Ethnography in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis: Both, neither, or something else altogether?

Abstract

This article focuses on various ethnographic procedures and findings in ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), addressing the question of how EM and CA relate to ethnography. Given the obvious answer that EM includes ethnography, we also argue that CA does as well, though just how EM and CA do so needs to be qualified and specified. Ethnographic procedures have been used in EM for decades, although often in non-standard ways, and currently with some ambivalence. In CA, it is more common to disavow ethnography in favor of recorded and transcribed interactional exchanges. However, we argue that CA often makes use of ethnographic insights drawn from extended study of recordings, while also identifying “ethnographic” inquiries of a sort that take place within the organizational settings studied. Our aim is to identify the place of ethnography within EMCA by taking an inventory of ways “ethnography” has been used, invoked, produced, and/or disavowed in particular studies and to highlight what is distinctive about those various EMCA uses of ethnography in contrast with more conventional ethnography.

Harold Garfinkel: Studies of Work in the Sciences

“…In my reading at least, the collection offers a significant glimpse of the shifting lay of the land between the two “versions” (we might already be in trouble here) of ethnomethodology found in Studies and Ethnomethodology’s Program (Garfinkel 1967, 2002). The Respecifying paper is marked in part by a series of dissatisfactions and critiques of “ethnomethodology thus far” and an ambivalent treatment of efforts in “analytic ethnography” (see also Rawls and Lynch 2022). In the seminars, we find discussions that incrementally explicate haecceity, embodiment, specificity, the significance of the unique adequacy requirement of methods, and remarks on contingency, objects, and, intriguingly, what Garfinkel glosses as “demonic order.” Perhaps most significant is the emergent emphasis on setting and the contingencies that membership practices must provide for or include (p. 135) over “membership” as some property of individual action.…”