Garfinkel's Ethnomethodology Research Articles

POLA TINDAKAN GURU DALAM MENDIDIK ANAK PENYANDANG ADHD DI SD ISLAM PERMATA MOJOSARI

People with ADHD are free to pursue their education, in both inclusive and regular schools with adequate facilities. In reality, some schools accept ADHD without consideration, especially the Permata Mojosari Islamic Elementary School which is a new school. The purpose of the study was to analyze the pattern of action teachers and ADHD students in regular schools. The research method uses qualitative ethnomethodology theory by Harold Garfinkel. The analysis technique uses ethnographic methods. The research subjects were ADHD students and teachers at the elementary school through observation, interviews, and documentation. The results are, first, ADHD students follow the lesson like normal students, but their seats are close to the teacher. Second, students provide special understanding. Third, students think about solving questions. Fourth, the teacher helps write the spelling based on the students' answers. Fifth, the writing is in his book. Sixth, when students are bored, they are given knick-knacking therapy. Seventh, when students succeed in carrying out the instructions correctly, a reward is given, when it violates social norms, punishment is given. The pattern of action in Garfinkel's ethnomethodology is influenced by the ability of the teacher.

Heinrich Wittenwilers ›Ring‹ als Krisenexperiment: Erwartung und Störung didaktischer Kommunikation

Heinrich Wittenwilers ›Ring‹ als Krisenexperiment: Erwartung und Störung didaktischer Kommunikation

Relevance and embodied reflexivity: constellations work between Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty and Garfinkel

This paper draws on Aron Gurwitsch's theory of relevance which was of outstanding importance for both Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body and Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. In the first part we discuss Gurwitsch's conception of relevance in contrast to Schutz'. We then develop a theory of embodied reflexivity drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Garfinkel together with some newer approaches on embodied practice and knowledge. In the second, empirical section we use the concepts and conceptions developed for the description and analysis of selected video recordings of systemic constellation sessions. Systemic constellation is a psychotherapeutic method which is used predominantly in psychological and pedagogical contexts as well as in management consultations. The basic assumption underlying constellations work is that the experiences of representatives are relevant for the person who has initiated the constellation and that they provide information about the issue at hand. The origin, validity, and reliability of the representatives' bodily and relational self-perception is difficult to assess and even more difficult to explain. In our contribution we propose a vocabulary with reference to Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, and Garfinkel, that, as we think, allows for the description of the phenomenon and at the same time throws a light on how relevance can be understood from a sociological perspective inspired by phenomenology.

Social Performance as Cultural Critique: Critical Theory beyond Bourdieu and Habermas

AbstractAlthough Bourdieu and Habermas concur that a critical reconstruction of the lay practice must be able to help people emancipate themselves from the social forces that are beyond their recognition, they take a radically different tack to achieve that goal. In the first part of this paper, I will bring Bourdieu to a “virtual dialogue” with Habermas and show why Bourdieu's method of “participant objectivation” should be abandoned in favor of Habermas's theory of “virtual participation”. In the second part, after examining how Habermas uses his theory of virtual participation to criticize Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, I will show why Habermas's theory of virtual participation fails to accomplish what it professes to do. In the third part, by recounting the history of child abuse, I shall argue that the critique of the traditional practice of child beating was made possible not through the exchanges of validity claims about child beating as Habermas would argue but through the performance of narratives that re‐describe the “meaning” of child beating in terms that made the traditional practice of child beating look inhuman, unbearable and horrible. Keywords critical theory, participant objectivation, virtual participation, validity claim, social performance, Narrative.

Editors’ Introduction

In the contemporary world visual data are found in a range of forms and formats and in a variety of practical empirical contexts. Our Introduction considers the growth of visual studies in recent decades and its increasing focus upon practices of visualization and representation. Contributions to this special issue are introduced to highlight the diversity of approaches and topics used by researchers employing visual methods. The articles presented here range from developments out of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology to studies concerned to promote a focus on aspects of human dignity and community.

The Meaning of Meaning in Sociology. The Achievements and Shortcomings of Alfred Schutz's Phenomenological Sociology

Phenomenological sociology was founded at the beginning of 1930s by Alfred Schutz. His mundane phenomenology sought to combine impulses drawn from Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and Weber's action theory. It was made famous at the turn of 1960s and 1970s by Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Berger & Luckmann's social constructionism. This paper deals with the notable accomplishments of Schutz and his followers and then proceeds to a shared shortcoming, which is that the phenomenological approach is unable to understand meaning in any other way but as actors's knowledge. Therefore, phenomenological sociologists are forced to describe the actor's interpretations of meaning as transparent to the actor him/herself, even if they sometimes make heroic attempts to escape the limitations of the phenomenological conception. The limitation is apparent in Husserl's and Schutz's definition of meaning as a “reflective intentional act”, Garfinkel's use of the term “accounting” to refer to a signifying effect, and the way Berger and Luckmann describe their social theory as “sociology of knowledge”. Today, similar confusions are present in Michael Polanyi's “tacit knowledge”and in Giddens' structuration theory.

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. By Bruno Latour. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 316. $39.95 cloth.

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. By Bruno Latour. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 316. $39.95 cloth. Reviewed by Mariana Valverde, University of Toronto1 Law & Society Review readers are likely to have heard the news that Durkheim is dead. Yet Durkheim-style thinking persists. Nietzsche's prophet Zarathustra tried to make us realize that if we no longer believe in God as the guarantor of order and meaning, we cannot continue to imagine that phenomena can be neatly categorized as effects of larger causes, with causes in turn organized in a coherent if mobile system. Zarathustra's words fell on deaf ears, however. Today, we may have learned that the world is neither static nor orderly, but we have not looked at our thinking tools to see which ones assume an order behind phenomena. Some who did hear Nietzsche's message decided to throw away all tools, in postmodern despair. Others buried their noses in concrete particulars (e.g., the historical turn). But mainstream sociologists, believing that scholarly raw material comes only in two currencies, facts and concepts, continue making the world-revisioned as sets of data-fit pre-given categories. Bruno Latour's critique of structuralist-influenced sociology does not take up the tired slogan about facts being socially constructed; on the contrary, it leaves facts to one side, concentrating on critiquing concepts. American audiences, often merging all things French into a single Rorschach blob, have not realized that Latour is adamantly opposed to the cultural-studies folk who came to believe that deconstruction (a method for analyzing texts) could replace both politics and social science. For Latour (as for Foucault, an affinity repeatedly recognized in this book), Durkheimian sociology has to be abandoned not because it is hopelessly positivist-though it is-but because it is not scientific enough. Invoking an alternative social science tradition, one that begins in Durkheim's forgotten rival Tarde and goes through Garfinkel's ethnomethodology to science studies, Latour's book is curiously optimistic: it is an anti-Durkheimian rules of sociological method. So just what is the new method, and why should legal scholars care? For Latour, the task of scholars begins by taking up a scientific skeptical stance and swearing never to use prepackaged abstract notions-or at least, to use them only after acknowledging that they are black boxes that could and should be opened at some point. One can then study how various actors interact in a particular setting, and how they help or hinder each other to generate a more or less durable result: the germ theory of disease, a new subway train, a legal doctrine, etc., with these accounts being notable by the absence of sociology's familiar concepts. Durkheim's claim to fame was that, unlike other late-nineteenth-century writers on issues such as crime and madness, he did not talk about hybrid entities such as degeneration, but rather began by positing and enshrining the social. For Latour, this attempt to purify a social realm is as problematic as its opposite, biological reductionism. And while Latour may be somewhat unfair in stating that contemporary sociology treats the social as a kind of stuff, his criticism of sociology's founding move is on the whole apposite. …

Difficult Collective Deliberations: Anthropological Notes toward a Theory of Education

Background/Context In the 1970s, Lawrence Cremin urged researchers to remember that education is more than schooling. Few heeded this call, perhaps because of the absence of the theoretical framework needed to make this more than a platitude. As a cultural anthropologist, I argue that education is a fundamental human activity that is infinitely more complex than anything that can happen during learning lessons in school. The argument is a theoretical one bolstered by the case studies included in this special issue. Policy Context There are two main strains of research by those concerned with education as something that does not happen solely or even mainly in schools. In anthropology, it has been necessary to be aware of this given the absence of institutions easily recognizable as schools in many of the societies in which anthropologists have worked. But even in this discipline, the emphasis was more on incidental enculturation than on education as deliberate effort. In sociology and related fields, many have looked at nonschool environments as causal to the socialization that appears to be a precondition to success in schools. The point of reference remained schooling. Purpose In this analytic article, I pick up two key terms in Cremin's definition: “effort” and “deliberation.” Through a contrast with Bourdieu's theory of habitus, I show that both words make sense in terms of an amended take on Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, Lave's understanding of learning as movement through differentiated social fields (“communities of practice”), de Certeau's insistence on “enunciation,” and Rancière's focus on productive ignorance. I show how all the case studies included in the special issue take us out of the world of early learning and into the world of continued efforts to change both oneself and one's consociates through often difficult collective deliberations. Conclusions/Recommendations Focusing on ubiquitous education about life conditions rather than early socialization or school-based skills reopens the question of the processes that actually constitute the school politically. If religion, ideology, artistic tastes, technologies, and so on, must be seen as developing essentially in and around institutions uneasily controlled by the “public,” then the conversations by school people about schooling (its policies, prerequisites, and consequences) miss what remains most powerful in human life—the continued efforts by all to transform their conditions.

Semântica social e etnométodos: metodologia da pesquisa do senso forense da decisão jurídica

To research the juridical decision requests more than to study the theory of the interpretation and the theory of the argument, it involve the study of the juridical community's daily life. The decisions are not mere application of the rules of law, nor of the argumentative rationality, they are fruit of communicative processes developed in the juridical community. To treat of the theme we related Niklas Luhmann's semantic vision with Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, what provides us a sociological explanation of the construction of the right starting from the juridical community added to the identification of juridical ethnomethods.

Ethnomethodology in Italy

This article provides an overview on works that have come out in Italy in the field of ethnomethodology. General introductory works are considered first, with reference to their similarities and differences. Subsequently, the interpretations and discussions concerning the ethnomethodological perspective are briefly presented, and the limited amount of empirical investigations on ethnomethodological questions is mentioned. Garfinkel's ethnomethodology has been the object of a few specific introductory and interpretative contributions. The relationship between ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics has been a further and distinct research theme. Discourse and conversational analysis as a research field of its own has elicited a remarkable flow of research, which is—in contrast to ethnomethodology—-not only methodological and epistemological but empirical as well. In particular, a number of authors have studied asymmetrical conversational exchanges in the institutional context provided by an Italian Court of Justice. Conversational analysis also has been instrumental in studying the production of social identity. In the final discussion, some theoretical points Italian students of ethnomethodology and the related disciplines have raised and discussed are presented in a condensed form.

The Reality of Communication

This paper tries to cast a new light on the reading of H. Garfinkel's works and elucidate their theoretical position.Since their appearance, ethnomethodological studies have been the ambiguous projects even on the theoretical foundation. We think this is partly because Garfinkel's projects were understood as positioned in the interpretive paradigms. Although we do not necessarily negate such an understanding, we think the core of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology is not grasped by it. We think, Garfinkel's thought lies outside the confrontation between the normative and the interpretive paradigms.In this paper, we will examine this point firstly by defining the theoretical position of the interpretive paradigms, and then by elucidating the fundamental mechanism of communication-practices Garfinkel observes and specifies.

THE PROMISE AND FAILURE OF ETHNOMETHODOLOGY FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE:

Despite the significance of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, it is vulnerable to a criticism that seriously undermines its claims for itself. Mary Rogers's article implicitly and to some extent explicitly reveals the fundamental weakness, the Achilles heel, of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. Her article can be read as providing the grounds for a powerful critique of ethnomethodology from a feminist perspective. The critique is that ethnomethodology is guilty of doing, without recognizing it, precisely what it criticizes traditional social science for doing. Ethnomethodology criticizes social science for not recognizing the ongoing methods by which all actors, including social scientists themselves, go about creating reality or producing their world, which is identical, according to Garfinkel, to making their world accountable (Garfinkel 1967, 1). Ethnomethodology seeks to de-reify the social phenomena that positivist social science as well as commonsense members treat as constituting a given, objective, thinglike reality. Garfinkel's analysis of the case of Agnes represents a groundbreaking work in sociology with respect to the social construction of gender; it was followed by ethnomethodologically influenced feminist works (e.g., Kessler and McKenna 1978; West and Zimmerman 1987). The ethnomethodologlcal approach has proved significant to feminist scholarship, and that scholarship has contributed to the significance of ethnomethodology, but the two are by no means Identical approaches to doing research or producing knowledge.

Ethnomethodological Recovery of Durkheim

When Parsons derived action theory from Durkheim's sociology, he also argued with Durkheim, disputed his claims, and expressly rejected some of his fundamental principles. Accordingly, American functionalism contained a hidden “negative image” of Durkheim. Parsons's student, Harold Garfinkel, addressed functionalism at its weak points, eventually overthrowing most of what Parsons had to say about society. Some of these weak points were predicated on Parsons's rejection of Durkheim, including explicit rejection of Durkheim's equivalences between society, morality, and objective reality. Garfinkel's ethnomethodology therefore rejected what had been premised on Parsons's rejection of Durkheim. In so doing, it reversed the negative image of Durkheim back to its positive classical form and empirically demonstrated some of Durkheim's most troubling principles. Since Garfinkel did not deliberately recover Durkheim in this manner, the dynamics of this case make it an interesting study of how theorists read other theorists.

THE PROBLEM OF THE ONTOLOGY OF THE LIFE-WORLD AND THE EXISTENTIAL SITUATION IN MODERN SOCIAL SCIENCE

This article analyses three variants of a situation characteristic for modern social science called `Roquentin's situation', the main character in Sartre's Nausea who symbolises the mutual estrangement between a researchers' standpoint and their social object. The first variant is represented by the transcendentalist position of Edmund Husserl. We find Roquentin in the passages of the transcendental ego expanding the philosopher's position by a certain constellation of inner viewpoints of the social object itself. The idea of a possible ontology of the life-world appears to be an indispensable condition for this reassessment. But the lack of a sociologically worked out concept of everyday life as a self-problematising layer of the culturally formed life-world confines it to an idea ` en passant' and results in privileging the self-evidences of the philosopher as `functionary of European mankind'. Everyday life as a `paramount reality' has already become privileged in Alfred Schutz's social phenomenology. Thus emerges the intersubjective drama between the ego agens and the objective observer, which leads to the figure of the ontologist of the life-world. Schutz's solution tacitly leads to ensuring a firm position for scientific consciousness. Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology provokes the figure of the objective observer as an ontologist of the life-world as well as the figure of the philosopher as a functionary of European mankind. The ethnomethodological attitude provokes not only functioning intentionality itself, but also gains access to its own mode of functioning. Thus the peculiar mobility of the researcher's position becomes clarified as a continual gaining of marginal grounds between practical everyday worlds and scientific reality as everyday reality par excellence. In other words, Roquentin's situation here is not resolved but becomes a motif for its own incessant reproduction. We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. (Wittgenstein 1969: 149)

A Phenomenological Approach to Social Interaction

H. Garfinkel has been trying over two decades to answer in his unique way one of the fundamental questions of sociology- “How is the social order possible ?”Its source, he finds, lies in the daily activity of each member of a society to rake things “accountable” or “visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes” -in my words, “giving-meaning-activity”. As one cannot bear any meaningless situation, he endeavors in his power to find the world of which meaning is consistent and familiar for him, thus contributing to re-find and re-produce the social order.Garfinkel has developed a unique method for observing this activity. This is characterized by the combination of the phenomenological approach by Husserl and the empirical. method of observation.The Main character of this giving-meaning-activity is-according to Garfinkel-its 'indexicality' or flexibility according to the situation. This character is not so strange or new to us Japanese researchers who are conscious of the dependability of the Japanese behavior on situations. We should notice, however, that Garfinkel presents this character not as a backward one peculiar to people except Western intellectuals. Rather he attributes it to the universal human nature.Notwithstanding his many contributions there are some points in his approach to be discussed more carefully. For instance, there is a danger of 'reductionism'-the tendency to reduce the macro social problem to the problem of a micro personal behavior. Another is that of 'formalism' which tends to focus on the form or way of giving-meaning-activity and to put less emphasis on the content of the given meaning.Despite these difficulties and for all criticisms, Garfinkel's ethnomethodology should be located in the history of human efforts which have been trying to understand and to control ourselves and our society through changing the invisible and the unconscious into the visible and the conscious.