Ethnomethodological Studies Research Articles

I am not that Caitlin: a critique of both the transphobic media reaction to Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover shoot and of passing

ABSTRACTIn this article I discuss and critique transphobic media reactions to the celebrity Caitlyn Jenner’s 2015 Vanity Fair cover shoot. I then consider these in the light of Garfinkel, H. [1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall] concept of ‘passing’ in his celebrated case story of Agnes and argue that ‘passing’ is often conflated with ‘being out’. I argue that the two are significantly different and claim that the former is implicitly based on a public lie. I use several auto-ethnographic narratives to illustrate the argument.

THE WRITING SKILL STIMULATION OF CHILDREN AGED 5-6 YEARS

The purpose of this research was examined the implementation of writing skill stimulation at TK Negeri Pembina Manahan Surakarta. The research used a qualitative approach with ethnomethodology study. The subject of research were teachers and children aged 5-6 years. The data collecting techniques used interview, observation, and documentation. The techniques for testing the data validity by triangulation of technique and source. The data analysis technique used the interactive data model by Milles and Huberman. The research result showed that TK Negeri Pembina Manahan did the writing skill stimulation through the learning activity based on the Early Childhood Education Curriculum of 2013. The stimulation did through writing activity and writing skill reinforcement activity (drawing, coloring, and cutting). The thematic learning with scientific approach supports the varied writing skill stimulation. These activities are able to support the children’development of writing skill, including: (1) the children are able to grip the pencil; (2) writing the self-name; and (3) writing word and number.  Â

Ethnomethodological Indifference: Just a Passing Phase?

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.

Through the Seventh Generation: Clanning as a Limiting Factor in Organized Criminality in Central Asia

The purpose of this paper is to present an ethnomethodological study of the Central Asian republics and the effects of clan and family structure on transnational organized crime. Criminal elements and terrorist organizations are found throughout the region. The various nomadic and sedintary ethnic groups in this region perpetuate the primordial patrimonial system of clan authority. The influence of the clan permiates the entire system and the reification inherent in this system disallows coordinated systems of trade across tribal boundaries. The absense of transnational groups is this region is explained with the influence of the clan.

The Impact of Globalization on Access for Individuals with Disabilities

The Impact of Globalization on Access for Individuals with Disabilities Katherine Williamson, Sarah Summy, EdD; Yvette Hyter, Ph.D. CCC-SLP; W.F. Santiago-Valles, Ph.D. Abstract This comparative ethnomethodology study is focused on the global context elements that help explain public policies and its consequences on types of access available to individuals with disabilities in the United States Midwest and West Africa. The goal of this study is to identify the role of individuals with disabilities in a global society by answering two research questions. First, what are the public policies in place for physical, social, and educational access in the United States Midwest and West Africa? Second, how is physical, social, and educational access being provided in the United States Midwest and West Africa? The comparative analysis of the United States Midwest and West Africa was constructed using archival research, ethnographic interviews, and observations in a variety of settings. The study concludes with exploration of the impact processes of globalization have on public policies in place, funding of those policies, and the consequent roles of individuals with disabilities in society. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jehd.v5n2a3

Cities of Noise: Sensemaking, Sensemakers, and Organized WorldsThe Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, by Kundera Milan. (Translated from the French by Linda Asher.) New York: HarperCollins, 2007.The Man Without Qualities, by Musil Robert. (Translated from the German by Burton Pike and Sophie Wilkins.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.Invisible Cities, by Calvino Italo. (Translated from the Italian by William

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech author Milan Kundera suggests that a novel is “an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”. Novels are, indeed, arguably the most subtle tool of ontological inquiry, insightful meditations on how individuals, faced with questions and enigmas related to human existence, make sense of their ‘being in the world.’ (Heidegger, 1962). I have always admired the mastery with which great novelists are able to dissect and convey the most intricate aspects of human situations through their characters and plots. Novelists’ investigations are typically triggered by twists and turns that generate disturbance in the status quo and call for interpretations on the part of the characters involved. I refer to this disturbance as ‘noise’. In this essay, I shall comment on a tale of three cities that share the attribute of noise and are depicted in literary works by Milan Kundera, Robert Musil and Italo Calvino. I shall use this tale to develop considerations that are relevant to the world of organizations, and I shall also highlight some ways in which organizational scholars can learn from novelists.

Accounting for Disability in the Phenomenological Life-World

This paper critically assesses Edmund Husserl's concept of the ‘life-world’, found in his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. We argue that Husserl's phenomenology fails to consider the social and material arrangements that allow subjectivity to emerge in our shared world. We begin by outlining the concept as formulated in Husserl’s Crisis. We then entertain Husserl’s critique by his most famous student, Martin Heidegger. We suggest a reformulation of intersubjectivity, along the lines of Heidegger’s mitdasein, accounts for subjectivity as it emerges in the shared world. Next, we introduce ethnomethodology, pioneered by Harold Garfinkel, which gives sociological support to this argument. Through the ethnomethodological disability studies of A.B. Robillard, we argue that the life-world is not always as democratic as Husserl's philosophy may suggest. This shows the necessity of disability politics. We end by asking what a phenomenology sensitive to this fact might look like, in terms of both disability studies and phenomenological philosophy more generally.

Reflexive Organizing for Knowledge Sharing: An Ethnomethodological Study of Service Technicians

ABSTRACTThis study examines how organizing is done reflexively through practice in the context of knowledge sharing. Organizing concerns reduction of equivocality and sensemaking so that actions can be interpreted and coordinated. Reflexivity refers to the fact that this organizing is done through talk, and that talk is an action that requires organizing. To examine how this reflexive organizing is accomplished, detailed analysis of video‐recorded interactions among photocopier service technicians revealed various interactional methods to make actions of requesting and offering assistance understandable and relevant. To explain these methods, Goffman's concept of embedding is applied. By embedding other social situations in the current talk, one can project a certain sense of one's talk. This reflexive organizing clarifies that organizing is part of, not separate from, any practice and that knowledge sharing is accomplished not through a retrospective narrative but through reflexive construction of the situation in which talk is made possible.

Differences and Similarities of Participant Experiences in Simulation of Problem Solving : Exploring Implications from a Case of CPX in Medical Education

전문교육영역에서 많은 교육 프로그램들은 실제 세계에 직접적으로 노출됨 없이도 실제 세계를 모사하여 학습자가 획득하고자 하는 내용을 보다 효과적으로 재생할 수 있도록 하는 시뮬레이션의 성격을 갖는다. 학습이나 평가 프로그램의 설계와 운영에서의 중요한 관건은 학습자로 하여금 관련 현장에서 활용하는 지식이나 기법을 얼마나 실제 답게 경험하도록 하느냐에 달려 있다. 본 연구에서는 의학교육에서 임상수행평가를 사례로 하여 참여자가 시뮬레이션 프로그램을 어떻게 경험할 수 있는지 살펴보았다. 이를 위해서는 재생산하고자하는 경험이나 지식의 동일성을 전제로 하지 않고, ‘사태를 있는 그대로’ 사태들간의 유사성과 차이가 무엇인지 면밀히 관찰 분석해 보고자 하였다. 실제 상황과 모사 상황은 각각의 상황이 노정하는 총체적 이해의 지평에 따라 다르게 경험될 수밖에 없다. 그럼에도 불구하고 시뮬레이션 프로그램이 모종의 교육적 기능을 할 수 있는 것은 전달하고자 하는 지식이 구현하고자 하는 실제의 모사 여부 수준보다는 참여자들의 실제적인 추론과 행위를 어떻게 지속적으로 유발시킬 수 있을 것인가에 달려 있다. 본 연구 결과는 상황주의 패러다임에 따른 교육 프로그램의 개발 및 학습전이 연구에 시사점을 제시해 줄 것이다.

Statistical Practice: Putting Society on Display

As a contribution to current debates on the ‘social life of methods’, in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which ‘methods’, here quantitative methods, come to have a social life – by embodying and exhibiting understanding they ‘make the social structures of everyday activities observable’ ( Garfinkel, 1967 : 75), thereby putting society on display. Exhibited understandings rest on distinctive lines of practical social and cultural inquiry – ethnographic ‘forays’ into the worlds of the producers and users of statistics – which are central to good statistical work but are not themselves quantitative. In highlighting these non-statistical forms of social and cultural inquiry at work in statistical practice, our case study is an addition to understandings of statistics and usefully points to ways in which studies of the social life of methods might be further developed from here.

A contemporary examination of workplace learning culture: An ethnomethodology study

Creating and maintaining a sustainable workforce is currently an international concern. Extensive literature suggest that students and staff need to be 'engaged', that is they need to interact with the health team if they are to maximise learning opportunities. Despite many studies since the 1970s into what creates a 'good' learning environment, ongoing issues continue to challenge healthcare organisations and educators. A 'good' learning environment has been an intangible element for many professions as learning is hindered by the complexity of practice and by limitations on practitioners' time available to assist and guide novices. This study sought to explore the nature of the learning interactions and experiences in clinical nursing practice that enhance a 'good' workplace learning culture for both nursing students and qualified nurses. An ethnomethodology study. A range of clinical settings in Victoria and Queensland, Australia. Students and registered nurses (n=95). Fieldwork observations were carried out on student nurses and registered nurses, followed by an individual interview with each participant. An iterative approach to analysis was undertaken; field notes of observations were reviewed, interviews transcribed verbatim and entered into NVivo10. Major themes were then extracted. Three central themes: learning by doing, navigating through communication, and 'entrustability', emerged providing insights into common practices potentially enhancing or detracting from learning in the workplace. Students' and registered nurses' learning is constrained by a myriad of interactions and embedded workplace practices, which can either enhance the individual's opportunities for learning or detract from the richness of affordances that healthcare workplace settings have to offer. Until the culture/or routine practices of the healthcare workplace are challenged, the trust and meaningful communication essential to learning in practice, will be achievable only serendipitously.

Flawed by Dasein? Phenomenology, Ethnomethodology, and the Personal Experience of Physiotherapy

This paper applies a hybrid Heideggerian-ethnomethodological approach to physiotherapy practice. Unlike previous studies written by and for practitioners, this paper uses my personal experience receiving physical therapy as its point of departure. By combining Heidegger’s [Being and time (trans: Stambaugh J). State University of New York Press, New York 1996] notion of the ‘ontological difference’ with Garfinkel’s (Studies in ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs 1967) concept of ‘accountability,’ I argue that in physical therapy practice, both client and practitioner actively shape the body into a coherent object for medical intervention. I begin by introducing three key phenomenological concepts, the life-world, the ontological difference, and Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity. I then empirically substantiate these concepts by reviewing classic and recent studies in ethnomethodology. I conclude with my own experience of physical therapy, and demonstrate how both client and practitioner actively constitute the body as a medical and therapeutic object. This is cause for both disability studies and physiotherapy to reconsider some of their core concepts, ‘medicalization’ and ‘client-specific measurement,’ respectively.

Doing focus group research: Studying rational ordering in focus group interaction

Scholars of ethnomethodologically informed discourse studies are often sceptical of the use of interview data such as focus group data. Some scholars quite simply reject interview data with reference to a general preference for so-called naturally occurring data. Other scholars acknowledge that interview data can be of some use if the distinction between natural and contrived data is given up and replaced with a distinction between interview data as topic or as resource. In greater detail, such scholars argue that interview data are perfectly adequate if the researcher wants to study the topic of interview interaction, but inadequate as data for studying phenomena that go beyond the phenomenon of interview interaction. Neither of these more and less sceptical positions are, on the face of it, surprising due to the ethnomethodological commitment to study social order as accomplished in situ, not as something that pre-exists or goes beyond the situated interaction. This article, however, challenges not only the first, but also the second position and suggests that it is, after all, possible to do committedly ethnomethodological studies of focus group data that demonstrate how members of a focus group setting accomplish certain rational orders, and, significantly, how they do so by utilizing certain available resources.

Local Division of Labor in Rehabilitation Team Conferences

This study investigates rehabilitation team members’ interactive accomplishments of their domains of work and responsibility in rehabilitation team conferences in Japan. A combination of membership categorization analysis and sequential analysis is adopted to systematically illustrate the situated productions of professional sense-making practices. Analysis focuses on the segment in which a physician asks a series of questions regarding a patient’s functional status and disability coded in the functional assessment record (FAR). A close examination of data shows that a physician does not always choose a respondent with his or her gaze when asking a question because s/he is continuously reading the FAR displayed on a computer screen. Despite this, a physician’s mention of a topic generates a professional’s domain of work and responsibility in a local division of labor which is used by members to assume who the relevant categorial respondent is. Further, members demonstrate these assumptions by shifting their gazes toward the computer screen, back to the document on the desk, and turning toward co-participants, thus embodying professional roles and responsibilities in situ. This study utilizes the analyst’s ethnographic understanding of the routines and division of labor at the rehabilitation ward as a resource to explicate professional sense-making practices, thus utilizing Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of work. Together with sequential and categorial resources offered by Sacks, this study elucidates inferences and normative expectations which rehabilitation team members bring together to reproduce the endogenous logic of rehabilitation culture in actual occasions of the institutional life.

Multimodal production of second pair parts in air traffic control training

Air traffic control (ATC) is a joint multiactivity project in which controllers are engaged in activities carried out with an array of artifacts, involve a multitude of objects and actors, and amount to the management of multiple parallel tasks. In ATC training, this complex joint project is transformed into an object of pedagogy. With the help of 3-D simulators, the trainees are enabled to imitate ATC tasks in natural environments. Our analysis discerns the temporal and sequential organization of ATC training. We focus on the trainer's prompt–trainee's multimodal response adjacency pairs. Since the trainer's prompt is made relevant by the trainee's pending task accomplishment, this prompt projects the trainee's task accomplishment as a sequentially relevant (multimodal) next in the instructional sequences. The multimodal trainer–trainee interaction thus is embedded in the ATC task accomplishment. Our analysis discerns the temporal and sequential organization of the prompt–multimodal response adjacency pairs and their relationship to the larger work activities in progress. The analysis is based on videotaped data (12h) gathered during tower control simulator training. The article touches upon some central concerns of contemporary conversation analysis (CA) and ethnomethodological studies, i.e., multimodality, embodiment and materiality as key aspects of the participants’ sense-making processes.

The idea of constitutive order in ethnomethodology

Despite its frequent appearances in sociological textbooks, dictionaries and theoretical opuses, ethnomethodology is still one of the most misunderstood and undervalued domains of sociological inquiry. This is particularly evident in the case of the central sociological question: social order. Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, provided a unique answer to the question of order. His answer emphasized a contingent, situated character of constitutive practices of local order production. Initially a response to Talcott Parsons’ question about the conditions of the stability of social order, Garfinkel’s conception of constitutive order was later radicalized and used as the foundation of the programme of empirical ethnomethodological studies. To properly understand the radical character of the conception and programme, it is necessary to reveal the core elements of it and to separate them from the historically changed components.

Ethnomethodological Studies in the Field of Health Care: On Some Issues Concerning Diagnosis

Ethnomethodological Studies in the Field of Health Care: On Some Issues Concerning Diagnosis

“Humans Cannot Communicate”—Unravelling the Mental Knots of Niklas Luhmann

DiMaggio, P. J. and W. W. Powell. 1991. Introduction (pp. 1–38) in Powell, W. W. and P. J. DiMaggio (eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. DiMaggio, P. J. and W. W. Powell. 1991. ‘‘The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields’’ (pp. 63–82) in Powell, W. W. and P. J. DiMaggio (eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge. London, UK: Vintage. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Law, J. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London, UK: Routledge. Meyer, J. W. and B. Rowan. 1991. ‘‘Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony (pp. 41–62) in Powell, W. W. and P. J. DiMaggio (eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Powell, W. W. and P. J. DiMaggio, eds. 1991. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Scott, W. R. and J. W. Meyer. 1991. ‘‘The Organization of Societal Sectors: Propositions and Early Evidence’’ (pp. 108–140) in Powell, W. W. and P. J. DiMaggio (eds) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

More studies in ethnomethodology

More studies in ethnomethodology

Pemanfaatan Brand pada Restoran Sunda (Studi Kasus pada Restoran Sari Sunda, Cibiuk, dan Bumbu Desa)

Brand utilization has been done in business or other non-profit organizations for a long time to differentiate a product from one manufacturer to other manufacturers. Sundanese culinary industries from time to time have significant growth. Thus, this article discusses on how the utilization of brand in Sundanese restaurants. Qualitative research dimension method was used, especially ethnomethodology study, that how an individual creates and understands everyday life. In this case, individuals are the consumers who were interviewed regarding their visit at each restaurant studied. Conclusion of this paper is brand can be utilized by the restaurants to touch cultural values of the customers to achieve marketing goals. Besides, brand can also be used to develop global marketing strategy for its unique cultural content.