Garfinkel, Social Problems, and Deviance

Abstract

AbstractGarfinkel and his earliest colleagues in ethnomethodology rejected the then conventional marginalization of the myriad forms of social knowledge, skill, and reason possessed by members of society themselves, and their derogation in the face of scientific sociology. Indeed, they installed the fine-grained analyses of members’ methods at sociology’s very core. Nowhere were these revolutionary initiatives more vividly displayed than in the study of social problems and deviance. This chapter traces the origins, expansion, and diffusion of ethnomethodological contributions to the study of social problems and deviance. More specifically, the chapter provides occasion to reflect on whether efforts to reconcile tensions within ethnomethodology between its own evaluative and value-neutral tendencies may contribute to overcoming the long-standing tensions between evaluative and value-neutral tendencies in the sociological subdiscipline of social problems and deviance. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first briefly reviews the historical development of social problems and deviance as a distinctive subdiscipline of sociology. The second section discusses various ways in which Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists intervened in the study of deviance and social problems. The third section focuses on Garfinkel’s enduring legacy. The final section provides some concluding remarks.