An assessment of the theoretical presuppositions of ethnomethodology

This chapter assesses the key theoretical presuppositions of ethnomethodology: that social order – interpreted as the intelligibility of coordinated patterns of action - is the central focus of sociological (and perhaps even of all social scientific) inquiry; that Parsons’ ‘analytical realism’ is false because order is observable routinely in everyday situations; that the meanings of social actions are locally variable and context-dependent (‘indexical’ and ‘reflexive’), rather than being determined by a semantic code; and that they are intelligible because they are self-identifying – their meaning is displayed and recognised by actors via shared methods or practices, in other words they are ‘accountable’. Ethnomethodology also involves some important methodological commitments: that for inquiry to be rigorous it must avoid reliance upon unexplicated resources, appealing only to what is observable or intersubjectively available; and the aim of rigorous social analysis must be literal description, rather than explanation or the production of theory: the task should be to ‘make visible’ members’ methods for the production of social phenomena. The conclusion reached in examining these arguments is that, while they relate to significant issues for social science, they exaggerate the intractability of the problems they identify. Moreover, ethnomethodology itself does not escape them.