Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is an approach to sociology founded by Harold Garfinkel, whose 1967 book Studies in Ethnomethodology gave the field its name and its founding statement of purpose. Rather than treating social order as something that simply exists and can be described from the outside, ethnomethodology studies the everyday, largely unnoticed methods ordinary people actually use, moment to moment, to produce and recognize a shared sense of orderly social reality in their interactions with one another. Garfinkel became especially well known for a set of breaching experiments, in which he or his students deliberately violated small, taken-for-granted norms of everyday interaction, such as responding to an ordinary greeting with an unexpectedly literal or overly formal reply, and then observed how strongly and quickly other people reacted to restore the disrupted sense of normal order. These breaches were designed to make visible the usually invisible background expectations that people rely on constantly to interpret one another's behavior as meaningful and orderly, expectations so deeply taken for granted that they are rarely noticed until they are broken. Ethnomethodology's focus on the fine-grained, practical accomplishment of social order in everyday interaction distinguishes it from approaches that treat social structure as a fixed backdrop to individual action, and it has been particularly influential on the closely related field of conversation analysis.