In February 2020, US president Donald Trump paid a state visit to India. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi organized a welcome for him at the world's largest cricket stadium with a crowd of 100,000. As President Trump entered the stadium to be greeted by Modi, the crowd was treated to the Village People's 1978 hit song Macho Man. The two macho men hugged at center stage, and two versions of ethnonationalism met in an expert piece of performance art. President Trump led a long-standing ethnonationalist project in the United States, while Prime Minister Modi led a similar project in India. Both emphatically embraced political performance, intuitively knowing that they were leading projects in political psychology. This is a rather widespread practice, both historically and geographically. With its close rela-tionship to stochastic violence, it is also a potentially dangerous one.

Economic nationalism is a form of nationalism, and nationalism is about the “nation.” Nations, however, are not states or governments. They are something different. Nations are most often conceived of in terms of an in-group and an out-group. As one researcher put it many years ago, “the concept of ‘us’ requires ‘them.’” More recently, a team of business researchers put it this way:

It would be nice to claim that economic nationalists are free of such discrimination, but this is often not the case. These authors also note that “hostility toward the out-group may be augmented during conditions of instability in the relative economic fortunes of nations” and that, during such episodes, pressure increases to maintain in-group solidarity. Such hostility is usually combined with a sense of crisis to strengthen its political psychology impacts. As noted by The Economist, “nearly all drawbridge-up parties argue that their country is in crisis and explain it with a simple frightening story involving outsiders.” This can be a volatile and sometimes lethal formula of political mobilization.

What Is a Nation?

Before delving too far into the subject of ethnonationalism, it is important to mention and to keep in mind that it is primarily cultural, linguistic and psychological.

In the preceding chapters, we have seen how economic nationalism functions as a lure for both economic policy and political dynamics. Its associated zero-sum thinking is a default in many circumstances, even though the majority of relevant contexts are not actually zero sum. We have also seen that economic nationalism, including ethnonationalism, pandemic nationalism and techno-nationalism, can set back actual economic and human welfare in multiple ways. Overcoming these defaults represents a perennial, major challenge for human progress. Nonetheless, before we conclude this book, we need to give economic nationalism its due.

Giving Economic Nationalism Its Due

This book has been quite harsh on economic nationalism in its various forms, but there are elements of it that are worthwhile and contribute to our understanding of the world. Going back to mercantilism, for example, there was a serious attempt to explore how the economic world worked and to begin to engage in real economic analysis. As stated in Chapter 2, the conception of the balance of payments possessed by some mercantilist writers was far superior to many present-day politicians. If their equation of power and plenty was too strong, they did at least identify two categories of concern that are relevant to this day.

There is less positive to say about Friedrich List and his vision of an imperial Germany. Nonetheless, his identification of both infant industry protection and the role of talented immigrants has relevance to this day. Unfortunately, his early followers also included imperial Japan, and his modern followers have both taken infant industry protection too seriously but not seriously enough. Retuning to this concept, modernizing it, and making it compatible with WTO law as a DFT remains a project surprisingly neglected. That said, we need to keep in mind that List and his followers wholeheartedly ignore the central role of services in modern economies, reducing the relevance of their ideas.

While economic nationalists often take zero-sum thinking for granted, their doing so has inspired researchers in other fields (political psychology, negotiations theory) to examine it in some detail. This examination reminds us that central concepts in economics can be difficult to understand and communicate and that, consequently, various forms of heuristic substitution are an inevitable default.

Introduction

Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis (WSA) has profoundly influenced research and theory on global political economy and the environment. Wallerstein's insights on the modern world-system are vital to helping us achieve an accurate understanding of ongoing processes of environmental degradation and uneven consequences from the global to the local. His ideas also help us evaluate prospects for responding to challenges such as socioenvironmental inequalities and climate change in the contemporary world-system. Furthermore, the world-systems perspective helps us imagine social change and possibilities for future world-systems. In this chapter, I first review important components of Wallerstein's world-systems perspective. I then discuss examples of how each in turn is pertinent to issues related to the environment and climate change. I take a detailed look at ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) theory, which draws directly from insights from WSA (Wallerstein 1974a). I conclude by looking at what the world-systems perspective has to offer specifically regarding the global climate change crisis and possible future world-systems.

WSA

Influenced by and building upon critical development perspectives, Wallerstein encouraged the study of the global system from the perspective he called WSA. He argued that the appropriate unit of analysis is the world-system and that it is vital to take a historical, long-view approach (Wallerstein 1976a, 1979, 2000b). According to Wallerstein, analyses must be “simultaneously historic and systemic” (Wallerstein 2000b, xvii). Along these lines, Wallerstein wrote:

After the mercantilist era, economic nationalism became intertwined with industry or manufacturing, and the two have been remained so ever since. This fact was not lost on one of the founders of the field of modern political economy, Robert Gilpin, who notes:

As we will see in this and subsequent chapters, these perspectives on manufacturing are limiting and tend to lead to conflict, something that Gilpin also notes. Further, the focus on industry turns out to be somewhat misplaced, and we need to take some time to see why.

What became known as the “Industrial Revolution” first took place in Britain or, more precisely, in the north of England. The initiating sector was the one we discussed in the previous chapter, namely, cottons. The initiating innovation was the flying shuttle, which, beginning in 1735, doubled pro-ductivity in weaving. Subsequent innovations took place in spinning. It is worth remembering that, up until the mid-eighteenth century, China and India accounted for approximately one-third and one-quarter, respectively, of global manufacturing output. Britain was playing catch-up but did so in a manner that surpassed these two previous loci of global manufacturing expertise. Eventually, these innovations had significant growth and wage effects in Europe. Exactly when this took place is a matter of debate, but it is located somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century.

Recall from Chapter 2 that the woolens sector in Britain successfully agitated for protection from cotton goods. This increased the incentives for domestic cotton goods production and innovation, including the introduction of a cotton–linen blend known as fustian that escaped the ban on cotton products. Steam power became central to the innovation processes as well. Importantly, innovations were not confined either to specific products or to specific countries. As noted by economic historians Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, “the technical innovations that were first made in cotton were applied to the woolen, linen, and silk industries as well.”

As a research topic, global inequalities have only been explicitly present in mainstream academic debates since the beginning of the twenty-first century. To be sure, in the 1970s, social science debates addressed the international division of labor, center–periphery dependencies, imperialism and the world-economy—and thus implicitly global inequalities. However, they took place in parallel with and independent of studies of income and educational inequality which focused almost exclusively on national contexts. It was not until the gap between rich and poor widened in many countries of the Global North, especially in the United States and Great Britain in the 1980s, that global inequalities became the new buzzword under which the world-economy was addressed together with structural inequalities.

At first, debates largely revolved around World Bank findings assessing the relationship between inequality and economic growth in the previous decades. Whether they concluded that “growth is good for the poor” (Dollar and Kraay 2002) or that “inequality is bad for the poor” (Ravallion 2005), they primarily focused on poverty as the decisive issue in poor countries and the one that needed to be addressed first. The World Bank initially argued that mean incomes between countries were converging and that global inequalities were declining. Soon, mounting evidence of a steep increase in the income ratio between the world's richest and the world's poorest individuals, alongside ever more data on rising inequalities within the largest and fastest-growing economies of China and India, overshadowed these claims. By the time Thomas Piketty published Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and Oxfam first reported that the richest 1 percent now owned more wealth than the rest of the planet (Oxfam 2016), global inequalities had become firmly established as both a research topic and a focus of media attention. Yet, by that time, world-systems analysis had dealt with global inequalities for more than forty years—using a more complex and differentiated terminology and a more encompassing historical perspective while anticipating many of the recent arguments and even predicting several country trajectories by a long shot.

In 1941, a little-known economist by the name of Albert Hirschman arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, on a fellowship. He was 25 years old and a Jewish German refugee. In the early 1930s, as Hitler rose to power, Hirschman had been active in the German Socialist Party but subsequently fled Berlin for Paris. From there, he went to study at the London School of Economics. Completing his studies at LSE, Hirschman went to Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Then to Trieste, Italy, for doctoral work in economics and back to Paris to enlist in the French army. Peddling part of the way on a stolen bicycle, he later fled France over the Pyrenees and went on to Lisbon for his escape from European fascism.

While in Berkeley, Albert Hirschman met his wife and wrote a book. He would go on to write many more books as he became increasingly famous, and this first book has been almost forgotten. It is entitled National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade and represents a refugee economist's struggle with the economics of fascism. Indeed, the book was in part a response to Herman Göring's famous statement that “guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.” As such, it was a contribution to a centuries-long argument in economics between “power” and “plenty” and still has relevance for us today.

The objective Hirschman set out for himself in National Power was “a systematic exposition of the question of why and how foreign trade might become […] an instrument of national power policy.” To address this, he engaged in novel statistical analysis of Nazi trade relations in the pursuit of national power. This analysis led him to the following conclusion:

Introduction

At the start of a seminar he convened at UCLA in 1992, Harold Garfinkel warned a visitor, “you must do what I call perspicuous settings, or tutorial problems, or when I’m in a bad mood I call them exercises. I never call them experiments.” He did call them experiments decades earlier, though he qualified this by saying that they were not “properly speaking experimental,” and that they were “demonstrations” that (in a phrase he attributed to phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg) provided “aids to a sluggish imagination” (Garfinkel 1967, 38). Regardless of what names he chose to give them, the various “experiments” he devised over many years demonstrated anything but a sluggish imagination, and they offered varied tasks, difficulties, and lessons for his students. Most, but not all, of the exercises used “trouble” as leverage for gaining insight into the routine organization of social activities. Some troubles were deliberately induced disruptions, such as in the simple case of playing the game of tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) when the “experimenter” would make a move by inscribing a mark straddling a line separating adjacent squares in the 3 × 3 matrix. This maneuver regularly drew the objection from the opponent that it was “against the rules,” but the rule in question was invoked consequent to the move, rather than being an explicitly stated precondition of play. Other exercises required students to perform activities while remaining alert to troubles that regularly occur—such as getting lost in the course of following directions.

Drawing from Garfinkel's published writings, as well as transcripts of lectures and seminars in the Garfinkel Archive, I begin with a discussion of some of his early experiments, comparing them with contemporaneous social psychology experiments and discussing how they were commonly presented in sociology textbooks as methods for exposing background knowledge and tacit presuppositions that operate beneath the awareness of social actors. After suggesting that some of the early experiments and Garfinkel's commentaries on them exhibited more problematic implications for sociology, this chapter goes on to examine a raft of exercises and demonstrations that Garfinkel deployed in a later phase of his teaching and research.

Introduction

This chapter discusses instances of breaching rules and constitutive expectancies concerning witnessable conduct in public space during the Covid-19 crisis, treating the pandemic as a perspicuous context for reflecting back on Garfinkel's contributions on trust conditions as basis for the public intelligibility of social order and the concept of breaching. We show how the reference to trust conditions and breaching enable us to better understand the changes involved in the pandemic as a progressively established social fact, in particular with regard to the seen but unnoticed features of ordinary conduct in public space. In turn, the way in which social practices in public space were promptly addressed and normatively changed during the pandemic sheds new light on the conceptualization of (naturally occurring) breaching as a members’ problem that is reflexively established in and as social interaction.

In this introduction, we discuss the notion of “trust” in relation to “breaching” as introduced by Garfinkel (2002) (“Trust and breaching” section), and then situate our reflection on breaching in the sociohistorical context of the Covid-19 pandemic in general (“Pandemic and breaching” section) and as concerning public space in particular (“Public space under Covid-19 as a perspicuous setting” section). Next, after having situated the video data this chapter is based on (“Data” section), we propose a study of how the accountability of conducts in public space suddenly became inspectable and altered during significant moments of the pandemic (“Formulating what happened and the understanding of the new rules,” “Overseeing police work enforcing the rules,” “Inspecting distance between people,” “Inspecting the number of people assembled” sections). The conclusion discusses the consequences of these disruptions for how issues of trust and normative order can be revisited (“Conclusion” section).

Trust and breaching

The notion of “breaching” normative orders, as a way to reveal the constitutive expectancies that makeup the seen but unnoticed features that render the social world meaningful, was discussed by Schütz (1962) and elaborated on by Garfinkel (1963, 1967, 2002). Pursuing how to produce “specifically senseless” situations (Garfinkel 1967, 55) stems from an interest in how to account for members’ shared, commonsensical attitude to the experience of everyday life as a situated accomplishment and how to observe it in moments of trouble.

Introduction

While I was conducting fieldwork on drag king workshops (DKWs)—social occasions in which female-assigned-at-birth persons transform their gender through makeup activities, verbal resources and corporeal exercises—I was intrigued by the number of reflexive activities deployed by the participants. Drag kings spent a lot of time discussing their gendered bodily transformations, theorizing on walking and its relationship to gender norms and public spaces, testing with other co-participants how gender transformation affected their spatial perceptions, and finally, over the course of their interactions, discovering the existence of a phenomenon they had been theorizing about in preceding conversations.

By “Gender as a scientific experiment,” I refer to the fact that gender can be experienced by participants as something resembling a scientific experiment—science as it is practiced within and through everyday activities. In her study on experimental demonstration and discovery as a practical accomplishment in school science labs, Sherman Heckler (2011, 13) notes that developing a disciplined perception of the world is the result of interactional work between students and teachers. In a quite similar way, interactions in DKWs lead participants to develop a fine-grained analysis and strong consciousness of gender construction processes. In DKWs, participants experiment with the transformation of their bodies, while making inquiries into the workings of (their) gender.

I will show how drag kings mobilize what Michael Lynch calls “epistopics,” epistemic topics that relate to “description, measurement, categorization, observation, reproduction” (1993, 247), while being shared by scientists within their professional activities and by lay people in the course of their ordinary practices. My focus on gender as a scientific experiment is inspired by two branches of literature. First, I draw on research from science and technology studies, ethnomethodology and linguistic anthropology, research that approaches science and daily life as practical accomplishments situated on a continuum, rather than stipulated as discrete entities. In this framework, scholars have approached science as its practical and interactional accomplishment (Latour and Woolgar 1988; Mondada 2005; Sormani 2014), a method of the “knowing-body” (Bjelić 2003, 12–13), and in its intertwining with daily life, trivial matters, poetics (Ochs et al. 1996; Latour 2007) and art (Sormani et al. 2019).

Introduction: Trust and artificial intelligence (AI)

Daemons, or demons, may signify diverse entities. In multitasking computer systems, daemons are computer programs that run as background processes without the supervision of a user. In the entirely different context of thought experiments, philosophers or scientists occasionally imagine demons as agents which act in ways that pose intellectual challenges or highlight apparent paradoxes. In this chapter, both uses become applicable concerning the operations of a set of technologies with automated features. By extension, this argumentation could be relevant for the contemporary discussion on AI and algorithmic systems.

For the past two decades, the field of AI has undergone significant developments. What was once a marginal strand of research in computer science has now been implemented in a wide range of practices, from highly technical expert systems to common and mundane applications. The neurosurgeon segmenting her scan of a brain tumor and the teenager applying a beauty filter to his Snapchat Story can both draw on the power of convolutional neural networks. As another example, although the data differs, uniquely tailored recommendations for medical treatments and suggestions for music may build on similar clustering techniques. The content-agnostic nature of machine learning methods allows for their application across the board.

The profusion of algorithmic systems is also accompanied by some concerns regarding their trustworthiness. Systems that sort, score, recommend or in other ways inform or make decisions that affect human experience have been understood as having many risks (European Commission 2020). Trustworthy AI has become a research field of its own with dedicated venues. For example, the ACM FAccT conference brings together academics and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability and transparency in socio-technical systems. One of the goals of this research is to make AI trustworthy and explainable (i.e., understandable and predictable by humans). As topics for computer science, they may have a certain novelty to them. However, the notions of trust and accountability have a long history in ethnomethodology.

Garfinkel developed his ideas about trust most notably in “A Conception of, and Experiments with, ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions” (Garfinkel 1963), in which he argues that trust is a necessary condition for understanding the events of daily life. According to Watson, though, this study of trust belongs to Garfinkel's early work, and not everyone regards it as “fully fledged EM analysis” (2009, 489).

Introduction

One of the more serious challenges confronting social research is that the social practices used to create stable social order and meaning—the social facts that are sociology's fundamental object—are usually taken for granted: their use does not require conscious awareness or consideration. In addressing this obstacle, Garfinkel noted that social practices can quickly become routine, making the social world appear to be just out there, ready to hand, to be easily identified and/or categorized. But, the actual embodied work of creating social facts is not readily available to detailed observation and/or reflection. Therefore, procedures for making social processes visible and available for observation are necessary. Having noticed that “trouble” in various forms can make participants aware of the practices they are engaging in, Garfinkel introduced what he called “tutorial problems” as a way of making trouble to give his students awareness of ordinary seen-but-unnoticed embodied practices: “‘making the phenomenon available’ again” as preparation for doing research (Garfinkel [1993] 2021, 37).

Often called “breaching experiments,” Garfinkel's tutorial problems are primarily teaching exercises, not experiments, designed to raise awareness of the “constitutive expectancies” (“trust conditions”) and “phenomenal field” properties of embodied action that ordinarily remain “seen but unnoticed.” He would sometimes invoke Aron Gurwitsch, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gestalt psychology in discussing phenomenal field properties. On other occasions, in describing seen but unnoticed aspects of practices he would refer to “contexts of accountability” and/or “accountable actions and identities,” in ways that were inspired by Kenneth Burke and Karl Mannheim. Both forms of reference date from 1939 to 1946.

While Garfinkel's approach has enormous potential for rendering taken-for-granted social processes available for empirical observation, and interest in his work is increasing, misunderstandings of his position that create the appearance of discontinuity and contradiction obscure both the argument and its implications. In this chapter, we confront these misunderstandings in two ways. In the first section, we trace continuities by focusing on a letter written by Garfinkel to his parents in July 1939, and the theme of Models and Mock-ups, that originates in a report Garfinkel wrote in 1943. Both show how preoccupations that are often identified with later periods inform his early observations. In the second section, we establish continuity between various approaches Garfinkel took to trouble/trust, indexicality and embodied practices over many years.

Introduction

One of Harold Garfinkel's legacies is his sociological experiments, which are commonly referred to as “breaching experiments.” Garfinkel created and developed these experiments to discover new phenomena that his contemporary social scientists had not found, adequately discussed or properly analyzed. The experiments allowed him to adapt the properties of praxeologically and conceptually unrelated scientific rationalities to the interactions in the lifeworld (e.g., Garfinkel 1952, 1963, 1967). That is, Garfinkel experimentally made trouble in situ by breaching people's normative expectations of various kinds, but paradoxically, he described, discovered and characterized the rational properties of mundane routine activities. We refer to this interest as a spirit of experimentation.

This chapter investigates the historical development of Garfinkel's ideas through experiments and examines the ways in which the participants deal with interactional, technological trouble in human–robot interactions (see, e.g., Ruiter and Albert 2017, for an overview of conversation analysis and experimental settings). In the following, we discuss Garfinkel's orientation to people's methodical accomplishments in practical activities that since his doctoral research he explored through experimental methods. We show that the sociological experimental attitude has influenced and shaped the development of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies, including current research on human–robot interaction. By examining experimentally conducted human–robot interaction, we argue that the analysis of human–robot interaction can also reveal aspects of routine grounds of everyday activities.

Our chapter is structured as follows. First, we consider Garfinkel's breaching experiments through the lens of his overall research trajectory from his doctoral dissertation (Garfinkel 1952) through to his Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967). Second, we clarify two important foundations of background expectancies and everyday life that Garfinkel's breaching experiment revealed: (1) the temporal organization of future action, which includes projection and the anticipation of forthcoming actions, and (2) knowledge based on accountability and membership categories. Third, we describe how we applied Garfinkel's spirit of experimentation to develop and test a service robot that can interact with multiple people simultaneously (i.e., a multiplex care robot system). Fourth, we demonstrate how the two key elements of the breaching experiments work in human–robot interactions in a spice shop where a parent and a child interact with and through a robot acting as a shopkeeper. In conclusion, we provide a possible description of the reason for why Garfinkel emphasized the spirit of experimentation and discuss how it is connected to human–robot interaction research.

Introduction

In 1967, the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology by Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) broke new ground in sociology. Garfinkel's Studies not only challenged sociology's paradigmatic foundations and routine working methods, but also produced heuristic anomalies and instigated new ways of probing social order and its recognizable production in situ. Among these new ways of working figured the now widely known, if not regularly practiced “breaching experiments,” experiments for which Garfinkel invited his students to engage in odd conduct in everyday situations (for example, by conducting oneself like a stranger at home). Taken out of context, these experiments sometimes came to be seen as being “odd” themselves, where in the first place they were devised as heuristic enterprises (making investigable the routine production of social order in everyday life) and critical probes (challenging “social theory” for its epistemological, ontological or other abstractions of social reality).

This introduction to The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel concentrates on the experimental outlook of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology (EM) (i.e., his “study of people's methods”). First, we shall outline EM's research rationale, as that rationale was articulated in Garfinkel's Studies (1967a), as an empirical and critical endeavor. Not only did his seminal book probe “social order” as a locally investigable phenomenon, instead of reproducing it as theoretical problem ex cathedra, but the book also challenged sociological theorization in so doing—a challenge leveraged by “breaching experiments,” yet sometimes missed in their introductory exposition. Second, we shall tease out the common ground of subsequent developments in EM, as that ground happens to be articulated and rearticulated through changes in successive program and position statements, spanning contrasting strands of conversational, practical, and conceptual analysis. Against this multifaceted backdrop, the most distinctive figure(s) of ethnomethodological experimentation will be located as a topic and resource, sometimes both. Finally, the heuristic tension between analytic detachment and practical involvement—a recurring tension in ethnomethodological research—will allow us to present this Companion and its contributions, in and for the renewal of ethnomethodological inquiry.

Cui bono? The question “to whose benefit” EM was, is or remains to be developed has, since Garfinkel's passing in 2011, been taken up under various guises, both “fundamental” and “applied.” There certainly has been no lack of voices, approaches and suggestions on how to make EM “useful,” “critical” or “reflexive,” including our own—“again,” we might add.

In the 1950s, Talcott Parsons, then Garfinkel's PhD adviser, worked on a manuscript in which he explored the “institutionalized one-price system” as a standardized feature of consumer markets (see Garfinkel 1967, 69). In a version of this manuscript published in Parsons’ and Smelser's monumental Economy and Society (2005 [1956]) the authors suggest that consumers internalize the normative basis of the institutionalized one-price system in the process of socialization and, therefore, do not engage in bargaining. This observation occasions Parsons and Smelser to argue that the one-price system “tends to eliminate bargaining over price in the immediate transaction” (p. 158).

Garfinkel (1967, 68–70) refers to the “institutionalized one-price rule” in his Studies when discussing one of his now so-called breaching experiments. In this experiment he asked his students to bargain for items sold at a standardized price. At this point of the Studies Garfinkel also introduced the often-invoked notion of the “cultural dope” as “the man-in-the-sociologist’s-society who produces the stable features of the society by acting in compliance with preestablished and legitimate alternatives of action that the common culture provides” (p. 68). He uses the experiment with his students to elaborate on this notion by suggesting that sociologists often consider participants as cultural or judgmental dopes when they ascribe their behavior to “rule-following.” By the same token, they tend to overlook the possibility that participants decide to avoid situations that can become ambivalent and uncertain if standards are being challenged.

Lynch (2012) has examined discussions about Garfinkel's notion of the “cultural dope” by examining the bargaining experiment. He begins by highlighting that the experiment unsettled students at first, but after the event many of them reported that they had been successful in obtaining a bargain and would continue to negotiate for price reductions. Rather than arguing that Garfinkel and ethnomethodology offer a counter-model of the actor as “a fully conscious, self-reflexive rational agent,” Lynch 2012) emphasizes that for ethnomethodologists actions and interactions are embedded within concrete circumstances. He then offers two interpretations of the results from Garfinkel's experiment.

In the “conservative reading” (Lynch 2012, 227), the experiment reveals that in supermarkets people tend to pay the standardized price without challenging it, but in exceptional situations might consider bargaining.