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Postface: “Experiments”—What are we Talking About? A Plea for Conceptual Investigations
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- By Wes Sharrock
- Edited by Philippe Sormani, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, Dirk vom Lehn, King's College London
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- Book:
- The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 28 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 25 July 2023, pp 217-220
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Summary
“Gosh, I wished Garfinkel had never used the term ‘experiments’!”—This, over and again, has been my line of chagrin expressed at the recurring, yet fleeting, all too narrow and often misdirected attention given to Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). Where does the chagrin originate? The title and subtitle above hint at the answer developed in this postface, a postface which, ironically, will be closing this volume dedicated to Garfinkel's “experimental legacy.”
That being said, the “experiment” that I became most interested in is one that was mentioned, I believe, in Garfinkel's notes for a course called “normal environments.” For this experiment, Garfinkel apparently requested his students to go into a public toilet, close the door behind them and then bang on the door. The results must have been intriguing, although the “toilet experiment” wasn't mentioned again—if it ever existed. Mostly though, I deplore the rendition of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology in terms of “experiments” or, worse, “breaching experiments.” In the two or three years following the publication of Studies, this led to crass interventions at least in British sociology which, more than anything else, were often just pranks, nurturing reductive, superficial interpretations of “ethnomethodology” (e.g., as a methodology for “social psychology” or “applied social science”).
What is the alternative? Among the various ways of practicing ethnomethodological research, there are “conceptual investigations,” taking inspiration from Wittgenstein and Winch, as much as Garfinkel and Sacks (e.g., Hutchinson et al. 2008). What is to be said on Garfinkel's “experiments” from the stance of conceptual inquiry, for which this postface pleads? First, it is worth recalling that Garfinkel devised his experiments as “classroom demonstrations” to teach elementary aspects of sociological concepts (Garfinkel 1956). Against this backdrop, the recurring interest in sociological theory for “breaching experiments” has turned them into a hugely inflated topic, only rarely if at all connected to Garfinkel's pedagogical uses of them. Second, a general note of caution is in order. What is to be understood as an “experiment” in the first place? And, depending upon that understanding, what would be the precise nature of experimental results? What would these results, and the materials they draw upon and make available, allow us to claim?
7 - The Inescapability of Trust: Complex Interactive Systems and Normal Appearances
- from Part 2 - Conceptual Points of View
- Edited by Richard H. R. Harper
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- Book:
- Trust, Computing, and Society
- Published online:
- 05 March 2014
- Print publication:
- 28 February 2014, pp 144-171
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Summary
Introduction
As the contributions to the first and last sections of this volume indicate, trust is a problem for those who build Internet services and those who are tasked with policing them. If only they had good models and even better specifications of users, use, and usage, or so they seem to say, they could build systems that would ensure and enhance the privacy, security, and safety of online services. Understandably (but perhaps not wisely), they tend to be impatient with what appears to be overly precious concept mongering and theoretical hairsplitting by those disciplines to which they look to provide these models and specifications. But perhaps an understanding of the provenance and distinctiveness of the range of models being offered might give those who wish to deploy them deeper insight into their domains of application as well as their limitations. Each is shaped by the presuppositions on which it is based and the conceptual and other choices made in its development. No one model, no individual summary of requirements can serve for all uses.
Awareness of this “conceptual archaeology” is especially important when the model's presuppositions are orthogonal to those that are conventional in the field. In such cases, it is critical to understand both why different starting points are taken and the benefits that are felt to be derived thereby. Difference is rarely an expression of simple contrariness but usually reflects deliberate choice made in the hope that things might be brought to light which otherwise are left obscure.
2 - Engineering Investigations
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- By Wes Sharrock, University of Manchester, UK, Graham Button, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
- Edited by Margaret H. Szymanski, Jack Whalen
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- Book:
- Making Work Visible
- Published online:
- 05 August 2012
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2011, pp 34-50
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Summary
Introduction
“Work” has been a long-standing topic for a number of disciplines. One of the “founding fathers” of economics, Adam Smith, developed the concept of the “division of labour,” the idea of optimising the organisation of work in mass production. In philosophy, Karl Marx, in part, defines what it is to be human by our need to work on our environment. In psychology, the subdiscipline of ergonomics was developed in order to better design the fit between the physical and psychological needs of individuals; the organisation of the workplace, equipment, and machinery; and the job itself, by measuring working performance. However, it is within sociology that work has assumed a particularly central role. Not only does it play out across the discipline's major theories, it has become a subdiscipline in its own right: “the sociology of work.”
Despite this wide and diverse interest in work across a range of disciplines, and particularly in sociology, Xerox's interest in studying people doing work, in the midst of them actually doing it (which is what has become known as work practice studies), has been mainly centred around a relatively small branch of sociology, ethnomethodological studies of work, initially developed by Harold Garfinkel (1967).
9 - Conversation of emotions: On turning play into psychoanalytic psychotherapy
- Edited by Anssi Peräkylä, University of Helsinki, Charles Antaki, Loughborough University, Sanna Vehviläinen, University of Helsinki, Ivan Leudar, University of Manchester
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- Book:
- Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 07 April 2008, pp 152-172
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Summary
This chapter is a collaboration between academic researchers and psychoanalytic child psychotherapists working in an economically deprived part of a large city in England. We explore the ways in which the psychotherapists' training and experience – what we refer to as their “therapeutic orientation” – are made relevant and consequential in their therapeutic interactions. We argue that such therapeutic orientation needs to be taken on board by analysts of interaction if they are to grasp the relevant sense of therapeutic activities carried out in and through talk.
The chapter presents an ethnomethodological case study. We examine four consecutive group psychoanalytic psychotherapy sessions – how they unfold and how children come to use what the situations afford. Alongside the audiovisual recordings, we scrutinize the therapists' own write-ups of the sessions, which were produced after the event by the trainee sitting in on the sessions. These write-ups display the therapists' professional orientation to the activities in sessions and consequently enable understanding of the interactions in terms of the “schooled experience” of the therapists. Moreover, in preparing this chapter, the “first pass analyses” of the video recordings have been discussed with the authors who acted as therapists. These discussions pinpointed misunderstandings, omissions, and errors, and made it possible to correct and extend the initial analysis and highlight the real differences of opinion among the authors as to what may be happening.
3 - Design by problem-solving
- Edited by Paul Luff, King's College London, Jon Hindmarsh, King's College London, Christian Heath, King's College London
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- Book:
- Workplace Studies
- Published online:
- 05 May 2010
- Print publication:
- 15 August 2000, pp 46-67
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Summary
Introduction
Over the course of a number of investigations we have examined aspects of the organisation of engineering work under the rubric of ethnomethodology's programme of ‘studies of work’ (Garfinkel, 1986). Our investigations were initially undertaken with the purpose of contributing to an understanding of the design process through the close observation of design and development work under ‘industrial’ conditions, rather than, as was more usually the case with studies of design, located in contrived experimental settings (cf. Button and Sharrock, 1994, 1996, 1998; Sharrock and Button, 1997). The close observation of the day-to-day work of design in large organisational conditions could enhance the awareness of conditions and contingencies that would be part of the design process in complex arrangements of work. They could thus provide informational input to the circumstances under which tools to support design would be used and the practical requirements with which such tools would need to be articulated. These studies also have cogency for the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). One of its concerns is the development of systems that will support large and complex ventures in coordinated work and the ‘industrial’ (hardware and software) design and development project is an example of a sizeable and complicated exercise in coordinated work.
Ethnomethodology's programme of work was itself developed as a corrective to the tendency of sociological studies titled as ‘studies of work’ to attend to almost everything that goes on in the workplace, except the work being done there.
4 - Epistemology: professional scepticism
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- By Wes Sharrock, University of Manchester, Bob Anderson, EuroPARC, Cambridge
- Edited by Graham Button
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- Book:
- Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 26 July 1991, pp 51-76
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Summary
Introduction
In our view, the epistemological arguments over ‘objectivity and relativism’, the relationship between ‘commonsense and pure reason’, the issue of ‘a paramount and multiple realities’, the relationship between ‘objects and appearances’ and other related epistemological issues in sociology and the human sciences seldom get beyond first base, not least because it is hard to get the lines of division identified well enough for there to be agreement on what are indeed the points of difference. Here we attempt a first base treatment of these issues by reverting to consideration of them in terms of Schutz's argument, and other basic phenomenological considerations. We do this because reasoned presentation of the issues in simple terms may help with the uphill struggle that, as Margolis (1986) observes, confronts anything that looks like a ‘relativist’ position – and we add, any which might be construed as ‘subjective’ in approach – because it will be typically presented by the opposition as blatantly stupid. Our objective is to display how Schutz, then Garfinkel and ethnomethodology, transforms the formulation of epistemological criteria into the topic of describing the properties of social organisation.
Examining social reality
It is a serious mistake to set philosophical scepticism on all fours and head to head with common sense understandings as though one straightforwardly and directly challenged the other. It is a usual characteristic of that scepticism that it seeks to operate at another level than the one on which our ordinary claims to knowledge get made.
7 - The social actor: social action in real time
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- By Wes Sharrock, University of Manchester, Graham Button, Polytechnic South West, Plymouth
- Edited by Graham Button
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- Book:
- Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 26 July 1991, pp 137-175
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Summary
Introduction
If social theory is going to pay any attention at all to the nature of ‘the social actor’, then how is that actor to be conceived? For some approaches to social theory (the structuralism of Althusser, 1971, 1976 and 1979, and Lévi-Strauss, 1963 are notable examples) there is little if any need for such a conception. The human sciences, for them, are not concerned with ‘individuals’ but with social wholes, and insofar as any conception of the social actor is needed then its development will be low priority, and the needs of its theorising can perhaps as well be served by leaving any conception of the social actor largely implicit. Other approaches to sociological theory think that a conception of the social actor is their necessary and fundamental basis, that they must found their understanding of society in ‘the actor's point of view’. These two broad orientations have a long-standing, even traditional, opposition, though they have relatively recently been joined by another position (Derrida, 1976 and 1978; Foucault, 1972; and Lyotard, 1979, being significant examples) which calls a plague on both their houses, telling us that both ‘the subject’ and ‘the social totality’ are mere fictions, by-products of the play of discourse and text.
Though the concern with social wholes regards the issues of the social actor as low priority, its very attempt to justify this evaluation contributes to direct controversy about the nature of the social actor, for making the case on behalf of locating sociological analysis primarily at the level of the totality involves arguing against the idea that social actors could possibly be self-determined.