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DOI 10.1007/s11133-010-9183-8
SYMPOSIUM ON EMIRBAYER AND MAYNARD’S “PRAGMATISM AND ETHNOMETHODOLOGY”
Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology
Mustafa Emirbayer & Douglas W. Maynard
Published online: 23 November 2010
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract Three features of pragmatist thought remain empirically underdeveloped or
insufficiently explored: its call for a return to experience or recovery of concrete practices; its
idea that obstacles in experience give rise to efforts at creative problem-solving; and its
understanding of language in use, including conversational interaction, as an order of empirical
practices in and through which problem-solving efforts are undertaken and social order
ongoingly and collaboratively accomplished. Our aim in this article is to show that there exists a
long-standing, theoretically informed, and empirically rich research tradition in which these
pragmatist themes are further developed, albeit in ways the originators might have foreseen
only in dimly programmatic form. This research tradition is ethnomethodology. We present in
bold strokes the classical pragmatist ideas of Peirce, James, Mead, Dewey, plus Addams,
focusing on the three themes mentioned above. We show how Garfinkel’s work surpasses even
that of the pragmatists in developing the larger implications and promise of those themes. We
demonstrate how ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation analysis,
respectively, continue as well to develop the original pragmatist impulse in unsuspected ways.
Finally, we step back from this account to ponder the broader significance of the connections
we have explored between pragmatism and ethnomethodology.
Keywords Pragmatism . Ethnomethodology . Conversation analysis . Garfinkel . Language
In Experience and Nature (1988c [1925], p. 17), John Dewey highlighted three failures of
what he called the “non-empirical method” of philosophy: “First,” he wrote, “there is no
verification, no effort even to test and check. What is even worse, secondly, is that the
things of ordinary experience do not get enlargement and enrichment of meaning as they do
when approached through the medium of scientific principles and reasonings. This lack of
This paper is equally co-authored. The order given is alphabetical only.
This article was accepted by the former editor-in-chief Javier Auyero. The current editor, David Smilde, has
approved of its publication.
M. Emirbayer (*) : D. W. Maynard
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison,
WI 53706, USA
e-mail: emirbaye@ssc.wisc.edu
D.W. Maynard
e-mail: maynard@ssc.wisc.edu
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function reacts, in the third place, back upon the philosophic subject-matter in itself. Not
tested by being employed to see what it leads to in ordinary experience and what new
meanings it contributes, this subject-matter becomes arbitrary, aloof—what is called
‘abstract’ when that word is used in a bad sense to designate something which exclusively
occupies a realm of its own without contact with the things of ordinary experience.” Dewey
suggested that an empirical method is needed to extend the insights of philosophy into
empirical reality and to test them there, thereby preventing philosophy itself from becoming
overly theoretical and out of touch with concrete experience. He asserted: “The problems to
which empirical method gives rise afford, in a word, opportunities for more investigations
yielding fruit in new and enriched experiences. But the problems to which non-empirical
method gives rise in philosophy are blocks to inquiry, blind alleys; they are puzzles rather
than problems.” Philosophy requires modern science in order to advance beyond the realm
of sheer abstract speculation and argumentation and substantively to add to our
understanding and grasp of the experiential world.
Dewey and the other classical pragmatists—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James,
George Herbert Mead—were all passionate believers in modern science. Their philosophy
was centrally concerned with applying scientific modes of reasoning and inquiry to the
problems of human existence. For their own part, however, these pragmatist thinkers
largely refrained from engaging in empirical (at least social-scientific) investigation. In
essence, they pointed the way—but did not or could not follow it themselves. Much of the
promise inherent in classical American pragmatism accordingly went unrealized. To be
sure, like-minded figures such as Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles Horton
Cooley were pioneers of American social science, and pragmatism did profoundly influence
the work of W. I. Thomas and the Chicago School of sociology, not to mention, later, that
of Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionists, including Morris Janowitz (1991).
Economics felt pragmatism’s influence, too, through John R. Commons—and Marxism
through the young Sidney Hook—while C. Wright Mills kept the idea of a pragmatist
critical sociology alive in mid-century. Even now, however, two decades into a far-reaching
pragmatist revival, one is hard pressed to find many empirical research programs, other than
symbolic interactionism itself, that pursue an agenda either directly informed by pragmatist
thinking or bearing a close family resemblance to it. Research into civil society and the
public sphere is influenced (by way of Karl-Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas) only in a
normative sense by the classical pragmatists. The same is true of feminist and race theory
(one thinks here of Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Shannon Sullivan, Cornel West, and
Nancy Fraser). And Hans Joas’s idea of the “creativity of action” has not inspired extensive
empirical investigation, at least not in the form of a systematic research enterprise, despite
Joas’s own persistent efforts in areas of macrosociology such as the study of modern wars
and violence and the sociology of religious phenomena.1 Meanwhile, philosophic
investigations by Hilary Putnam, Richard Bernstein, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom
1
In the final chapter of The Creativity of Action (1996), Joas lays out some of the implications of his
theoretical ideas regarding action for theories of social order and social change, focusing, among other
things, on theories of collective action and differentiation. He focuses on economic sociology in a brief essay
co-authored with Jens Beckert (2002). Intriguing as well is the attempt by Josh Whitford (2002) to bridge
Joas’s theoretical insights with the empirical research program of Charles Sabel (see fn. 2). For Joas’s studies
on war and religion, respectively, see Joas (2000, 2003); on the question of the genesis of values, see Joas
(2000). For a close look at his major work, The Creativity of Action, see Colapietro (2009); for a broad
overview of his life’s work to date, see Joas and Knobl (2009, pp. 512–28). Interestingly, in a chapter on
ethnomethodology in that latter work (Ch. VII, p. 152; cf. Joas 1996, p. 162), the authors allude briefly to
certain action-theoretic similarities between Garfinkel and pragmatism. Our aim is to pursue these linkages
more extensively and systematically.
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have remained firmly planted in the ground of abstract reasoning, at least in the sense of
refining pragmatist precepts rather than of extending them empirically.2
In our view, three features in particular of the thought of the classical American
pragmatists remain empirically underdeveloped or insufficiently explored: first, its call for a
return to experience, a move that entails, among other things, a recovery of concrete
practices, an emphasis on what Harold Garfinkel has described as the “just-thisness” of
empirical everyday life as it is lived in situ; second, its idea of obstacles in experience
giving rise to efforts at creative problem-solving, that is, to concrete practices aimed at
resolving difficulties and accomplishing, in real time, a revised or reconstructed social
order; and third, its understanding of language in use, including conversational interaction,
as an order of empirical practices in and through which problem-solving efforts are
undertaken and social order ongoingly and collaboratively accomplished. The classical
pragmatists, philosophers engaged in relatively abstract theoretical discourse, were unable
to pursue these ideas deeply into the empirical domain, even as they saw the empirical
efforts of others as a means more completely to realize their philosophic ambitions (as in
the above quotation by Dewey). Among the key figures of the pragmatist revival, few
besides Joas have sought to bridge the divide between philosophy and social science,
linking pragmatism-inspired action theory to theories of social order and social change.
Our aim in this article is to show that there exists—besides symbolic interactionism,
which this paper does not set out to explore, even as it duly recognizes its importance—a
long-standing, theoretically informed, and empirically rich research tradition whose guiding
ideas bear a close affinity to classical and contemporary pragmatism. This research tradition
is ethnomethodology, defined broadly to include not only the seminal investigations of
Garfinkel but also closely related endeavors such as ethnomethodological studies of work
and science as well as conversation analysis. In important respects, ethnomethodology goes
far toward realizing pragmatism’s original promise; it attends, in a phrase, to pragmatism’s
unfinished business.3 We are not proposing here that ethnomethodology and allied
endeavors are based upon or justified by pragmatist thought. Like Bernstein’s (2007,
p. 12) point regarding contemporary philosophers who, without direct influence from the
pragmatist tradition, articulate “insights and themes” that deeply articulate with and refine
that tradition, our claim is that ethnomethodology extends pragmatism in consistent and
fruitful ways without any previous overt connection. This linkage between pragmatism and
ethnomethodology has gone largely unnoticed, and, indeed, would be disavowed by many,
both from within and without the ethnomethodological enterprise. (As we discuss below,
Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology was actually constructed against, rather than with, classical
2
We cannot claim, of course, that the above list of mid-century and contemporary thinkers influenced by
pragmatism is anywhere near exhaustive. Nor can it be our goal to cover, in the limited space available,
everyone who fits such a description. There are severe constraints upon what we can do. Perhaps the most
notable omission is Erving Goffman, who was deeply influenced in his thinking by George Herbert Mead. A
highly complex, sui generis thinker, the specific respects in which his ideas were inspired by pragmatism
nonetheless place him, for the purposes at hand, within the category of symbolic interactionism. More recent
thinkers also not mentioned include Charles Sabel (1994); Roberto Unger (2007); and Richard Posner
(1991). One concentric circle further removed, moreover, are pragmatist fellow-travellers such as Charles
Tilly, who asserts in Why? (2006, p. x) that “If this were an academic treatise, I would surely trace my line of
argument back through American pragmatism via John Dewey and George Herbert Mead.”
3
Again, to prevent misunderstanding, we underscore that other ways do exist of attending to pragmatism’s
unfinished business; we focus here on only one of these, rather than attempt to discuss them all. Besides
ethnomethodology and conversation analysis there is also symbolic interactionism, the most venerable,
influential, and important of all pragmatism-inspired research programs in sociology. Prior to this, there was
also the work of the first Chicago School; see also the work mentioned in fns. 1 and 2.
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American pragmatism.) Ever since the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology
(1967), it has been far more common to relate Garfinkel’s work to three other major
currents in mid-twentieth century thought: Parsonian structural-functionalism, against
whose theories of action and order Garfinkel is said to have developed his most distinctive
themes; Schutzian phenomenology, said to have been the most important source of Garfinkel’s
theoretical insights; and, in certain respects at least, Wittgensteinian (1953) ordinary language
philosophy. With the publication of Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s
Aphorism (2002), yet another intellectual reference point has been highlighted as well:
Durkheim’s program of inquiry into the concreteness of social facts. This program is said to
have served as Garfinkel’s theoretical obsession for well over half a century.
These suggestions regarding Garfinkel help to situate his work within larger traditions of
thought and shed light on what makes its research program so creative and powerful. We
are not concerned here to dispute them. By “redrawing the map,” however—as Donald
Levine (1995, p. 293) proposes—and pointing out neglected linkages between previously
disconnected continents, we can illuminate not only how the three pragmatist insights
mentioned above can be empirically investigated, thereby dissolving the aforementioned
problem so presciently noted by Dewey, but also how ethnomethodology itself might be
differently understood, namely, as an arena in which pragmatist impulses for scientific
investigation can move forward, albeit in ways the originators foresaw only in dimly
programmatic form. Our new interpretation, accordingly, has the potential not only to
change our map of the sociological terrain (Dewey 1988c [1925], p. 125) but also to
stimulate new lines of investigation. Toward this end, we proceed in four major steps. In the
first, we present in bold strokes the classical pragmatist ideas of Peirce, James, Mead,
Dewey, plus Addams, focusing on the three themes we mentioned earlier. In the
second, we show how Garfinkel’s work surpasses even that of the pragmatists in
developing the larger implications and promise of those themes. Then, in the third and
fourth sections, we demonstrate how ethnomethodological studies of work and science
and conversation analysis, respectively, continue as well to develop the original
pragmatist impulse in unsuspected ways. In the conclusion, we step back from this
account to ponder the broader significance of the connections we have explored
between pragmatism and ethnomethodology.
Part One: Pragmatism
What are the key ideas of pragmatist thought, at least insofar as they bear upon our story
regarding Garfinkel and ethnomethodological studies of work and science and conversation
analysis? What important business does this tradition of thought leave unfinished? In what
respects did it stall in its development, conceptually as well as empirically, and why? What
contributions do prominent figures of the pragmatist revival make to completing the
unfinished business of classical American pragmatism, and in what respects do they, too,
ultimately come short? To consider pragmatism in such a light—that is, in terms of the
problems it leaves unresolved—is in itself already an endeavor in the pragmatist spirit. For
pragmatism is about nothing if not the creative solving of problems in experience through
the application of reflective intelligence. Blockages to habitual courses of thought and
action, and creative or reconstructive ways of addressing such blockages, typically in the
medium of language, are among the core themes of the pragmatist tradition. In this opening
section, we discuss these same themes in broad outlines. We do not falsely assume an
across-the-board unity to the pragmatist tradition. There are many differences and
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divergences among the pragmatists. For purposes of the present paper, however, it is less
important to probe into those discrepancies than to stress, in general terms, the overarching
commonalities. We do not mean, either, to restrict the universe of classical pragmatists—or
their more recent followers—in invidious fashion to the cast of characters mentioned above.
We wish only to invoke the thinkers most necessary for presenting the three sets of ideas we
have highlighted, and, in so doing, also to suggest, in preliminary fashion, how pragmatism
fell short in developing them. Attending to these tasks sets up our discussion—in later
sections—of how the ethnomethodological tradition can be said to carry forward the
original mission of pragmatist thought.
The Return to Experience
The first of the topics of special relevance to us is the pragmatists’ return to experience. All
pragmatism proceeds from the notion that the Western tradition, which includes not only
philosophy but also the philosophic assumptions underpinning modern science (both
natural and social), erroneously directs us away from lived experience, from concrete
practices, toward theoretical abstractions. In two of the founding texts of pragmatism, “The
Fixation of Belief” (1992b [1877]) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1992b [1878]),
Peirce asserted the primacy of this realm of practice. He argued that “Doubt” or confusions
arising in experience are what occasion thought in the first place and that, in turn, the
results of thought must always be subjected to the pragmatic test: “Consider what effects,
which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception
to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object”
(Peirce 1992c [1878], p. 132). James reaffirmed this basic thrust of Peirce’s “pragmatic
maxim,” despite giving it a somewhat individualist slant in some of his writings, including
Pragmatism (1981 [1907]). In his view, practice—experience—supplies the impetus for all
inquiry; it also reveals the meaning of ideas and provides the ultimate test of their truth.
“The whole originality of pragmatism, the whole point of it, is its concrete way of seeing. It
begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it (James 1981 [1909], pp. 281–82). (In
the subsequent section, we show how this quotation aptly serves as an epigraph for
Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology.) In later writings, James supplemented these insights with
what he termed a doctrine of radical empiricism, according to which “there is only one
primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed”—again,
“pure experience” (James 2003 [1912], p. 2). As James conceived of it, pure experience
encompasses not only “the things themselves” but also “the relations between things,” not
only material reality but also consciousness, not only the objects of thought but thought
itself. Thus, conceptual dualisms such as those between subject and object, theory and
practice, mind and nature, or ideal and material should be avoided as pernicious and
misleading. In so inveighing against the tendency to posit false divisions inside a seamless
pure experience, James sought to further pragmatism’s aim of moving beyond the fruitless
abstractions so deeply engrained in the philosophy of his day.
Such an endeavor is central to Dewey’s work as well. In Experience and Nature (1988c
[1925], pp. 18–19), he agreed emphatically with James that pure experience is “doublebarrelled”: “[I]t recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material,
subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality. ‘Thing’ and
‘thought’...refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience.” (As
we shall see, Garfinkel spoke in similar tones of the tendency among present-day
sociologists to focus on concepts at the expense of the situated details of practices.) Dewey
was critical of thinkers who remain caught up in such dualisms. What is required for an
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adequate grasp of experience, he asserted, is a “trans-actional approach,” one that
involves “the seeing together, when research requires it, of what before had been seen
in separations and held severally apart” (Dewey and Bentley 1991 [1949], p. 112).4 (In
this specific respect, he diverged not at all from James’s radical empiricism.) How, then,
did Dewey propose to do away with such longstanding divisions? The beginnings of an
answer come in one of his earliest major works. In a classic essay of the pragmatist
tradition, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1972 [1896], p. 97), Dewey
suggested that experience is a “comprehensive...organic unity,” a “sensori-motor
coordination,” consisting at least as much in action as in knowledge, an organic circuit
in which the contributions of object and subject, stimulus and response, can be seen “not
as separate and complete entities in themselves, but as divisions of labor, functioning
factors, within the single concrete whole.” He added that in most of the practices
constituting ordinary lived experience, there is little conscious separation among these
elements, as the concrete practices in which we engage flow smoothly in “a continuously
ordered sequence of acts, all adapted in themselves and in the order of their sequence, to
reach a certain objective end” (Dewey 1972 [1896], p. 104). Sounding, in fact, one of the
most distinctive of pragmatist themes, he stressed the habitual and taken-for-granted
nature of our practices, at least those found in unproblematic circumstances lacking in
uncertainty (e.g., “what sort of a bright light have we here?”; “how am I to complete the
organic circuit?”). When practices proceed uninterruptedly and without resistance, their
meaningfulness resides deep within them as part of an unbroken coordinated system of
activity, and the validity of objects forming part of those systems goes unquestioned as
well.
It is one thing, of course, to call insistently for a return to experience, as Dewey
and his fellow classical pragmatists did. It is another thing entirely to indicate how
this might be accomplished. The classical pragmatists failed to demonstrate how one
might actually move beyond the artificial issues they decried and “return” to the
things of experience—including the very relations or trans-actions that are also a
feature of that experience. They provided lessons in principle but did not indicate a
theoretically informed method by which to proceed.5 Much the same can be said of the
more recent figures of the pragmatist revival. Hilary Putnam, Richard Bernstein, and
Richard Rorty, for example, write extensively of Jamesian radical empiricism and
Deweyan trans-actionalism and devote much attention to subverting the false distinctions—
e.g., facts and values; thought and action—that continue to hamper philosophic and social
inquiry. They engage vigorously as well with a wide range of substantive issues in social
thought. However, as professional philosophers, they are unable to do more than point in
the right direction by means of reasoned argumentation. To be sure, Cornel West, Charlene
Haddock Seigfried, Shannon Sullivan, and Nancy Fraser go considerably beyond the
aforementioned thinkers in inquiring substantively into the concrete practices that
constitute ordinary lived experience—in their case, especially, the experience of race- and
4
He expresses this perhaps most eloquently in Experience and Nature (1988c [1925], p. 372): “When the
varied constituents of the wide universe, the unfavorable, the precarious, uncertain, irrational, hateful, receive
the same attention that is accorded the noble, honorable, and true, then philosophy may conceivably dispense
with the conception of experience. But till that day arrives, we need a cautionary and directive word, like
experience, to remind us that the world which is lived, suffered, and enjoyed as well as logically thought of,
has the last word in all human inquiries and surmises.”
5
We leave aside here the question of James’s (1987 [1902]) empirical investigations into the phenomenology
of religious experience.
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gender-based divisions. But even so, they propound no systematic method whereby one
might study how social actors actually “do” race or gender, that is, how they creatively
accomplish, perhaps even in the face of challenges, problems, or perplexities, a social order
marked by concrete raced or gendered disparities in access to or possession of material or
other resources.
Problems and Creative Problem-Solving
This last point brings us to the threshold of our second major theme: the pragmatists’ focus
on problems and creative problem-solving. Long before Dewey, Peirce (1992b [1877],
p. 114) spoke of a “calm and satisfactory” state he termed “Belief,” a state that “does not
make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in a certain way,
when the occasion arises.” Belief, he suggested, “involves the establishment in our nature
of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit (1992c [1878], p. 129). Dewey further
developed this idea. In Human Nature and Conduct (1988c [1922], p. 15), he argued that
humans typically engage in a relatively unreflective form of action. “Habits may be
profitably compared to physiological functions, like breathing, digesting. The latter are, to
be sure, involuntary, while habits are acquired. But important as is this difference for many
purposes it should not conceal the fact that habits are like functions in many respects, and
especially in requiring the cooperation of organism and environment.” There is thus an
important relation between habits and common sense: habits are preobjective or prior to the
specification of objects of knowledge. This does not mean, however, that humans are mere
automatons. Rather, they follow “acquired predisposition[s] to ways or modes of response,
not to particular acts” (Dewey 1988c [1922], p. 32; italics in original). Habitual practices
are, at least potentially, dynamic and adaptive, entailing a tacit—indeed, bodily—
knowledge that, without resort to conscious planning or a deliberate following of
instructions, enables one to react in real time to the changing vicissitudes of social
situations. Dewey’s account of such practices has been described by Joas (1996, p. 148) as
a “non-teleological interpretation of the intentionality of action.” In that account, habitual
practices are oriented neither to the attainment of externally determined goals, as in the
rationalist means-end model of action, nor to the carrying out of rules of action, as in the
normativist model of Parsonian structural-functionalism, but to aspirations located, in Joas’s
(1996), p. 158) words, “in our bodies. It is the body’s capabilities, habits, and ways of
relating to the environment which form the background to all conscious goal-setting, in
other words, to our intentionality.” We extend Joas’s insight and ideas by suggesting how
the latter can serve as a stimulus to empirical research. As we show in the next section,
pragmatist action theory anticipates something very much like the perspective on real-time
human conduct associated with Garfinkel’s writings.
Dewey recognized that an account of action restricted solely to habitual practices
can only go so far. Sometimes, he observed, habits come up against situations that
present a blockage or a dilemma. In respect to such circumstances, when the way to
proceed is unclear, he and other pragmatists came up with important insights. When
Peirce mentioned Belief, for instance, he counterposed it to a condition he termed
Doubt, “an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves
and pass into the state of [B]elief. The irritation of Doubt,” he asserted, “causes a
struggle to attain a state of [B]elief. I shall term this struggle inquiry” (Peirce 1992b
[1877], p. 114). Dewey, too, devoted careful attention to this state of indecision. In “The
Logic of Judgments of Practice,” he pointed out that all practical reasoning begins with a
problematic experience, a “fork in the road,” which it attempts experimentally to resolve.
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Thinking is what occurs most especially in situations where regular channels of
action no longer suffice, where conflicts or ruptures in practice cause perplexity.6
“[I]ncompleteness is not psychical,” Dewey (1985 [1915], p.15) wrote. “Something is
‘there,’ but what is there does not constitute the entire objective situation....The logical
implication is that of a subject-matter as yet unterminated, unfinished, or not wholly
given.” Something must be done—some practical judgment arrived at—that will render
the situation settled and resolved. Actors must systematically examine the facts of their
situation, critically observe what is before them, seek to clarify what is causing them
perplexity, and attend to it. Such a thought process, Dewey (1988a [1920], p. 161) added
elsewhere, is “not aimless, random, miscellaneous, but purposeful, specific, and limited
by the character of the trouble undergone.” By means of it, theory can be brought back
into a more meaningful connection with practice, such that the latter no longer proceeds
by trial and error or in accordance with custom or authority, but rather, calls for guidance
upon a knowledge that has, for its part, foresaken the quest for certainty. Creative
problem-solving, he (1988e [1929], pp. 169–70) wrote, “effects an exchange of reason
for intelligence....A man is intelligent not in virtue of having reason which grasps first
and indemonstrable truths about fixed principles,...but in virtue of his capacity to
estimate the possibilities of a situation and to act in accordance with his estimate.” (Or,
as Cooley [1966 [1918], p. 351] expressed it, “The test of intelligence is the power to act
successfully in new situations.”) Intelligence is brought to bear upon even the most
mundane of everyday practices. Habits can themselves be made more intelligent. And
the social conditions of the production and reproduction of those habits can also be
reconstructed. This might entail an extended process of reform, one aided and abetted by
a critical pragmatic science.
While Dewey provided perhaps the most fully developed account of perplexity leading
to intelligent reconstruction, it was Jane Addams who investigated most deeply the
phenomenon of perplexity itself, turning it into a topic in its own right. For her, perplexity
was not merely intellectual but emotional and existential, not merely a problem “out there,”
objective and actual, but an experience of internal strain, bafflement, and puzzlement. In
Democracy and Social Ethics (2002 [1902]), she provided many examples of such
perplexity, centering around breakdowns in understanding that emerge when persons
involved in one course of life encounter others whose course is very different from—and
alien to—their own. For instance, when a charity worker visits her clients, she is bewildered
by what she finds in the everyday lives of these tenement dwellers; “the charity worker
finds herself still more perplexed when she comes to consider such problems as those of
early marriage and child labor, for she cannot deal with them according to economic
theories, or according to the conventions which have regulated her own life” (Addams 2002
[1902], p. 21). Such conditions of perplexity provoke inquiries meant somehow to address
them, responses that can be reflexive, mechanical, and dysfunctional, or, alternatively,
intelligent and practically effective. The latter category of responses entails putting one’s
pregiven morality to the pragmatic test and moving forward with new taken-for-granteds,
habits, and dispositions; it entails uniting practice with theory and aiming genuinely to
remove or resolve the original disturbance and to resume the flow of life. Thus, the charity
worker “discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and it takes but a
little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist so strenuously upon the conventions
of her own class, which fail to fit the bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people”
In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1988f [1938], ch. VI), Dewey coined the phrase “indeterminate situation”
to describe such circumstances.
6
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(Addams 2002 [1902], p. 33). It should be plain here that what Addams described resonates
deeply with the kinds of incongruities that have been fruitful for ethnomethodological
inquiry, a matter to be explored at greater length below. For what she deemed specific
troubles of moral adjustment are for ethnomethodology particular instances of a more
fundamental problem, that of a chasm between abstract rules, standards, and conventions, on
the one hand, and situated practices, on the other. This problem is one that neither Addams
nor her fellow pragmatists were equipped theoretically—or methodologically—to explore.
The Importance of Language
The final pragmatist theme of special significance to us is the theme of language or
linguistically mediated problem-solving. The pragmatists’ engagement with it began, like
almost everything else in that tradition, with Peirce. Saussure (1959 [1916], p. 71) is well
known for having propounded a dualistic understanding of the sign, seeing it as a
combination of “signifier” (sound-image) and “signified” (concept). Not only did he assign
this “double entity” a bifurcated structure; he also depicted it as static and inert, for
signifiers, while “arbitrarily” related to signifieds, were, in his view, “fixed, not free, with
respect to the linguistic community that uses [them].” Peirce, by contrast, took as his unit of
analysis not dyadic structures but a triadic process of “sign,” “object,” and “interpretant.”
“A sign,” he (1932 [c. 1897], p. 228) wrote, “is something which stands to somebody for
something....It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent
sign, or perhaps a more developed sign,” in an unending chain or succession of
interpretations. With this focus on addressivity, Peirce made the theme of fundamental
sociality one of the key ideas of the pragmatist tradition. He also stimulated, with his
emphasis on semiosis as an ongoing, open-ended dynamic in which meaning is “infinitely
deferred” (Searle 2005 [1994], p. 725), important later work on indexical expressions, from
Bar-Hillel (1954) to Garfinkel himself (1967; Garfinkel and Sacks 1970); these expressions
depend, for their very sense, on a grasp of their pragmatic context, including knowledge of
the persons saying them, their time and place of expression, and so forth. Since Peirce
restricted himself to logical or philosophical analyses, however, no tools were developed for
empirical inquiry into many key issues pertaining to such expressions. Finally, Peirce’s
semiotic, with its stress on both addressivity and indexical relations, led in the direction of a
theory of linguistic-semiotic community, a community of interpreters or inquirers (Peirce
1992a [1868], pp. 52, 54–55). In such a community, dialogue can proceed in respect to the
interpretation and adjudication of competing truth-claims, and a “settlement of opinion” can
ultimately be brought about as “the result of investigation carried sufficiently far” (1992c
[1878], p.139; see also 1992a [1868]). This communitarian dimension to Peirce’s thought
also remained primarily logical-philosophical in character. Importantly, however, it
prefigured and pointed the way to the more socially grounded arguments of the later
pragmatists and pragmatism-inspired thinkers, including Apel and Habermas, whose views
of discourse ethics are influenced by Peirce. That communitarian dimension also
anticipated ethnomethodology’s thrust into the empirical sphere of actual social relations.
Dewey, too, developed prominently the idea of language as crucial to collective efforts
to resolve perplexities and to arrive at more warranted and practically effective opinions. To
begin with, language made possible, in his (1988c [1925], p. 132) view, “that preliminary
discourse termed thinking” which allows actors to reconsider, revise, and reconstruct
problematic contexts. “Events when once they are named lead an independent and double
life. In addition to their original existence, they are subject to ideal experimentation; their
meanings may be infinitely combined and re-arranged in imagination, and the outcome of
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this inner experimentation—which is thought—may issue forth in interaction with crude or
raw events.” Indeed, this internal discourse makes events “infinitely more amenable to
management.” But, as Dewey further pointed out, linguistically mediated problem-solving
is at the core not only of thinking but indeed of all association. It is much more than a
vehicle for storing and communicating knowledge; it is an ensemble of means for the
coordination of activity oriented toward the reconstruction of incomplete or indeterminate
situations. Dewey made this clear, for example, when he (1988b [1922], p. 57) observed
that language first comes into the world as a form of interaction involved in making
demands for food or social contact, “operat[ing] not to perpetuate the forces which
produced it but to modify and redirect them.” And elsewhere (1988c [1925] p. 139), too, he
declared: “Language, signs and significance, come into existence not by intent and mind
but...in gestures and sound. The story of language is the story of the use made of these
occurrences; a use that is eventual as well as eventful.” These assertions about language
make perfectly clear why he accorded it such significance in his writings on collective
problem-resolution, including his important work, The Public and its Problems (1988d
[1927]). Notice, however, Dewey’s use of the word “eventual” in the above quotation. It
suggests that the meaning of utterances or language in use develops in real time and is
emergent. This seems to mean, by implication, that we need to understand language as it
exists in the concrete dynamic interactions of people actually speaking with one another.
Unfortunately, while Dewey highlighted the importance of concrete behavior and its
temporal dimension, one finds only illustrative examples in his writings—certainly no
systematic investigations of actual linguistic or conversational practices. In other words,
Dewey wished to elucidate how cooperative inquiry and associative behavior are possible.
However, after engagingly thematizing the important social characteristics of language, he
curiously abandoned the pursuit, even though it would have greatly furthered his
understanding of the activities with which he was so concerned (cf. Colapietro 2009, p. 3).
Language, finally, was central to Mead’s understanding of the capacity of humans—through
mind, thought, and what he termed “reflective intelligence”—to control their responses and to
adjust and redirect their experience. Indeed, mind itself, as he pointed out in Mind, Self, and
Society (1934), has to do in its fundamental nature with language. In a familiar passage of that
work, Mead (1934, p. 76) addressed the question as to how a sequence of acts can become a
human and meaningful experience. His answer drew from Peirce’s earlier triadic theory of
semiosis, conceptualizing meaning as a relation among three phases of the social act: a
gesture of one organism, the adjustive response of another organism, then the completion of a
given act. “This threefold relationship constitutes the matrix,” Mead (1934, p. 77) wrote,
“within which meaning arises,” adding that in this threefold relationship, any gesture or
linguistic sign has an action component to it, insofar as its design indicates a response and a
resultant collaborative social act: “The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives
to the gesture of the first organism the meaning which it has” (Mead 1934, pp. 77–78).
Mead’s insights were of great methodological import and, as we shall see, conversation
analysis would go on systematically to explore them. For his own part, Mead moved from
this account of meaning to a developmental view of language, as encapsulated by his famous
metaphors of play, the game, and the generalized other. Along the way, he also developed a
theory of “intelligent conduct,” using the term, much as Dewey did, to highlight delayed
responses to signs in outward experience, pauses that make possible “the implicit initiation of
a number of possible alternative responses...[and] the exercise of intelligent or reflective
choice in the acceptance of that one...which is to be carried into overt effect” (Mead 1934, p.
98). Finally, Mead (1934, p. 388) spoke, like James, Peirce, and Dewey before him, of
concrete interactional processes in which actors take each others interests into account and, in
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light of those interests, collectively work out courses of action aimed at reconstructing their
problematic life-contexts. Despite these emphases on sociality and collaborative problemsolving, however—and somewhat like James’ “failure to stress sufficiently the inescapable
environment of social communication” in which human opinions and interests are embedded
(Colapietro 2009, p. 3)—he continued to struggle against cognitivist tendencies in his
thinking. He also remained, like the other pragmatists, content to dwell at the level of
abstraction—for instance, pointing toward a concrete investigation of language in use while
not following that path himself. In the pages ahead, we shall have occasion to explore these
shortcomings.
Many pragmatists since the time of the classical generation have made important
contributions to our understanding of language and the accomplishment of social order. One
is C. Wright Mills, who, in the 1940s, elaborated a theory of vocabularies of motives
according to which the motives for human conduct, when articulated to others or to oneself,
always and necessarily are expressed in the terms of a common language. Mills’s theory
was a classic bridge to empirical sociology, although its core insights have been more
extensively developed, not by Mills himself, but by researchers in the ethnomethodologal
tradition, as we shall see. Pragmatist philosophers associated with what has been described
as the linguistic turn in the human sciences also made important contributions. One thinks
here, for example, of the late Richard Rorty, for whom language was a category of central
importance. Even more salient is Robert Brandom, whose Making It Explicit (1994) has
been hailed as a work of signal importance to the contemporary philosophy of language. As
Bernstein (2007, p. 17) explains it, “Ever since Charles Morris introduced his famous
distinction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, it has become a virtual dogma among
analytic philosophers that there is a clear hierarchal ordering among these three
disciplines....[P]ragmatics is dependent on semantics, and semantics is dependent on
syntax. Now Brandom radically challenges this dogma and turns things upside down. His
basic thesis is that pragmatics has explanatory primacy....This demands developing a
comprehensive understanding of social discursive practices.” Brandom too, however,
remains in the end highly abstract, failing to cross the divide separating theoretical from
empirical investigation of language. We shall explore in greater depth below the
contributions he makes—and how ethnomethodology and, in particular, conversation
analysis can complement them.
Part Two: Garfinkel and Classical Ethnomethodology
The conventional story of twentieth-century philosophy has it that pragmatism went into
eclipse after World War II with the rise of analytic philosophy and the concomitant
professionalization of the discipline. Relatedly, the conventional story of twentieth-century
sociology posits that, while pragmatism exerted an early influence through the Chicago
School, it too, by mid-century, was left largely behind, with the partial exception of
symbolic interactionism. Specifically, Parsonian structural-functionalism and a new
causalist approach to quantitative data analysis became hegemonic and relegated
pragmatism-inspired work to the status of a minor footnote in the history of sociological
theory. In recent decades, these declinist narratives have been vigorously disputed, as
contributors to the pragmatist revival have reinterpreted the internal histories of the two
disciplines and found a continuing strength and vitality to pragmatist impulses, a
“continuity and persistence of the pragmatic legacy” (Bernstein 1992, p. 817). In the case
of philosophy, it is now argued that, “rather than viewing the analytic movement as
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representing a sharp rupture with pragmatism, we should understand that its most enduring
significance is contributing to an ongoing pragmatic legacy (Bernstein 1992, p. 823). And
in the case of sociology, pragmatism is seen as living on in several distinct currents of
theory and research (as mentioned earlier in this article). We now know that the story of
pragmatist sociology after the late 1930s is a far richer one than at first realized.7 Not
everyone, however, can be said to be carrying the pragmatist torch in self-conscious
fashion. Some only do so implicitly. And some pursue pragmatist themes only in the sense
of gravitating intuitively toward the same questions and same answers as the original
pragmatists. In the case of Garfinkel, in fact, this engagement with themes originally laid
out by pragmatism unfolds in the midst of strenuous arguments actually in criticism of the
pragmatists themselves. While Garfinkel can be said to have been captivated by the three
key themes of pragmatism we have emphasized, he also recognized that pragmatism has
some unfinished business to attend to, a promise that will remain unrealized so long as its
pronouncements, abstract and philosophical as they generally are, fail to lead us, in good
pragmatist fashion, to tangible forms of inquiry. In the first part of the present section, we
explore in depth Garfinkel’s own explicit responses to pragmatism. In the remaining two
parts, we turn to his actual agenda for ethnomethodological research, stressing there its
recovery of experience, the first of the themes developed above. Discussion of his
engagement with our two other themes is reserved for the later major sections of this essay.
Garfinkel’s Early Engagement with Pragmatism
The early period of Garfinkel’s intellectual formation, extending from the mid-1930s through the
early 1950s, coincides closely with the passing of the generation of the classical American
pragmatists.8 Between his college years at the University of Newark and his graduate studies at
North Carolina and Harvard, the halcyon days of pragmatism finally drew to a close and the
ideas of Peirce and his successors fell, if not into eclipse, then at least into a lower profile. How
familiar was Garfinkel with pragmatism then? It is difficult to imagine a well-read young
sociologist, especially one with a taste for philosophy, not feeling deeply the power of
pragmatism during those years. But beyond such speculation, there is indirect biographical
reason to believe his knowledge was not inconsiderable, thanks in part to his relations with
certain mentors, teachers, and fellow students. From early on, for example, Garfinkel came into
contact with Philip Selznick, immersed himself in the writings of W. I. Thomas, and was
captivated by Florian Znaniecki—pragmatists all. He learned as well from Kenneth Burke,
whose affinities with pragmatism are now being recognized.9 And while at the University of
North Carolina’s sociology department, he also was exposed to the spirit of melioristic social
reform so prevalent in that milieu.
7
For surveys of pragmatism’s influence on twentieth century sociology (and social thought, more generally),
see Shalin (1986); West (1989); Joas (1993); Levine (1995); Seigfried (1996); and Dickstein (1998). On the
later incarnations of the Chicago School, see Fine (1995).
8
It is during these years that Garfinkel attended college at the University of Newark, earned a Master’s
degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, did his military service in World War II, and
completed his Ph.D. at Harvard (under the supervision of Talcott Parsons). Biographical material for this
paragraph is taken from Rawls (2002, 2005) and Garfinkel (2002, pp. 77–87).
9
On Selznick’s relation to pragmatism, see Joas (1998, p. 193); on W. I. Thomas’s, see Joas (1993, pp. 29–
32); on Znaniecki’s, see, in addition to the aforementioned source on Thomas, Znaniecki (1919, pp. xiii–xiv);
on Burke’s, see Hildebrand (1995). Although C. Wright Mills’s early pragmatism-influenced writings were
already appearing in prominent venues, Garfinkel was not yet familiar with them; on Mills’s relation to
pragmatism, see Horowitz (1966).
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Garfinkel’s earliest writings give added evidence of the influence of pragmatism upon
his thinking. They also reveal, however, a simultaneous interest in and growing
appreciation of yet another body of work, namely, Continental phenomenology.10 In his
very first publication, “Color Trouble” (1940), an observation-based study that won an
award when subsequently published as a short story, Garfinkel examined the dynamics of
racial segregation in the South—in particular, the perplexities that arise when a black
woman passenger from New York City refuses to move to the back of the bus when the bus
driver orders her to do so. What Garfinkel (1941, p. 105) observed of a policeman on the
scene—that “certain blockages had presented themselves with which he felt insecure in
dealing”—applies to his other characters as well: they were forced to engage in situated
reasoning when ordinary courses of action came to a halt. The story became, in effect, a
study of situated problem-solving undertaken by different characters as their takenfor-granted habitual modes of conduct were disrupted. While showing an affinity with
pragmatism at least in this respect, “Color Trouble” may also indicate an emerging
phenomenological orientation on Garfinkel’s part. His preoccupation, like that of the
pragmatists, was with disruption, its potential for mutual accommodation and its actual
consequences or how the drama is brought to a tragic close and the participants restore an
ordinary structure to the situation. But Garfinkel also added a phenomenological dimension,
treating the situation as a moment of suspension when taken-for-granted solidities and the
stance of unquestioned belief in them can no longer be held. As this happens, the prejudices
of the participants are thrown into relief.
Garfinkel’s embrace of phenomenology also became evident in his Master’s thesis, which
explored differences in the treatment accorded in North Carolina to blacks and whites involved
in homicides. “The Negro offender,” noted Garfinkel (1949 [1942], p. 380), “is an
unproblematical figure as far as the white court is concerned”[:]...‘You never know why
one nigger kills another.’”11 By contrast, “the white offender is a problematical figure...in the
sense that the court recognizes the legitimacy and necessity for understanding why the white
offender ‘really’ killed his victim.” Despite an arguably pragmatist interest in (race-specific)
perplexities and judgments, he (1949 [1942], p. 376) explicated courtroom reasoning more
directly in phenomenological terms, citing Husserl, Gurwtisch, Schutz, Cairns, “and others,”
while holding that actors employ a “system of procedures of definition and redefinition of
social identities and circumstances” to arrive at their racialized patterns of sentencing.
In a text composed in 1948, just two years after his move to Harvard, Garfinkel (2005
[1948]) explicitly engaged with, and positioned himself in respect to, the pragmatist
tradition, even as he also embraced, all the more clearly, the phenomenological way of
thinking.12 This difficult and abstract manuscript, which laid out many of the key ideas of
what would later become ethnomethodology, included several passing mentions of Peirce,
James, Mead, and Dewey. On one telling occasion, when Garfinkel was discussing
10
Biographically speaking, Garfinkel was familiar with Continental phenomenology since his very earliest
years at UNC. In addition, during his time at Harvard, he interacted frequently with Alfred Schutz at the New
School for Social Research and with Aron Gurwitsch at Brandeis. (See, again, Rawls [2002], [2005]; and
Garfinkel [2002, pp. 77–87].)
11
In the quotation within this quotation, Garfinkel used the language of the court and was not speaking for
himself.
12
For a detailed discussion of Garfinkel’s engagement with pragmatist themes in this work, one that
takes a different tack than that which is pursued here, see the introduction by Rawls (2005), e.g., pp.
59–61. Rawls documents a sustained dialogue on Garfinkel’s part with pragmatist authors and ideas,
although, as we shall suggest in what follows, that dialogue was not very complete or systematic from a
pragmatist perspective.
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Parsons’s theory of action, he made a quick but sympathetic reference to James. “No more
than a dozen social scientists,” he (2005 [1948], pp. 139–40) complained, “have attempted
to push...beyond the not nearly so obvious obviousness of the division of objects as
concrete and abstract, real and ideal...[,] to that rational ground where James’s promise of a
radical empiricism is indeed fulfilled.” Immediately thereafter, however, he moved on to
discuss ideas by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. In another passage, Garfinkel (2005
[1948], pp. 145–46) referred in passing to Peirce—again, not unfavorably—suggesting that his
own views were “in accordance with C.S. Peirce’s formula” (i.e., the pragmatic maxim).
Specifically, he noted, much as a chair’s identity consists in the “physical manipulations” and
actions directed toward it, so too are social identities symbolically constituted in and through
“the operations by which [they are] manipulated as [objects]” (e.g., “oppose, attack, defend,
insult, validate...”). However, here as before, he (2005 [1948], pp. 147–48) moved on quickly
to develop arguments of a phenomenological nature.13 Garfinkel explained that observers
define social identities by accounting “in ‘because of’ and ‘in order to’ terms for the sequences
of different signs that [these identities seem] capable of generating....” These terms—“because
of” and “in order to”—come directly from the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz (1967a
[1945]). Garfinkel wrestled during these years with Parsons’s (1937) theory of the structure of
social action. He sought to provide for structures of experience of wider range than those found
in Parsons’s work, to render the theory of action better able to deal with the full panorama of
actual and concrete experience (Heritage 1984, ch. 2). Toward this end, he preferred
phenomenology over pragmatism, since the former provided him with conceptual tools for
showing how the world actually looks to actors, for revealing the “actor’s universe” as an
“experienced universe” (Garfinkel 2005 [1948], p. 117). It is as if, from Garfinkel’s own
standpoint, pragmatism pointed in the right direction, but only phenomenology could take us
there. (We note later how phenomenology, at least in its cognitivist, Schutzian, version, proved
in the end not completely adequate for his purposes, either.)
Thus it appears that, in this text, Garfinkel moved largely within the intellectual
universes of Parsonian theory (which he criticized) and of Continental phenomenology
(which he embraced)—and that only secondarily and slightly did he orient himself to
pragmatist thought. On the few other occasions in which he did make direct reference to
pragmatism, he did so in markedly critical tones. Garfinkel contended that pragmatism
takes a non-social view of the motives attributed to actors, seeing them as a property of
individuals rather than of the situations in which they find themselves. For example, he
(2005 [1948], pp. 167–68) suggested that Mead’s notion of the “I” has something
essentialist about it, as if the “I” were a kind of “concrete biological organism” or “vessel”
of motive. “Every social relationship will have its peculiar order of motives that the actors
assign to each other” while engaged in sequences of action (Garfinkel (2005 [1948],
p. 169). Relatedly, Garfinkel argued that pragmatism accords a false reality to social roles
and to the role-taking process through which actors are said to determine their courses of
conduct. “Living in the vivid present in its ongoing working acts,” he (2005 [1948], p. 116)
pointed out, “the working self experiences itself as the originator of the ongoing acts, and
thus as an undivided total self....[It is only] when the self in a reflective attitude turns back
to the working acts performed [that] this unity disappears,” giving rise to the mistaken idea
13
Phenomenological arguments came before his references to the pragmatists as well. For instance, his
aforementioned reference to Peirce appeared in the context of Garfinkel’s describing how, from an actor’s
point of view, objects are real things even if analytically they can be decomposed into temporally successive
acts and “noemata,” a Husserlian term that connotes perceptual adumbrations through which actors produce
the sense of facticity to things. Such “working acts,” as Garfinkel (2005 [1948], p. 144) argued, form the
“structural makeup” that gives definition and meaning to social objects, including selves and identities.
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of role-taking as a contemplative process apart from and antecedent to the practical realities
of working acts. (In a similar vein, he [2005 (1948), p. 192] criticized Dewey for advancing
an erroneous view of the self as a “mosaic of roles.”) Garfinkel concluded that
pragmatism’s approach to action is itself contemplative and “theoretical,” granting a false
reality to concepts when instead it ought to be investigating real interactions. He seemed, in
these instances, not simply to move from positive references to pragmatism to more
systematic uses of phenomenology, but specifically to express dissatisfaction with the
former as a way of thinking about selves, identity, motivation, and role-taking.14 What are
we to make of these critiques, and what might explain them?
For one thing, Garfinkel’s way of addressing pragmatism in this early text was episodic
and incomplete. It lacked engagement with many of the latter’s most recognizable
contributions, such as its call for a return to experience, its understanding of habitual action,
its concern with perplexity and intelligent problem-solving (in which theory is brought back
together with practice), its approach to language and semiosis, and its vision of progressive
social reform and reconstruction. To the extent that his (2005 [1948]) monograph can be
read at all as a critique of pragmatist thought, the study was unsystematic and avoided a
comprehensive understanding of pragmatism’s overall intellectual unity and cohesion. But
more importantly, there was something untenable about Garfinkel’s views of certain aspects
of pragmatist thought. The latter does not counterpose working acts to a purely contemplative
orientation in which actors do not act but merely think. Its point, rather, is that thinking is itself a
mode of action, such that to separate the two is a grievous error that prevents one from seeing
how creative problem-solving actually is undertaken. For Mead, the “working self” involved in
action is aware of originating that action but is otherwise engaged in it unreflectively. Its
“reflective attitude” only comes about when that action is blocked; only then does the self
become an object. Indeed, Mead (1964 [1903]) wrote disparagingly of “parallelistic
psychology” and of its view that psychic components always accompany behavioral action,
and he surely agreed that role-taking is not a contemplative process undertaken apart from
and somehow antecedent to the practical realities of working acts. Pragmatism, then, does not
deem the individual rather than trans-actions the unit of analysis. In fact, this charge better
characterizes Blumer’s (1937) symbolic interactionism, a subjectivistic abridgement of
pragmatist thought gaining sway during Garfinkel’s early years (and highly visible in his
attention space), than it does pragmatism itself. And the direction in which this line of
argument can more fruitfully be developed is a methodological not a theoretical one, focusing
research on concrete in situ interactions rather than on internal processes of mind. Garfinkel’s
arguments confused, it might be said, the parents with their offspring. Indeed, it is for this
reason—and not only on account of the genuine strengths of Continental phenomenology—
that he was possibly too quick to dispense with the home-grown alternative.
Finally, there is the consideration that phenomenology itself, at least in the Schutzian
variant with which Garfinkel was engaged during these years, resonates with at least certain
aspects of classical American pragmatism. To take just one example, Schutz drew explicitly
upon James when developing his account, in “On Multiple Realities” (1967a [1945]), of
“finite provinces of meaning,” while there and in other essays (e.g., “Common-Sense and
Scientific Interpretation of Human Action” [1967b (1953)]; “Some Leading Concepts of
14
Garfinkel’s embrace of phenomenology, both in terms of theorizing and of data, was complete by the time
of his (still unpublished) Ph.D. dissertation (1952). However, we refrain from discussing this work in the
present context, as our aim here is not to present a complete account of Garfinkel’s intellectual development
but rather to chart briefly the trajectory of his early engagement with pragmatism. On ethnomethodology’s
relation to phenomenology, however, see Heritage (1984, ch. 3) and Lynch (1993, ch. 4).
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Phenomenology” [1967a (1945)]), he developed connections as well between his
phenomenology of the life-world and Mead’s writings, although he also criticized those
writings.15 Of particular importance to Schutz was Mead’s recognition of the importance of the
“manipulatory area” (Schutz (1967a [1945], pp. 223–226) and what Schutz called the world of
working within one’s “reach.” This world was structured temporally in other ways that Schutz
defined phenomenologically and cognitively and that Garfinkel came to examine empirically
and in terms of embodiment. While phenomenology was in many respects different from
pragmatism, it should come as no surprise that the early Garfinkel moved toward it even as he
continued to hold onto insights bearing a deep affinity with classical pragmatist thought.16 To
grasp more fully the principles underlying his fateful move, of course, it would be necessary to
study Garfinkel’s development from a “sociology of ideas” perspective, mapping the state of
the sociological field during his formative years, investigating his locations within and trajectory
across that space, and reflecting on the choices then available to him for professional
advancement and elaboration of his intellectual perspective. That, however, is a topic for a very
different kind of investigation than the one we are essaying here.17
Members’ Methods and the Recovery of Practice
Despite Garfinkel’s impulse to downplay the overlap of his insights with those of
pragmatism, he actually went on in his subsequent writings to take up some of the
fundamental concerns of the pragmatist tradition, its unfinished conceptual and empirical
business that requires “attending to.” Foremost among these was the return to experience.
Whereas the pragmatists failed to give us purchase on the actual concrete procedures
whereby actors accomplish the meaningful, patterned, and orderly character of everyday
life, Garfinkel began, after the mid-1950s, to analyze systematically the “members’
methods” whereby the orderliness of everyday life is ongoingly achieved.18 The
specification of these methods, the systematic charting of lived experience, became the
signal contribution of his life’s work. In a number of papers published over the span of
more than a decade, many of them collected in Studies in Ethnomethodology, he enunciated
this new program of research. In language strikingly reminiscent of Dewey but drawing
heavily on Schutz (1971 [1943]), Garfinkel (1967, p. 277) insisted that “the scientific
rationalities are neither properties of nor sanctionable ideals of choices exercised within the
affairs governed by the presuppositions of everyday life.” Indeed, he continued, “the
problems encountered by [many conventional] researchers and theorists...may be troubles
of their own devising. The[se] troubles would be due...to the insistence on conceiving
actions in accordance with scientific conceits instead of looking to the actual rationalities
that persons’ behaviors in fact exhibit in the course of managing their practical affairs.” If
15
For his part, Husserl, too, was influenced by James, although, according to Spiegelberg (1956), he was
more impressed with James’ Principles of Psychology (1905 [1890]) than with Pragmatism. (1981a [1907]).
16
The relations between phenomenology and pragmatism, and how they affect sociological views of
language and the self, are an important topic in their own right, which we cannot address here. Kestenbaum
(1977) explores the possible connection between Dewey’s notion of habit and phenomenological approaches
to intentionality; Spiegelberg (1956) compares Pierce’s and Husserl’s “phenomenologies,” rejecting the idea
that they reflect mutual influence but suggesting that there are at least coincidental areas of agreement.
17
For a comprehensive survey of the new sociology of ideas, see Camic and Gross (2001).
On the origins of the term “ethnomethodology” and how the term was originally meant to capture the
availability of commonsense knowledge and “methods” whereby “members” of a society hold one another
accountable to that knowledge as a practical matter, see Garfinkel (1974, pp. 16–17).
18
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Garfinkel here was able simultaneously to draw heavily on Schutz and to sound themes
reminiscent of the pragmatists, it is because Schutz himself (1971 [1943], pp. 77, 84), in the
very paper cited, drew theoretical ideas from the classical American pragmatists. Garfinkel
(1996, 2002) later emphasized his own heterodox way of thinking as a return to Durkheim
rather than to pragmatism, as a recovery of the neglected wisdom in Durkheim’s aphorism
regarding the concreteness of social facts.19 Drawing on the phenomenologists, he directed
a powerful challenge to the two dominant sociological perspectives of the post-war era—
Parsonian structural-functionalism and quantitative data analysis—claiming that both
neglect the specific processes through which social facts are locally and endogenously
produced. In various places, however, Garfinkel (e.g., 1988) also effectively sounded
pragmatist themes, charging that these post-war sociologies elide practical action by
conceptualizing it as unstable and uncertain, as a stream of experience needing always to
have order bestowed on it by means of theoretical constructions such as rules or models,
instead of its being an order already coeval with the very existence and presence of social
action. In his critical assessment, as in pragmatism’s critiques of Reason, conceptual
sociological thought was seen as standing over and above experience and as claiming a
false superiority to it.
Garfinkel concurred with the pragmatists on another key point as well: The world of
pure experience cannot be understood in terms of the dualist frameworks of modern
epistemology, ways of thinking that draw a sharp dividing-line between subject and object.
He acknowledged that actors themselves have a dualist or objectivist view of the world—
that is, in their “mundane reasoning” (to invoke Pollner’s [1987] phrase), they conceive the
world before them as obdurately real—but he added that actors produce this sense of
objectivity by means of various procedures or methods and that they do so all the time, with
no “time out.” Actors coordinate themselves, in other words, not by way of a common
system of symbols (i.e., by thinking alike), but by actively achieving a sense of knowing
things in common and of having the “same” perspective were they to change positions with
one another. From a member’s point of view, social facts are, indeed, objective, but
paradoxically that facticity is the result of actors’ ongoing concerted work. Objectivity is
achieved. Garfinkel went to the roots of the objectivity of social facts. He underscored the
practical efforts, not only in everyday settings (the special province of Pollner’s
investigations), but also in collective enterprises such as modern science (including
ethnomethodology itself as a science), required to maintain the assumption of an external
reality with transcendant properties. Objective statements are generated in both everyday
and scientific contexts, but they must be seen as nothing other than indexical expressions
whose verifiable sense is an achieved feature related to accounting practices in the settings
of which they are a part. Garfinkel specified a number of such practices, including
“ad-hocing,” which occurs when instructions are only partial and actors take the left-out
steps on their own to fulfill criteria of objectivity—“I can’t categorize this particular paper,
but I’ll give it a ‘B’”—and “glossing,” which occurs in the coding of ambiguous events,
such as suicides. (Yet another practice involves creating narratives to fit one’s [scientific]
data, as when one anticipates how a story will be used by various parties: “How do I have
to write up the account for those who will read it?”) In uncovering these and other practices,
19
Specifically, this Durkheimian aphorism consists of a reference, in The Rules of Sociological Method
(1982 [1895], p. 45), to “our basic principle, that of the objective reality of social facts.” Durkheim declared:
“It is...upon this principle that in the end everything rests, and everything comes back to it.” Garfinkel
invoked this aphorism in the opening pages of Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967, pp. vii–viii), and he
underscored it all the more forcefully in his second collection, Ethnomethodology’s Program (2002), which
bears the subtitle, Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism.
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Garfinkel showed how “primordial” divisions in pure experience are actually achieved. His
program of ethnomethodological inquiry emerged, in this sense, as an important elaboration
upon Jamesian (and Deweyan) radical empiricism.
Much like Dewey as well, Garfinkel supplemented these insights with a careful inquiry
into the ways in which actors continually interpret, contextualize, and find underlying
patterns, meanings, and unities in the “objective” facts before them. His inquiry was fully
consistent, moreover, with Gurwitsch’s (1964, p. 234) appreciation of James’ (1905 [1890],
pp. 196 ff.) injunction to avoid the “psychologists’ fallacy”—that is, “in discussing a state
of mind from the psychologist’s point of view, to avoid foisting into its own ken matters
that are only there for ours.” Following gestalt theory and phenomenological psychology,
Gurwitsch (1964) explored how actors do not build up things in the natural and social
worlds piecemeal but assemble them into “gestalt contextures.” That is, they experience
them as already there and constituted; to take but a simple example (Gurwitsch 1964, pp.
240–42), when a navigator discovers land, it is first seen as a vague and somewhat
indeterminate “coastline” or “island” and only secondarily and progressively in terms of its
detail. Actors accord to social objects, too, and to complex scenes of interaction, a gestaltlike character. How does this happen? Garfinkel (1967, ch. 3) spoke here of a “documentary
method of interpretation,” in which “an actual appearance [is treated] as ‘the document of,’
as ‘pointing to,’ as ‘standing on behalf of’ a presupposed underlying pattern. Not only is the
underlying pattern derived from its individual documentary evidences, but the individual
documentary evidences, in their turn, are interpreted on the basis of ‘what is known’ about
the underlying pattern. Each is used to elaborate the other.” Garfinkel also recognized, as
Wieder (1974, pp. 187–88, 200) has pointed out, that these “individual documentary
evidences” are often indexical expressions (e.g., accounts of actions) that, accordingly,
“have no self-evident or self-explanatory sense. Instead, the utterances as ‘pieces’ have a
sense as constituent parts of the setting in the manner that a constituent part of a gestaltcontexture has functional significance.” Achieving the gestalt requires actors’ work, of
course, and it puts into question any conventional dualism of account and setting, subject
and object. One might recall here the Deweyan idea of an organic circuit, in which the
stimulus is not “outside” or “external to” the response. As Dewey made clear, actors’
response is into the stimulus, helping to constitute it. In gestalt terminology, the constituted
whole provides for ex post facto derivation of stimulus as well as response. What especially
prefigures here—and resonates with—the above insights of early ethnomethodology is the
implication that the gestalt-like character of objects and interactions is a practical
achievement. Indeed, it points even beyond early ethnomethodology (and Schutzian
phenomenology) in its view that this achievement has bodily and concerted dimensions and
is not merely cognitive.20 In his later writings, Garfinkel moved to embrace that very
insight. In Ethnomethodology’s Program (2002, chs. 1, 8), he stressed that actors’
orientation toward objects (e.g., ringing phones), is an embodied orientation, and he coined
such terms as “oriented objects” and “coherence of phenomenal fields” to highlight, in his
editor’s (Rawls 2002, p. 32) words, “the embodied character of...practices for producing
and recognizing the coherence of perception.”
One final (and related) feature of Garfinkel’s return to experience and practical action are
his insights into, not the cognitive coherence of the world, but its normative ordering. As a
good Kantian, Parsons before him had insisted that there is a lawfulness to the moral life, an
order ensured by the following of norms and rules. Garfinkel, by contrast—and in this
On the way in which actions and not just “objects” of perceptions are gestalt-type accomplishments, see
Maynard (2005).
20
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respect he followed Burke (1969 [1945]) and especially Mills (1940)—contended that
norms are best seen as features of settings and as parts of the very organization of conduct
of those settings, not as causes of that organization in the first place. Settings teach what
one needs to know, practices get done according to what those settings need done, and this
takes place irrespective of what the prevailing norms might be: the ordering capacities
embodied in actors’ practices—and not the rules themselves—are what is most important
(Hilbert 1981). Social settings are thus already intelligible and orderly, not chaotic and
disorganized, and an “autochthonous” order is already there, albeit one always and ever in
the process of being achieved. From Garfinkel’s perspective, the problem with norms and
rules was that they are decontextualized: in actual social life, even predictable activity
requires judgmental work. Those who do not undertake such work and operate without
common sense—e.g., the “actors” in Parsons’s framework—are “judgmental dopes”
(Garfinkel 1967, pp. 66–67). Garfinkel (2002, chs. 1, 5–6) did speak of how actors use
rules to help others to learn a procedure. These “instructed actions,” however, have
“praxeological validity” only insofar as they pass what can be construed as a pragmatic
test—that is, insofar as they work or make sense—and this is so regardless of whether
activities have been in accord with the rules along the way. (For example, actors drive on
the highway as a profoundly practical matter rather than “follow the rules of the road” in
some mechanical fashion.) Garfinkel suggested that actors use norms and rules to realize
whatever organizational purposes they can be fitted into. As judgmental workers, they
tolerate violations to keep the work flow going; they make exceptions “just this time” and
suspend (rather than break) the rules putatively governing their actions. (Zimmerman’s [1970]
important early inquiries are dedicated to working out this proposition.) Norms and rules are
significant, in fact, “as a way, or set of ways, of causing activities to be seen as morally,
repetitively, and constrainedly organized” (Wieder 1974, p. 175); they are a constitutive part
of the very activities they purportedly regulate. As such, they manifest the property Garfinkel
(1967, ch. 1) termed “reflexivity.” In pragmatist terms, norms and rules are important only
insofar as they are invoked or used. Garfinkel went well beyond what the classical American
pragmatists were able to achieve in this regard. Conceptually, he generalized from formal
institutions—to which Mills (1940), in particular, had confined himself—to all putatively
norm-governed settings, and substantively, he set up a highly fruitful and wide-ranging
empirical research program. We shall soon see how Sacks and his collaborators (Sacks et al.
1974) followed him down this path in their own work on turn-taking.
Two Implications of the Recovery of Practice
Throughout all the above discussions, Garfinkel developed two other important themes, one
theoretical and the other methodological. In a theoretical vein, he maintained that the
procedures—or members’ methods—through which social order is produced are themselves nearly always lost sight of by the actors who engage in them. In this respect,
members’ methods are very much like the tacit, habitual, and taken-for-granted practices
highlighted by the pragmatists (especially Peirce, Dewey, and Mead), practices that come
under conscious reflective scrutiny only when blocked, thwarted, or rendered ineffectual.21 The
reflexivity accruing to objective properties of settings is “uninteresting” (Garfinkel 1967, p. 7)
to the actors themselves; they remove such properties from visibility. Actors consider the
everyday world “objective” or “just out there”; they do not ask ethnomethodological
21
Perhaps Garfinkel and the pragmatists converged on this theoretical position because there are logically
only so many theoretical positions possible in the space of theories of action; see Levine (1995).
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questions. Indeed, if they did ask such questions about their procedures or otherwise attempted
to “stabilize” them, nothing would get accomplished and the “anomic features” of settings
would be “multiplied” (Garfinkel 1967, p. 270).22 So too with moral order and the use of
norms and rules. Garfinkel reacted here against the “teleological model of action” (Joas 1996)
shared by structural-functionalism and rational actor theory, as well as by various quantitative
approaches, which, for lack of having a theory of action of their own, often formulate their
hypotheses in ad hoc fashion. Both structural-functionalism and rational actor theory ascribe
to actors’ modes of relation to the world something of their own mode of relation to the
actors: namely, an intellectualist orientation. In a manner foretold by Dewey in The Quest for
Certainty, these approaches judge actors’ rationality by the superior criterion of the theorist’s
own rationality, assigning to actions that lack sufficient facts or scientificity the character of
being “emotional” or “value-driven,” that is, non-rational. (This is evident enough in the case
of rational actor approaches. But it applies as well to Parsonian theory, as Heritage [1984,
1987] has extensively and persuasively argued.) What both approaches disregard is the
distinctive “logic of practice,” to invoke Bourdieu’s (1990 [1980]) famous phrase, a corporeal
and unthinking logic that remains wholly outside the terms of a “means-end” mode of
theoretical reasoning. While it is true that most sociology depends on various degrees of
abstraction or “formal analysis” (Garfinkel 1996, 2002, chs. 1, 5), as soon as one moves in
that direction one leaves behind the world of concrete experience, a world that
ethnomethodology, like pragmatism, wishes to recover. Garfinkel took very seriously the
workings of practical action. Conceiving of action as comprising an array of members’ actual
methodic procedures, which in Deweyan terminology are “trans-actional,” he moved even
beyond pragmatist thinking, insofar as the latter had rather little to say empirically about the
practices whereby social order is actively accomplished.
Methodologically, Garfinkel also made a crucial contribution: he developed an actual
program for doing ethnomethodology and for empirically identifying the aforementioned
procedures for producing social order. His great achievement was to convert the Jamesian
metaphysics of radical empiricism into a highly elaborated research agenda, one that
maintains, with Heidegger, that the most fruitful approach is not to ask, “‘What is
metaphysics?[,]’ so that we would then begin by talking about metaphysics, [but] instead
[to] ask a metaphysical question and thereby land ourselves in the midst of metaphysics”
(Garfinkel 2002, p. 199).23 How did Garfinkel envision empirically exploring the world of
“haecceities” (Garfinkel 1991) and of concrete experience? He stressed, above all, that one
has to be doing, as a competent participant or “member,” what other members of a concrete
setting are doing. It is only in this way that one can see what the practices are that make up
the setting and that are features of it by being observable as features. Generic (or “formal”)
analysis—e.g., “the students were nodding”—is insufficient. How does one know that they
are students? How does one know that they are nodding? Garfinkel admonished: Do not
explain what others do as a collectivity; first-person narratives are better. Do not say
“sometimes” or “usually.” Do not speak in “generalities” (Garfinkel 2002, p. 203), even
22
Garfinkel (1967, p. 173) observed: “In the conduct of his everyday affairs[,] in order for the person to treat
rationally the one-tenth of [his] situation that, like an iceberg appears above the water, he must be able to
treat the nine-tenths that lies below as an unquestioned and, perhaps even more interestingly, as an
unquestionable background of matters...which appear without even being noticed.”
23
This affinity on Garfinkel’s part with Heidegger, at least with the latter’s way of rejecting conventional
approaches to philosophizing, is unsurprising in light of Rorty’s (1979, pp. 6–7) observation that it was
Heidegger, along with Dewey (he also mentions Wittgenstein), who “brought us into a period of
‘revolutionary’ philosophy...by introducing new maps of the terrain (viz., of the whole panorama of human
activities) which simply do not include those features which previously seemed to dominate.”
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when using ethnomethodological terms. Do not say, even in respect to a single actor, “He
gestures whenever he makes points.” Say instead: “When he stated such-and-such a thing,
he made a gesture that could be interpreted as a point.” The gesture’s meaning is indexical
to whatever else is going on in particular in that setting. So if you have a schema in your
head of what certain things mean, it will not get you anywhere in terms of understanding
how people do what they do. Get down to the rich details and the skill involved in the
practices. Go for the lively features. Isolate elements that have some prominence and then
describe how they get concretely achieved as intersubjectively real for the participants. Get
hold of their specifics, as opposed to their generics. Such were Garfinkel’s practical
admonishments. Much about them, again, is reminiscent of the pragmatists’ sensibility. But
whereas classical American pragmatism maintained, even in its most empirical moments, a
certain distance from concrete details, Garfinkel moved beyond any lingering theoreticism.
Indeed, he produced a wide variety of recommendations for getting at practices in lived
experience that would otherwise be hard to detect or analyze. It is this contribution that
constitutes his enduring legacy—and the most significant means whereby he can be said to
have carried forward the unfulfilled agenda of pragmatist philosophy.
Part Three: Ethnomethodological Studies of Work in the Professions and Science
The above topic of Garfinkel’s methodological policies leads us directly to the second of the
three pragmatist themes we originally identified: problems and creative problem-solving.
Following Schutz (1967b [1953]), Garfinkel (1963, p. 188) proposed, in his seminal paper, “A
Conception of, and Experiments with, ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions,”
that the “perceived normality” of events in the everyday world reflects actors’ investment in
certain tacit and unreflective presumptions, that is, in the commonsense knowledge made
possible by adherence to the attitude of daily life. When actors do not—or cannot—invest in
these presumptions, they experience profound difficulties in maintaining the everyday social
scene. Garfinkel also owed a debt to Burke on this score, and hence, indirectly, to the
pragmatists—a fact that became apparent in a much later work (2002, p. 211), in which he
spoke approvingly of Burke’s [1969 (1945)] idea of “perspective by incongruity.” In similar
spirit to Burke, he (1963, p. 187) asked in his “Trust” paper, “what can be done to make for
trouble[?]” Garfinkel devised social-scientific procedures for rendering “members’ work”
visible; the most famous of these were his “breaching experiments,” which he originally
presented as “tutorial exercises” or teaching “demonstrations” for students. These experiments
brought about in participants of social scenes a state of profound disorientation—or, to use a
term from Dewey’s and Addams’s vocabulary, perplexity—and yielded the unanticipated
additional result (which might have surprised even the pragmatists) that the regular workings
of taken-for-granted practices are experienced not only as a cognitive but also as a moral
obligation (hence the word “trust” in the essay title). In Studies in Ethnomethodology,
Garfinkel introduced yet another approach to the uncovering and specification of ethnomethods. Examining a real-life situation, that of an “intersexed” person in pursuit of a
gender-changing operation, he argued that blockages to the ordinary unrecognized operation of
everyday practices arise, not from experimental contrivances, but from features already built
into (and “naturally” occurring in) that situation. Thus, “Agnes,” who seeks to “pass” as a
woman despite “male” features to her anatomy and biography, is forced to act as a “practical
methodologist” (Garfinkel 1967, p. 180), thereby experiencing the ordinary takenfor-granted world—specifically, the dichotomous sex composition of the normative gender
order—as already and profoundly “breached.” In this way, she gains unique insights into how
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the visibility of anyone’s gender status is ongoingly accomplished. The model of inquiry that
Garfinkel established here became increasingly prevalent, as investigators more and more
eschewed inducing breaches in favor of examining obstructions arising spontaneously in social
situations. But in either case, the similarities between pragmatism and ethnomethodology were
highly evident. We focus on more of these similarities in what follows, contending that
pragmatist views on perplexity find a close analogue in what Garfinkel—and later
ethnomethodologists of work and science—refer to as “the shop floor problem.”
The Shop Floor Problem
In the pragmatist tradition, as we have seen, perplexities represent a kind of moral fissure that
arises when one way of life runs up against another, indexing a breach in social relations. For
example, when examining disruptions to common-sense knowledge, Addams directed special
attention to sexual, class, ethnic, and other categorical differences between people, along with
the disparities in power these can involve. She exposed the perplexities that arise, for example,
when children (especially daughters, in her account) become educated and depart from
obligations of filial piety to embrace wider social ideals; when household members employ
domestic helpers; when any actor in an industrial or educational enterprise depreciates the
social experience of those who labor to earn wages or become educated; or—in the example we
discussed earlier—when a social worker of one class and educational background confronts a
family of a lower stratum. Garfinkel went about the problem of investigating perplexities in a
significantly different way. He examined instances in which one way of life is articulated in
bureaucratic requirements, procedural specifications, or management plans, while another is
what actually happens on the shop floor, with all its unanticipated circumstances and
contingencies. From an ethnomethodological point of view, any workplace can be filled with
the kinds of contingencies, circumstances, particularities, and exigencies that preoccupied
Addams’s charity workers, difficulties that defy the abstract plans and expectations of theorists,
managers, designers, and others concerned to stipulate how shop floor courses of action should
flow: the disparity between “plans and situated actions,” to invoke Suchman’s (1987) phrase, is
not always class-based, but it can be. What Garfinkel emphasized is that this disparity is
better conceived as a function of the shop floor problem than as a discordance between
different kinds of social experiences or backgrounds. That is, he stressed that the source of
perplexity is best understood as a discrepancy between managerially approved ways of
recording and tracking performance and the actual skills in detail and locally organized, lived
work of doing a job in real time with the materials and personnel at hand. The pragmatists fell
short in probing empirically the situated methods and practices whereby participants actually
handle such discrepancies and produce order at the local level. Following Garfinkel, by
contrast, ethnomethodologists of work and science have investigated and documented the
particular, concrete, collaborative, and “real-time” ways in which actors manage, in face of
manifold contingencies and unanticipated circumstances, to carry out the abstract versions of
whatever it is that their occupational responsibilities might require.24
24
Garfinkel recounted in Ethnomethodology’s Program (2002, pp. 80, 95 fn. 7; see also Garfinkel 2004a;
Garfinkel 2004b, p. x) the circumstances in which he initially used the term “shop floor problem.” He
recalled that, in 1994, he attended, at Beryl Bellman’s invitation, a conference on workplace difficulties at
McDonnell Douglas. Bellman and his colleagues (the latter all aerospace engineers) served as consultants to
that firm, and it was they who labelled its quandaries—specifically, the disparity between the actual work of
those building its C-47 airplanes and the firm’s “front office protocol accounts of production costs, protocols
that ha[d] lost sight of [that work]” (Garfinkel 2004b, p. x)—“The Shop Floor Problem.” Garfinkel indicated
that it was from this team of consultants that he appropriated the term, generalizing it to subsume a much
wider range of sociological phenomena.
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Before we turn to an assessment of these various ethnomethodological investigations, let
us briefy review Garfinkel’s own inquiries into the shop floor problem. He began to
elucidate the issue (without specifically labelling it as such) as early as Studies in
Ethnomethodology, where he directed close attention to actors’ concrete worksite-specific
practices, whether these be found in jury rooms, outpatient psychiatric clinics, or suicide
prevention centers. In a later article, “The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with
Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar,” he turned to the “night’s work,” as he
called it, of astronomers engaged in discovering activities. “We did not examine,” he and
his co-authors (Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston 1981, pp. 137, 139–41, italics in original)
observed, “and we want not to examine the end-point object [i.e., the discovered pulsar] for
its correspondence to an original plan. We want to disregard, we want not to take seriously,
how closely or how badly the object corresponds to some original design—particularly to
some cognitive expectancy or to some theoretical model—that is independent of their
embodied work’s particular occasions as of which the object’s production—the object—
consists, only and entirely.” Garfinkel and his associates devoted themselves instead to
specifying these embodied practices’ “first time through,” “local production properties.”25
But it was only in Ethnomethodology’s Program that Garfinkel discussed the shop floor
problem explicitly and at length.26 Dubbing it “Ethnomethodology’s discovered topic,” he
observed there that the practices found “in work’s places, just there, and with just what
equipment and instruments are at hand, in just this building, and in just these rooms, with
just who is there, in just the time that is marked by clock” (Garfinkel 2002, pp. 95, 249),
can be the object of tutorial exercises, which attend to the “phenomenal field properties of
common occurrences” (Garfinkel 2002, pp. 95, 249, 100). Or, he added, they can drive
“hybrid studies,” which are concerned with “properties of work in densely recurrent
structures..., not occasionally but systematically, and therein ubiquitously” (Garfinkel 2002,
p. 100, italics ours). The latter studies require investigators to immerse themselves in the
work settings they are studying, to become so competent at the work at hand that their
findings will be taken seriously by those occupationally or professionally engaged in it.27
Even with these recent elaborations, however, Garfinkel’s insights into the shop floor
problem maintained a remarkable consistency over the decades. Together, they opened up
an ambitious new agenda for substantive research. Garfinkel brought together—under one
conceptual rubric—a wealth of new empirical questions to explore. We now turn to
ethnomethodologists’ systematic pursuit of these questions, to their actual studies of the
shop floor in all its concrete details.
25
Garfinkel’s (2002, ch. 9) still later-published work on Galileo’s inclined plane demonstration—much of it
undertaken, however, around the same time as the pulsar study—covered (in this respect) similar ground.
To be more precise here, the term “shop floor problem” first appeared—with a brief discussion—in
Garfinkel’s Cooley-Mead Lecture, “Ethnomethodology’s Program” (1996; the contents of this paper are
reprinted in Ethnomethodology’s Program [2002, chs. 1 and 5]). Garfinkel (1996, p. 9) wrote in that paper:
“[Ethnomethodology’s] findings are found [in ethnomethodological studies of work and science] in the
phenomena of two constitutents of the Shop Floor Problem: (1) shop floor achievements and their
accompanying careful* descriptions, and (2) shop floor theorizing.” (“Careful*” denotes the concrete
practices of order production with which ethnomethodology, by contrast to formal analysis, is concerned.) It
is only in the 2002 work, however, that the idea of a shop floor problem received sustained attention.
26
Garfinkel and Wieder (1992, pp. 182–84) termed this the “unique adequacy requirement.” Interestingly,
Pollner and Emerson (2001, p. 123) observe in respect to it: “As EM focuses more intensely on specialized
settings, the earlier methodological goal of making the familiar strange is replaced by efforts to make the
strange familiar. For this recent development in EM, the fusion of local and analytic knowledge and
competencies is not a ‘problem,’ but a goal.”
27
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Perplexities in Social Work and Health Care
One can only imagine what a Dewey or (especially) an Addams might have done with the
tools of an ethnomethodologist. And one can only imagine what an ethnomethodologist
would do with these pragmatists’ (again, especially Addams) empirical research topics,
studying, for example, the perplexities of charity (and social) workers from within the
framework of the shop floor problem. While no ethnomethodological study has yet covered
this empirical terrain, a few investigations somewhat closely related to those of Addams do
exist. Let us briefly consider them, selecting from the wide literature on this topic a small
set of studies that engage with our featured themes while also representing, for their own
part, influential contributions to the ethnomethodological tradition. The earliest of these is
Zimmerman’s aforementioned inquiry into intake processes at a welfare agency. Workers,
he (1970, pp. 221, 222, 228) found, often face perplexing situations where rules about
assigning clients come up against unforeseeable circumstances that do not fit with what the
rules dictate. There is a discordance between the “explicitly stated policies and procedures
designed to advance formally defined goals” and “the variety of practices and mundane
considerations involved in determinations of the operational meaning and situational
relevance of [these] policies and procedures,” a discrepancy, that is, between the formal
plan of the organization and its “actual task structure..., the variety of problematic features
generated by the attempt to put [its programmatically specified tasks] into practice.” Faced
with this discrepancy, workers regularly depart from the rules—the abstract version of how
they are to assign clients. They do so, not out of noncompliance or deviance, but from a
concern that everyone involved be accountably satisfied that the processing of cases is
happening for all practical purposes. The “order” of getting work done in an “orderly”
fashion resides, not in the rules per se, but in the methodic ways in which workers use the
rules, especially in perplexing contexts, in a concerted effort to achieve agency goals.
Zimmerman (1970, p. 225) concluded, in words that could almost be found verbatim in a
pragmatist account of intelligence: “[T]he operational import of formal rules and
organizational policy (of which the assignment procedure is an instance) is decided by
personnel on a case-by-case basis and warranted on ‘reasonable grounds.’...[T]he
reasonableness of such decisions, from the point of view of personnel, relies upon a
taken-for-granted grasp of, and implicit reference to, the situated practical features of task
activity.”
Closer yet to Addams’ concerns was research on British Health Visitors and their
dealings with families with newborn babies. Health Visitors (HVs) are agents of a
community-nursing program in the United Kingdom, authorized to detect and prevent ill
health, identify physical needs, and provide advice to families in the care and management
of their children. HVs have a statutory obligation to visit all mothers with children under
the age of five to ensure that illness is prevented and to find problematic cases for referral to
specialized agencies. Having to fill out a form called the Child Health Record and to fulfill
the textually stated requirements of the Health Visitors’ Association presents a kind of shop
floor problem, with all the moral dimensions that Addams glossed but was unable to
explore in the details of everyday practice. Although HVs attempt to construct a befriending
relationship to families, Heritage (2002, p. 316) observes: “A substantial proportion of
mothers, particularly those in poorer socioeconomic circumstances, see the HV service
largely in terms of social control and surveillance and attempt to minimize contact with its
representatives. Most surveys suggest declining levels of satisfaction with the role and
value of HVs.” There appear to be good interactional reasons for such declining levels of
satisfaction. For example, there is a moral backdrop to the relationship that is not explicitly
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formulated. HVs regard mothers as properly motivated to take care of their babies but not
necessarily as competent to do so; this orientation on the part of HVs results in their
frequently offering unsolicited advice to mothers, who mostly resist the advice and
sometimes in a defensive way. The relationship comes to be constructed, not as a
befriending one, but rather as one of “experts” to “novices,” as the HVs and mothers
(sometimes fathers) struggle with one another in beneath-the-surface “competence
struggles” (Heritage and Sefi 1992), wherein “mothers strive to show that they have
displayed vigilance in child care and have competently responded to problematic
situations” (Heritage and Lindström 1998, p. 416).
This research on Health Visitors addresses precisely the kind of perplexity about which
Addams wrote, a perplexity based in professional-lay disparities and in the class differences
built into them. However, there is much more afoot here than background-variable
disparities. The very form that HVs need to fill out, a form with requirements for face sheet
data, consent signatures for immunizations, and explanations of clinic procedures, is often
an intrusion—with “an alien set of relevancies” (Heritage 2002, p. 318)—into the
relationship between HVs and mothers (except when fathers are present); HVs use it to
legitimate their questions and to draw fathers into the conversation. Moreover, following a
principle “drawn from the normative order of everyday life” and neither built into the form
nor drawn from any procedure for implementing the instrument, HVs ask questions that are
“optimized” (Heritage 2002, p. 322). For instance, the form has a blank space for “birth
information: pregnancy normal/abnormal, specify.” HVs regularly generate this information
by asking (optimistically), “And you had a normal pregnancy?” Exceptions occur when
they have learned something through prior discussion that indicates that there was some
difficulty. Thus, the form does not operate irrespective of the identities of participants and
across all circumstances. Rather, while drawing on generic interactional relevancies, it still
responds to particular circumstances, for HVs engage in “recipient design” (Heritage 2002,
p. 326; cf. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974) by asking questions that reflect in situ
family biography. Ethnomethodological research demonstrates again and again that
bureaucratic forms in any work setting always involve a set of “normal, natural troubles”
(Garfinkel 1967, p. 192) in their use. Accordingly, these forms require and call for
common-sense interpretation, as embodied in a set of practices for understanding and
interpreting their requirements in relation to situated purposes and circumstances. Entries in
bureaucratic records, according to Heath and Luff (2000, p. 38), require “defeasing,” which,
in the philosophy of jurisprudence, refers to how any rule or law, despite its precision and
relevance, confronts actual conditions that it cannot handle in formulaic fashion. Somehow,
the rule or law (or stipulated categories on a form, in the case of welfare and other such
agencies) needs to be explicated with regard to those conditions. Because circumstances
and contingencies are boundless, the perplexities of doing shop floor work—perplexities
that cause actors’ responses to be, in Dewey’s terms, incomplete or unfulfilled—are also
boundless. The great insight and contribution of ethnomethodology has been to make a
topic of these perplexities and to demonstrate that social organization inheres in the
practices by which actors handle them.
One final line of work that bears, at least indirectly, on the sorts of perplexities originally
addressed by Addams is ethnomethodological studies of good and bad news, typically
conducted in social settings involving health care providers and recipients. Maynard (2003)
has investigated how good and bad news represents disruptions of quotidian life to the
extent of jeopardizing participants’ sense of what is real. He observes that participants in the
everyday world on rare occasions inhabit a state that phenomenologists thought belonged
only to the philosopher, a state of “epoché,” where the ordinary abandonment of doubt in
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the objectivity of the external world and in the character of certain social objects therein is
suspended. (Peirce, too, as we have seen, spoke of states of Doubt and of Belief.) Unlike
the phenomenologist, however, who suspends the natural attitude in a strategic fashion,
everyday actors have the epoché thrust upon them often in moments of ordinary talk and
social interaction, moments when they become oriented to possible good or bad news and
its various adumbrations. In those moments, they experience something very much like the
perplexity with which pragmatists were preoccupied. Indeed, as one commentator
(Seigfried 2002, pp. xxv–xxvi) has pointed out, Addams herself suggested that this
perplexity of experience represents a breakdown—an epoché—of “usual understandings,”
“assumptions,” and “presuppositions,” all close cousins of commonsense knowledge and of
what Schutz (1967b [1953]) referred to as the attitude of daily life. Recall, from our earlier
discussion, that when Dewey (1988f [1938], ch. VI) spoke of perplexity, he conceived of it
as an “indeterminate situation.” In the ethnomethodological treatment of good and bad
news, it is possible to see, in fine interactional detail, the indeterminacy in which
participants become embedded. It is also possible to follow in pragmatist terms the creative
problem-solving and intelligence with which these participants, when delivering or
receiving good or bad news, move, as it were, between social worlds, reconstructing the
old in light of new exigencies. They do so through practices that shift the accent of reality
from one prior set of social organizational forms to a newer, fresher set. In episodes
consisting of only a few turns of talk, that is, speaker and hearer open up—and then close
back down—deep fissures in their everyday experience, thereby creating (at least ideally)
newly habitual, newly intelligent modes of being in the world.
Perplexities in the “Discovering” and Social Sciences
Empirical analyses of social welfare and medical settings are by no means the only
contributions by ethnomethodologists to the systematic study of the shop floor problem and
of perplexity. It will be recalled that Garfinkel himself deemed these phenomena to be
prominent features of the “discovering sciences.” It is these sciences, accordingly, that he
made a key object of ethnomethodological investigation.28 In this respect, he attended to
some unfinished business in the agenda of pragmatist philosophers. In Dewey’s work, if not
in Addams’s, the discovering sciences were a topic of utmost importance. It is to these
sciences, Garfinkel declared, that we must go, not to philosophy, to find out the facts of the
world. Dewey seemed to suggest, in fact, that all the positive sciences—mathematics,
physics, chemistry, biology, among others—are commensurate with pragmatist investigation, for they help to resolve situations of perplexity by providing knowledge necessary for
overcoming conflict in coordination. What he did not investigate, however—but
ethnomethodology does—is the phenomenon of perplexity as it appears inside science
itself. Garfinkel’s co-authored inquiry into the discovery of the pulsar, together with
subsequent work by his collaborators on that study—Eric Livingston and Michael Lynch—
demonstrates that the discovering sciences are, indeed, often the sites of incongruities
between plans and situated actions. These researches have shown how perplexity in terms
28
Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston (1981, p. 133) distinguish the discovering from the social sciences in the
following manner: “The social sciences are talking sciences, and achieve in texts, not elsewhere, the
observability and practical objectivity of their phenomena....Social sciences are not discovering sciences.
Unlike ‘hard sciences’ they cannot ‘lose’ their phenomena; they cannot undertake the search for a
phenomenon as a problem to be solved, finally be unable to do so, and thus have ‘wasted time’; they do not
know the indispensability of bricolage expertise; and these are never local conditions of their inquiries and
theorizing.”
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of the shop floor problem emerges and is dealt with in the everyday, on-the-job, real-time
activities of working scientists. Livingston (1986, pp. 7, x), for instance, explores how, in
“the situated lived-work of doing professional mathematics—that is, as a work-site
phenomenon,” mathematicians confront and solve problems in the “production of ordinary,
naturally accountable proofs.” In most studies, he observes, “the living foundations of
mathematics...remain...untouched and unexamined.” In his own research, by contrast, he
(1986, p. 16) examines “the local work of producing and exhibiting, for and among
mathematicians, a ‘followable’—and, therein, a naturally accountable—line of mathematical argumentation.” In this way, he (1986, pp. 15–16) returns “the mathematical object to
its origins within the mathematical work-site…, the real-world practices of professional
mathematicians,” thereby highlighting the “‘reasoner’s work’ that surrounds even a simple
proof and [that] recovers that proof as a naturally accountable mathematical object.”
Livingston’s inquiry is an exemplary hybrid study of practices in the discovering sciences,
meant to be “instructive in and consequential for” practicing mathematicians themselves
(Livingston 1986, p. 6). It explores from within, as it were, the problem-solving in which
scientists engage on a regular basis, in the course of a day’s work, taking seriously the
situated details of the actual work they do on the mathematical shop floor.
Lynch, too—Garfinkel’s other collaborator on the pulsar article—offers useful insights
into the shop floor problem within the discovering sciences. He examines a neuroscience
worksite, one devoted to studying, with an electron microscope, a regenerative brain
process called “axon sprouting.”29 Lynch (1985, p. 3) focuses on the “unformulated
practices” of that laboratory setting, practices outside the purview of official “methods
sections” of published research papers, with their “step-by-step maxims of conduct for the
already competent practitioner to assimilate.” Drawing on ethnographic observations, as
well as on conversation analyses of recorded worksite interactions—interactions involving
“talk which accompanies the work as that work is underway; not talk about the work but
talk in the work, talk which is part of the work” (Lynch 1985, p. 10)—he devotes close
attention to the problem, one often encountered by neuroscientists as part of their day’s
work, of distinguishing “facts” from “artifacts” in the electron micrographs generated by
their work equipment and procedures. Production of that distinction in specific cases, and
then also the resolution of perplexities, are concerted and in situ achievements. Lynch’s
work also inquires into the problem of reaching agreement in scientific practice. It explores
the “devices” and ethno-methods whereby laboratory scientists, in the course of their shop
talk, move toward an “achieved agreement”—in other words, “how the talk of members
establishes any ‘objectivity’ for all practical purposes in the local setting” (Lynch 1985,
p. 203). Lynch’s (1985, p. 202) focus is on the modifications that colleagues effect in their
own and others’ accounts of objects, “the ways in which speakers change their
descriptions…in the face of expressions of disagreement by others in a conversation.”
Such an investigation leads him to questions previously taken up by the pragmatist
philosophy of science, specifically by Dewey’s (1988f [1938], p. 15) theory of “warranted
assertibility,” a standard the latter sees as replacing “Truth.” For our present purposes, what
is most significant here is the manner in which Lynch (1985, p. 203) adds to
ethnomethodology’s insights into “the unremitting achievement of...technical details in
concerted work” on the shop floor, that is, the contribution he makes to its understanding of
the setting-internal—specifically, interactional—world of the discovering sciences.
29
Arguably, Lynch’s inquiry falls a bit short in terms of qualifying as a hybrid study of work, since, as he
(1985, p. 2) himself confesses, he “never approached a practitioner’s skills” and was “unable to participate in
the lab’s researches,” although he did achieve “limited competences.”
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Besides such studies, ethnomethodology also features a closely related line of work
that directs attention to the shop floor problem within the social sciences. Garfinkel
(1967, ch. 1) himself pointed toward such a research focus when he showed how coding
the contents of folders in an outpatient clinic to provide a “disinterested” description of
the clinic’s operations depended on a variety of embedded and tacit “ad hoc
considerations.” Coding instructions, he (1967, p. 24) wrote, “furnish a ‘social science’
way of talking so as to persuade consensus and action within the practical circumstances
of the clinic’s organized daily activities.” Recent research on the survey interview
(Maynard and Schaeffer 2000; Maynard et al. 2002) continues this attention to ad hoc
methods necessary to the survey-based social science enterprise. It shows how survey
researchers seek to control the data collection process by standardizing the survey
interview and its administration. Since no instrument or instructions (manuals,
procedures) can be devised that anticipate the plenitude of emergent exigencies that
accompany the interview as an in vivo task, there is always “more” to instructions than
can be provided. This “more to it” involves members’ methods as an uncharted domain of
organized activities accompanying survey manuals-, procedures-, and instruments-in-use.
Maynard and Schaeffer (2000, 2002) discuss “analytic alternation” in the context of
survey interviews as a way to investigate practitioners’ work, both its adherence to formal
inquiry—use of rules, procedures, and instruments for conducting the interview—and its
deployment of taken-for-granted, tacit skills, as these are exhibited in the orderly details
of talk and action that support and help achieve survey interviews as the relatively reliable
and valid instrument they are taken to be. Heeding Garfinkel’s warning that
ethnomethodology ought not to present itself as a corrective to formal analysis,
ethnomethodological studies of the survey interview do not aim to undermine the
methods or findings of survey research.
In pragmatist terms, a concern with social and moral reform through better
democratic organization is potentially addressable through the now myriad ways that
what can be called applied ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies have
proliferated. Besides the aforementioned science and workplace studies, these include
investigations that highlight the complexities of “routine” endeavors, in which job
descriptions need to be informed by explications of actual practice (Whalen et al.
2002; Heath and Luff 2000); analyses of doctor-patient communication and of how
medical education can benefit from knowledge of sequential organization (Heritage and
Maynard 2006; Heritage et al. 2007); and a line of studies that can be said to show how
domination perseveres and democracy is obstructed in everyday encounters (this line of
inquiry begins with the racial homicides paper of 1949 [1942] and extends through
Garfinkel’s “Agnes” study [1967] to works by West and Zimmerman [1987], Kitzinger
[2000; Kitzinger and Frith 1999], and Rawls [2000]; these writings all explore how race,
gender, and sexuality are “done” or accomplished and thereby disclose ways in which the
workings of these principles of division can be “undone”). The various investigations we
have mentioned do not merely demonstrate the member-methodic architecture on which
the everyday world is built. Rather, “ethnomethodology is applied ethnomethodology,” as
Garfinkel (2002, p. 114) once proposed; it proceeds on the assumption that its inquiries
can be remedial so long as their expertise avoids generic representation and tags itself
instead to the particularities of actual talk and embodied practice in concrete social
settings. Ethnomethodology can engage in genuine critical reconstruction and, in a
pragmatist spirit, apply intelligence to situations of real perplexity, but it can do so only
provided it remains wedded to the details situationally embedded in concrete shop floor
problems.
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Part Four: Conversation Analysis
The last of the three great pragmatist themes we highlight in this essay is language, or
linguistically mediated problem-solving. This, too, is a problem-area to which pragmatism
has contributed much, recognizing, in Dewey’s (1988 [1938], p. 51) words, that “Language
occupies a peculiarly significant place and exercises a peculiarly significant function in the
complex that forms the cultural environment.” As Dewey himself nicely expressed it,
although language is just one institution among others, “it is (1) the agency by which other
institutions and acquired habits are transmitted, and (2) it permeates both the forms and the
contents of all other cultural activities. Moreover, (3) it has its own distinctive structure
which is capable of abstraction as a form” (Dewey 1988f [1938], p. 51, italics in original).
Despite his considerable insights into language, however, here as well Dewey left
unfinished business for ethnomethodology—and its close relation, conversation analysis—
to take up and complete. In this regard, pragmatism was hardly different from any
number of other perspectives informing sociology. As Schegloff (1996a, p. 162) has
noted, although “language figures centrally in the organization of social life, it has remained
peripheral to the main thrusts of the discipline.” When not peripheral, it has been studied for
the way it is stamped with abstract social and cognitive structures rather than in empirical
fashion, that is, according to its actual usage and in terms or orientations that actors
themselves employ or display. While the pragmatists did bring language and its integral
place in human conduct to the brink of empirical investigation, they did not and could not
step over a chasm created by philosophical and theoretical shortcomings inherent in their
perspective. In this section, we examine some of these shortcomings, directing special
attention to the following issues: (1) the inherently indexical quality of words, phrases, and
utterances: the notion, that is, that context provides invariably for their sensibility; (2) the
insight that language in use is not primarily about communication in the traditional sense
but instead involves performing social actions of a vast variety and in organized or
patterned ways; and (3) the idea that, although language use exists in behavior, such
behavior need not involve “taking the role of the other” or internalizing rules for
comporting linguistic productions, or any other such subjectivist processes. A brief
revisitation of our three thinkers in this area—Peirce, Dewey, and Mead—will prove useful
here, together (in each case) with a consideration of how ethnomethdoology and, in
particular, conversation analysis are compatible with pragmatist ideas yet move beyond
them in promising new directions. We shall also discuss briefly the relevant ideas of
pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom, and then, similarly, inquire into how conversation
analysis helps those ideas to move from the abstract realm into that of the concrete. Before
any of that, however, let us begin with a brief overview of Garfinkel’s contributions to
linguistic analysis, together with a discussion of the (related and seminal) contributions of
his associate, Harvey Sacks.
From Ethnomethodology to Conversation Analysis
Garfinkel’s (1967, p. 1) interest in language cannot be said to have represented a first-order
attraction. Rather, it derived from his preoccupation with “practical activities, practical
circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study.” However,
from the very beginning of Studies in Ethnomethodology, he (1967, pp. 1–2) drew attention
to the phenomenon of “accounts” of everyday activities, or verbalizations of various kinds
that locate, identify, describe, categorize, analyze, or otherwise provide for the sense of
practical activities. Accounts, including those that aim for scientific precision, always—i.e.,
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“in every particular case”—lack in ostensive or literal truth and verifiability; rather, they
have a certain looseness to them, such that members need employ a variety of accounting
practices in using and understanding those accounts. Accounting practices include, as
mentioned earlier, ad hocing (“et cetera,” “let it pass,” and so forth), and they also include
procedures such as supplying whatever unstated understandings are necessary to
comprehend the accounts, waiting for subsequent talk to grasp fully the significance of
some current saying, building up an account’s mutually elucidating particulars over the
course of conversation, and orienting to the serial placement of accounts in the developing
course of action. The “recognizable sense” of accounts always depends on the “socially
organized occasions of their use” (Garfinkel 1967, p. 3), which is to say, the tacit methods
or practices to which members must adhere and that are the universal although not
invariable accompaniment to assembling accord on, or achieving the objectivity of, any
account for every and all participant(s) in a setting. Accounting practices are the
“properties” (Garfinkel 1967, p. 11) by which actors consider themselves to be remedying
the occasionality or context-embeddedness of indexical expressions as they use them in the
course of realizing practical actions. We shall have more to say about indexical expressions
when we return shortly to the pragmatists.
Just as Garfinkel did not investigate language in use because of a first-order attraction,
but rather out of an interest in practical activities, Sacks developed his investigations of
conversation in hopes of developing a science that could handle the details of actual social
(linguistic) events and activities. Recording technology, which allows the replaying of
segments of talk, transcription, and repeated observations, enabled the inquiry. Prior to the
emergence of conversation analysis, the social scientific study of language was mostly in
the hands of linguists. Or when sociolinguists took to the field, it “was explored as either
dependent or independent variables...rather than as process or practice” (Schegloff et al.
1996, p. 12). Sacks (1992 [1964–72], pp. 622–23), however—like Garfinkel a sociologist
through and through—asked whether a “fully comprehensive, coherent linguistics” is
even possible if one does not come to grips with actual, even singular, utterances in their
context—the particularities and specificities of utterances as participants use them in
everyday affairs. He concluded that the grammar of utterances is deeply related to their
occurrence in interaction-based sequences—and therefore in a locally produced and locally
determined social organization—rather than in abstract syntactic, semantic, or other
cognitively based mechanisms or other elements (e.g., demographic factors) external to
interaction as such. This analytic orientation was evident in Sacks’s famous co-authored
paper, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation”
(Sacks et al. 1974, pp. 699–700), in which he and his colleagues specified the practices or
methods whereby actors solve the problem of how to accomplish the feature of interaction
that only one person talks at a time (they do so through the achieved orderliness of turntaking in conversational interactions). It was also evident in work on the so-called
“adjacency pair,” in and through which indexical expressions—i.e., any and all spoken
utterances—come to have their intelligibility. Adjacency pairs include greeting-greeting,
question-answer, request-response, assessment-agreement or disagreement, jokeappreciation, news delivery, and manifold other sets wherein a constitutive utterance is
defined and understood not only by its possible grammatical design but also by its
placement contiguous to other(s) in the sequence. Drawing from Garfinkel’s insights—as
well Goffman’s (1964, 1983) attention to “the neglected situation” of ordinary interaction
and its order—investigations by Sacks and his collaborators and successors provided a solid
foundation for advances into problem areas brought by pragmatism to the forefront of
philosophic inquiry but then left empirically untouched. That is, conversation analytic
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research has something to offer pragmatism and sociology more generally. But what,
specifically, are these unsolved problems of the pragmatist approach to language? And how
does conversation analysis, despite lacking specific engagement with pragmatist formulations, nevertheless address these problems?
Language in Use
Peirce’s investigations of language, it will be recalled, are an example of an extremely
prescient approach that resonates with later linguistic philosophy. Also of interest, however,
are two issues regarding indexical expressions that his semiotic theory left empirical social
science to address. One is the question of how signs actually work, the problem of (at
worst) a potential for infinite regress in the sign-object-interpretant relation or (at best) a
certain vagueness as to how meaning is actually settled in real linguistic communities,
rather than in the minds of perceivers. The other is what kind of analysis can be done with
an infinite regress of semiosis, with a continuous linguistic process, with expressions whose
sense is not denotative but instead somehow deeply and recursively context-dependent.
While technically incisive and elegant in its own right, Peirce’s semiotic bequeathed to
social science no actual tools for empirically answering these questions. The ethnomethodological tradition, however—including conversation analysis—does propose compelling ways of addressing both issues. As we have seen, one of the originating insights of
this tradition is that the use of language involves indexical expressions. Garfinkel (1967, p.
44) noted that indexical expressions do not represent disordered or disorganized interaction
or the potential for an infinite regress of contextual explication for their sensibility; rather,
they are the precise site where social order and social organization are to be found. The
orderly properties of indexical expressions, in other words, are the “ongoing practical
accomplishment” (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970, p. 341) of participants in actual settings—and
therefore capable of empirical investigation. As adumbrated above, conversation analysis
represents the most sustained empirical approach to the orderliness of language in use and
to indexical expressions in particular. Sacks’s early inquiries into how the positioning and
placing of utterances provide for their intelligibility are now the starting-point of a wide
array of studies on the sequential organization of conversation. Paying attention to
sequences, to what happens next at each moment in relation to what it follows in a
developing course of speech-based action, this body of work pursues a sustained and
rigorous inquiry into indexical expressions and their social organization. Moreover,
conversation analysis and cognate inquiries such as discursive social psychology (Potter
and Edwards 2001) handle effectively the more general problem of context. Discourse
analysts often suggest the importance of “context”—wider social structures in which
members of society may be embedded—but conversation analysis suggests that the more
local sequential context needs first-order appreciation, because that is the environment to
which participants in interaction demonstrably orient. To the extent that these participants
deal with wider social structures, it is also to say that such structures will be consequential
for, and thereby analytically available in, the sequential organization of the talk (Schegloff
1987).
How about Dewey—what can be said of his approach to language? Of special interest
here are his observations concerning language as dynamic social action, its use in and as the
coordination of activities, and the way its contextual embeddedness provides for meaning.
Dewey (1988c [1922], p. 57) held that language, in meeting “old needs,” “opens [up] new
possibilities” and is a device for undertaking human efforts of immense and ever-widening
variety. He also stressed that a speaker and a hearer are both necessary to discourse and that
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their cooperation through act and “contemporaneous response” is the means by which
speech and gesture enter into behavior, such that meaningful objects come to sensuous
apprehension. This is fully compatible with ethnomethodology’s idea of reflexivity, which
holds that accounts of the objective characteristics of a setting are embedded parts of the
practices that bring them to their objectivity. Finally, as one interpreter (Black 1962, p. 517)
observed, Dewey contended that words find meanings in contexts such as rules, habits,
methods of action, coordinations, forecasts, attitudes, plans, and designs. However, in the
end, Dewey left the following problems unresolved: If language is activity, just what
activities do we use it for and how? If language helps us coordinate our activities, how can
we abandon the untenable notion of rule-governed stability and investigate the practices by
which people act in concerted and cooperative ways? If context is important to the
meaningful determination of gestural activities, including utterances and other linguistic
components, how do we rigorously analyze context? (Dewey’s concern with defining the
meaning of a word or idea by its consequences often implied or entailed employment of the
very term being defined.30) After his probing investigation of Dewey’s approach to
language and related topics, Black (1962, p. 523) concluded that Dewey “did not approach
the subject as an inquiring empiricist, eager to discover what was antecedently unknown,
but rather as an investigator whose broad philosophical position was already so firmly
established in his own mind that he sought illustrations rather than material for new
conclusions.” Picking up where Dewey left off, however, conversation analysis does “find”
the actions that utterances perform; it does so by attending to participants’ orientations, as
the latter are displayed in interaction. In Schegloff’s (1996a, pp. 168–172) terms, the
approach to action of conversation analysis encompasses at least three kinds of inquiry. One
involves procedural accounts of the sequentially organized practices by which participants
accomplish actions and see what they are doing. Another involves locating formulations
and the methods by which such formulations work to perform things like inviting someone
to join a group or fishing for information. A third entails showing alternative ways of
producing utterances—whether in immediate or delayed fashion, for instance—and of
accomplishing activities related to the actions already underway. For example, a (by now)
well-known finding is that agreeing with a previous speaker’s utterance is regularly done
immediately, while disagreeing usually is delayed. These patterns embody what is known
as “preference structure” in conversation.31
Conversation analysis attends as well to some of the unfinished business in Mead’s view
of language. Like Dewey, Mead (1964 [1903]) saw cognition not as a permanent phase or
aspect of consciousness but as a moment in a process that begins when knowledge of the
world breaks down and critical reflection is required. In analyzing this process, he discussed
the significant symbol and the problem of meaning. In his view, a gesture or any linguistic
sign has an action component to it, insofar as its design indicates a response and a resultant
collaborative social act. Mead (1934, p. 6 fn. 6) held that language or speech can only be
understood “in terms of the social processes of behavior within a group of interacting
organisms;...it is one of the activities of such a group.” Repeatedly, he invoked behavior,
30
A metaphor that Black (1962, p. 520) invoked is that of the automobile: to know how its gears contribute
to the whole machine, it is not necessary to point to the “work of the gears” literally. One can observe the
actions of the automobile in relation to the turning of the gears and in terms of their consequences; the gears
are a feature of what the automobile does as a vehicle in action. By extension, Dewey could have been
implying an ethnomethodological theme: that words cannot be defined by their consequences so much as
they are understandable in reflexive relation to the accounting practices in which they are embedded.
31
For examples, see Sacks (1992, pp. 300–305); Pomerantz (1980, 1984); ten Have (1999); Heritage (1984);
Clayman and Gill (2004); and Arminen (2005).
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behavioral sequences, and overt activity as the repositories of meaningful linguistic and
gestural signs, in a way that undermined what Reddy (1979) has called the “conduit
metaphor”: the idea that language use is only about “communicating” thoughts and ideas
rather than implementing actions of various kinds. However, Mead also developed the idea
that significant symbols call out in the sender the same response they call out in the
recipient, or what Mead called “taking the role of the other.” Two important tendencies in
social theory flow from this notion. One is a move toward a subjectivist approach to
symbolic interaction (Blumer), in which action requires inferring the thoughts of the other;
the other is a rule-governed notion of language use and communication (Habermas), in
which “same” responses are thought to depend on the internalization of grammatical rules.
With either of these tendencies, analysts move away from behavioral analysis as such,
undermining Mead’s own social behaviorist approach to language and gesture. Mead
himself never really took on language as an empirical topic in its own right. As Joas (1985,
p. 117) puts it, “in his theory of the origin of language, Mead restricts himself to the level of
symbolic interactions and of elementary, one- and two-word sentences. His theory lacks an
adequate concept of syntax as much as it does a semantics comprehending word fields and
fields of meaning, or a taxonomy of the various ways in which language can be
pragmatically used.” While Mead’s writings provided insights into the abstract structures of
language, their target of inquiry was always the sentence devoid of any context of
experience in which an actual person has really used the sentence. This is a little like using
a computer game such as “Sim City” to present a theory of urban development, rather than
plunging into the concreteness of the social and political organization of a real city’s
workings. In highlighting this rather primitive theory of language in Mead’s work, Joas
reminds us yet again of unfinished theoretical business. Pursuit of this unfinished
business—specifically by way of conversation analysis—may now be due, if not overdue.
Needed with respect to language use and provided by conversation analysis in a way that
fulfills pragmatist sensibilities is a theory and methodology that captures how participants
in interaction actually talk—and how they do so using interpretants and indexical utterances
with an intrinsic organization that they themselves achieve in real time. Conversation
analysis offers a mode of inquiry that places priority on members’ methods in terms of
overt practices of talk and social interaction. It does not deny subjectivity or “mind”; it
seeks only to gain access to how the actors themselves have access to one another’s internal
cogitations (to the extent that those are consequential): namely, through what is observable
and reportable about concerted behavior.32 It is through participants’ displays in their
conduct together that subjectivities are made manifest—and only then as an outcome of
action and interaction rather than as its progenitor. If one person invites another to a movie
and the recipient declines the invitation, the one may gather, through a nuanced
construction of the declining utterance, that the recipient really “wanted” to go out (or
the opposite) as a matter somewhat independent of the declination itself. By the same token,
noticing the design of the invitation, its recipient may infer how sincere its speaker was in
issuing it. Analytic access to the wants or desires of these actors may be built upon their
practical access to such internal entities, rather than upon the analyst’s privileged theoretical
or methodological claims, post-hoc interviews, or the like. Interestingly, through such
means, even the sorts of thought processes, activities of “mind,” in which Mead himself
was most interested—namely, those involved in intelligent problem-solving and in the
creative, meliorist reconstruction of social scenes—can be effectively investigated. For it is
For recent work on “conversation and cognition,” see te Molder and Potter (2005) and, especially, Potter
and te Molder’s (2005) introduction to that collection; see also van Dijk (2006).
32
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in and through linguistic interaction, as accessible to analysts of conversation, that the
working-out of intelligent solutions is often visible. Returning to an example we mentioned
earlier, Heritage and Lindström (1998) examine a Health Visitor’s relationship with a
mother who, over the course of several visits, confesses to not having strong feelings for
her newborn child. As the authors relate the story, the HV at first engages with the mother
as a professional, reassuring her that this is “natural.” But as the mother, in subsequent
visits, reveals further anxiety about her attitude toward the baby, the HV shifts from this
professional stance toward becoming recognizably more personal, telling the mother, for
instance, that it took her over six weeks to establish a bond with her own baby. The HV’s
narrative practice of speaking her own troubles is a way of entering into the experience of
the mother and, in the mother’s own words, is “reassuring.” Rather than operate as a
bureaucratic “baby expert,” the HV relates to the mother intelligently (in a pragmatic and
procedural sense), that is, as a “befriending” supporter (Heritage and Lindström 1998, p.
433), stressing that the mother’s worrisome attitude toward the baby will resolve itself and
implying that, far from abnormal, it can easily be recognized in contemporary technical and
medical discourse. Here is a case, then, of intelligent conduct in interaction, as charted and
analyzed by ethnomethodological students of conversation.
Making It Empirical
Before concluding this section on language, it is worth making mention of Robert
Brandom’s 1994 book, Making It Explicit, a highly regarded and relatively recent major
publication in the pragmatist tradition. One achievement of that text, as Bernstein (2007,
pp. 16-17) has suggested, is to have drawn upon Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Hegel in
developing a critique of “epistemological and semantic representationalism” in modern
philosophy in favor of a theory of “discursive practices.” And an outcome of this critique,
as we discussed earlier, is to have turned on its head Charles Morris’ hierarchy of syntax,
semantics, and pragmatics, wherein the latter is assigned the bottom rung. In sociology,
Schegloff (1996b) has argued similarly against the notion of predication, or the idea that the
proposition is fundamental to the constitution of language and language use. Just as
representationalism has infected much of modern philosophy, predication underlies
linguistic and traditional sociolinguistic approaches to language use. Conversation analysis
replaces these approaches with an analytic orientation to “the move, the action, the activity”
(Schegloff 1996b, p. 112) whereby sometimes, but by no means always, representation and
predication may happen. That is, communicating ostensively (through representing or
predicating) is only one kind of speech act among a myriad of others that include
complaining, advising, ordering, reporting, announcing, discriminating, telling a story,
being ironic, greeting, welcoming, and joking, and that depend neither on representation
nor predication to have social force and consequence. The resonance with Brandom’s
critique is important.
Brandom’s goal is to develop a “rationalist” pragmatism that involves a normative
orientation to social practice. This orientation and its roots in commitments and proprieties
may resonate with “trust” and “morality” in a Garfinkelian and Schutzian sense. Brandom’s
goal and its possible ethnomethodological resonances are matters too complex to address
here. However, let us offer the following two observations. First, his work again points in
possibly fruitful directions for modes of inquiry that would embody our three identified
pragmatist features: a return to experience, a focus on creative problem solving through
real-time praxis, and an understanding of language as people actually use it for talking and
acting in concert with one another. As a philosophic rather than social scientific endeavor,
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Brandom’s discussions of anaphora, deixis, and other aspects of indexical utterances
employ constructed examples, suppositions, and literary extracts to illustrate his arguments,
returning us to the exact point at which the early pragmatists left social science in the first
place: without an empirical program having theoretical underpinnings compatible with
pragmatist philosophy. Second, it bears repeating that, although ethnomethodology and
conversation analysis have never explicitly addressed pragmatist themes, to claim that they
implicitly do so is consistent with asserting about the “new pragmatists” (not only Brandom
but also Jeffrey Stout, Cornel West, and others) that, as Cheryl Misak (2007, pp. 1–2) has
put it, they bring out “the best of Peirce, James, and Dewey as resurfaced in deep,
interesting and fruitful ways,” whether or not these more recent thinkers are part of the
pragmatist tradition. Or, as Bernstein (2007, p. 11) has said of philosophers such as
Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson who were involved in the linguistic turn, they
“were able to refine and advance pragmatic themes that were anticipated by the classical
pragmatists.” Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis present that refining and
advancing ability and potential for pragmatism not in philosophy but in theory and
research in the sociological tradition.
Conclusion
Prior to the Parsonian era, which coincided with the ascendancy of quantitative data
analysis, pragmatist thought provided much of the underlying impulse behind
American sociology. Its influence was pervasive both in the discipline and in
intellectual life more generally. There has been a resurgence of pragmatism in
philosophy, and to a perhaps lesser but still significant extent, in social science as
well (e.g., Dickstein 1998; Joas 1993, 1996). In this paper, we have sought to contribute
to a revitalized pragmatism in sociology by stressing the striking thematic continuities
between it and ethnomethodology, and in so doing, to demonstrate just how deeply the
latter, among its other independent contributions, can relate to the grand and venerable
tradition of social thought of this country. Our hope is that, by offering such arguments,
we have stimulated—in good pragmatist fashion—fresh new connections between
estwhile distant relations, a new set of questions to explore and new studies to pursue.
It does not matter that the young Garfinkel, in his concern to separate his way of thinking
from the symbolic interactionism of his day, distanced himself as well from classical
American pragmatism, aligning himself instead with Continental phenomenologists and
gestalt theorists such as Husserl, Schutz, and Gurwitsch. Nor does it matter that, in
seeking to bring about an intellectual revolution in his field, to recover its neglected or
lost essence (a strategy typical of subversives), he invoked the sacred figure of Durkheim
rather than, say, of Peirce, Dewey, or Mead. What is important here are the fundamental
commonalities between the pragmatism that prevailed in the years of Garfinkel’s early
intellectual development and the unique, even revolutionary mode of inquiry that he and
his followers, including in the field of conversation analysis, went on to elaborate. Once
we recognize these commonalities among the two projects, we can make valuable
progress toward realizing the aims they share, each enterprise fortified, perhaps, by the
insights and admonitions of the other. As Levine (1995, p. 276) has put it, while the
variegated theoretical traditions in sociology have developed from a common Aristotelian
heritage to yield an “array of distinctive sociological orientations,” and while those
orientations have developed internally, they have also benefited from cross-theoretical
dialogues. If that is true internationally, it must also be the case that two autochthonous
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U.S. theoretical traditions can speak to one another in fruitful ways even when heretofore
they have not sought to do so.
We have suggested three ways in which pragmatism and ethnomethodology converge or
at least can be in the kind of dialogue that Levine and, interestingly enough, Rorty (1979,
p. 318) before him advocated. First, the return to experience means eschewing analyses that
depend on inert background and other abstractions and bringing social life as it is lived in
its member-produced practices to the forefront of sociological inquiry. Second, a focus on
creative problem-solving—always a prime concern of the pragmatists and recently analyzed
by Joas (1996, p. 144, ch. 3) as “situated creativity” to be found in the “full spectrum of
human action” rather than in a narrow swath (as in artistic endeavors)—leads to a
theoretical approach that is non-teleological in character, comprehends embodied activity
and language use, and captures actors’ pre-reflective competencies. Such considerations
point toward ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic research because there are few
other theoretically informed empirical endeavors that fit Joas’ criteria so well. Finally, language
is a venerable pragmatist topic, as in Dewey’s formulations about its “eventful” as well as
“eventual” character in use and Mead’s preoccupation with significant symbols. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis are cognate with pragmatism insofar as they are concerned
with understanding utterances both as context dependent in a local and temporally developing
sense and as a site for social action and interaction—and insofar as they are intent on
analyzing them in a way that captures their pragmatically cooperative (or, in ethnomethodological terms, collaborative or co-produced) character.
One might ask what is the significance of drawing this new map, of pointing out the
interlinkages between two geographies. The answer is that, as Levine (1995, p. 293) has
proposed, redrawing the map of the social sciences lessens the salience of rigid theoretical
boundaries and of superficial narratives of theoretical and empirical unity based on
exclusivity. A new map can join territories that have been thought to consist of irreducible
differences. Of course, regarding attempts at altering cartography, Dewey (1988c [1925], p.
125) once observed: “It may be [objected] that it [is] not the world which [is] changed but
only the map.” In counterpoint, however, as Dewey himself immediately added, “there is
the obvious retort that after all the map is part of the world, not something outside it, and
that its meaning and bearings are so important that a change in the map involves other and
still more important objective changes.” Possibilities, in other words, are tangible and clear
for mutual enrichment of the two traditions of pragmatism and ethnomethodology, and this
boundary-crossing can only add to the excitement and fruitfulness of each and of the
sociological tradition as a whole.
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Mustafa Emirbayer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Together with
Matthew Desmond, he has co-authored two books on race in America: Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The
Sociology of Race in America (McGraw-Hill, 2009), a comprehensive new textbook; and The Racial Order
(University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), a theoretical study of the structures and dynamics of racial life.
Douglas W. Maynard PhD, is Conway-Bascom Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of
Wisconsin, Madison. He has specific interests in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and the study of
naturally occurring interaction. He is the author of numerous journal articles, and among book publications
are his monograph, Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings
(University of Chicago Press 2003), an edited volume entitled Standardization and Tacit Knowledge:
Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview (Wiley Interscience 2002) with Sociology Department
colleague Nora Cate Schaeffer and others, and another edited volume (with John Heritage) entitled
Communication in Medical Care: Interaction between Primary Care Physicians and Patients (Cambridge
University Press 2006). Recent, collaborative journal publications focus on requests for participation in the
survey interview (American Sociological Review, 2010) and on telephone solicitations for tissue donation
(Sociology of Health and Illness, 2009). A recent sole-authored publication revisiting earlier research on
bargaining and negotiation is in the Negotiation Journal (2009).
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