listening to the same candidate. Garfinkel entertained 11 categories of anxiety-related symptomatology (e.g., “Certainty-Uncertainty,” “Leaving the field,” “Somatic complaints”, “Deep sighs”). Each category might have as many as five sub-components (PO: 430–433). Each subject, therefore, was assigned a numeric score based on how many of the components in each category were present (e.g., 3/5 if there were three positives in a category with five components). The maximum possible score, therefore, would be eleven, but the actual reported scores ranged from 0.0 to 7.8 (see Table 5 in Chapter 22). The difference between the scores from the first and second listening was represented as the subject’s “Relative Anxiety Score” (PO: 433). These ranged from −1.20 to 7.33. This information is essential for interpreting Figure 2 in the Studies (OP: 67).
It was referenced explicitly in Garfinkel (2002: 167, 176).
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Koschmann, T. Early Glimmers of the Now Familiar Ethnomethodological Themes in Garfinkel’s “The Perception of the Other”. Hum Stud 35, 479–504 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9243-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9243-z