Overview

1
Ethnography Ethnomethodology

• Overview
• Personal background using ethnomethodlogically-i
  nformed ethnography in IT research
• What is ethnography?
• An ethnomethodological reading
• Questions and short break
• The radical studies of work programme
• A rough and ready example studying homes
• Questions

2
A Cautionary Word

• Ethnomethodology (EM) does not cast social
  phenomenon in terms of conventional social
  science distinctions and practices. For example,
• EM does not exploit objective/subjective
  dichotomy
• Or agency and structure
• Or macro and micro
• You will find these and other staple topics of
  the social sciences discussed within the EM
  literature but they are treated critically and
  dispensed with as EM has no use for them, no work
  for them to do
• See Wes Sharrock and Rod Watson Autonomy
  among social theories the incarnation of social
  structures, Actions and Structure (ed. Fielding,
  N.), pp. 56-77, Sage, 1988.
• Wes Sharrock and Graham Button The social
  actor social action in real time,
  Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences (ed.
  Button, G.), pp. 137-175, Cambridge University
  Press, 1991.

3
Square Pegs and Round Holes

• So you cant align EM with conventional social
  science
• A strange kind of Californian subjectivity its
  not
• Garfinkels slogans
• EM is asymmetrically alternate
• EM is incommensurable
• EM is not available to conventional social
  science
• Of course you can try to make EM answerable to
  conventional social science but you will only end
  up losing what it is about, you will misread it
• See Harold Garfinkel and Lawrence Wieder Two
  incommensurable, asymmetrically alternate
  technologies of social analysis, Text in
  Context Contributions to Ethnomethodology (eds.
  Watson, G. and Seiler, S.M.), pp.175-206, Sage,
  1992.

4
Setting Caution Aside

• Im not going to tell you why EM has no use for
  the conventional distinctions and practices of
  social science
• Dealing with these issues would take many
  lectures
• And they are well documented - see Button, G.
  (ed.) Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences,
  Cambridge University Press, 1991 for a
  comprehensive introduction and treatment
• So why tell you, beyond inviting you to read into
  the matter?
• EM requires that you suspend the educated ways
  in which you have been taught to make sense of
  the social (Sacks 1992) - to suspend talking
  about life in terms of agency, structures, and
  the like - and demands that you step outside the
  box
• Harvey Sacks On exchanging glances, in
  Lectures on Conversation (ed. Jefferson, G.),
  Volume 1, Part 1, Fall 1964 - Spring 1965), pp.
  81-94, Oxford Blackwell Publishers, 1992.

5
Moving On What is Ethnography?

• Put 20 different ethnographers in a room and you
  will get 20 different answers
• So what does that tell us?
• That ethnography is a diverse enterprise
  consisting of heterogeneous conceptions and
  practices
• Ethnography cannot be commonly defined - it has
  the characteristics alluded to in Wittgensteins
  aphorism about games
• What is common to them all? - Dont say There
  must be something common, or they would not be
  called games - but look and see whether there
  is anything common to all. - For if you look at
  them you will not see something that is common to
  all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole
  series of them at that To repeat dont think,
  but look!
• To understand something of the salience of
  Wittgensteinian thought to EM see, Jeff Coulter
  The Social Construction of Mind Studies in
  Ethnomethodology and Linguistic Philosophy, Rowan
  and Littlefield, 1979.

6
No Commonality?

• But what about method?
• Surely ethnography minimally requires first-hand
  observation, the immersion of a fieldworker in
  some setting of social action?
• When doing ethnographic research one thing is
  needful first-hand observation. Go and sit in
  the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the
  doorsteps of the flophouses sit on the Gold
  Coast settees and the slum shakedowns sit in the
  orchestra hall and in the Star and Garter
  burlesque. In short, gentlemen, go get the seat
  of your pants dirty in real research.
• Robert Ezra Park, cited in Robert Prus Symbolic
  Interaction and Ethnographic Research
  Intersubjectivity and the Study of Human Lived
  Experience, State University of New York Press,
  1996.
• The problem is, what is meant by observation,
  setting and immersion?
• Is a fieldworker who investigates news paper
  reports by reading them doing observation by
  immersion in a setting?
• See, for example, Lena Jayyusi The equivocal
  text and the objective world an
  ethnomethodological analysis of a news report,
  The Australian Journal of Media Culture, vol. 5
  (1), 1991. http//wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoo
  m/ 5.1/Jayyusi.html
• Well, yes. The point is that there is no
  commonality of methods. Ethnography cannot be
  pinned down. There is no definitive version.
  Furthermore, old versions fall out of use and new
  ones get created all the time (hence similarities
  and relationships)

7
So Where Does That Leave Us?

• Trading in (competing) versions an
  ethnomethodological version (one of many, EM not
  a unified field)
• There is nothing special about ethnography
• Ethnographies are a staple feature of everyday
  life
• the member in the midst of witnessed actual
  settings recognizes that witnessed settings have
  an accomplished sense, an accomplished facticity,
  an accomplished accountability That
  accomplishment consists of members doing,
  recognizing, and using ethnographies.
• Harold Garfinkel Studies in Ethnomethodology,
  Prentice-Hall, 1967.
• Forget the terminology (close encounters with
  difficult words), the point is that Garfinkel
  sees ethnography as something that members do all
  of the time (some examples)
• Ethnography is a members method for
  investigating, observing, querying, articulating,
  understanding, recognizing, etc., social settings
  from within the flow of activities and events
  that populate those settings
• What the method of the matter consists of is
  EMs central concern and an issue that we will
  return to

8
Lay and Professional Ethnographies

• If ethnography is a ubiquitous feature of
  everyday life, something ordinary members do, why
  is it part of the social science research
  armoury?
• A distinction between lay and professional
  ethnographies a recognizable difference exists
  as to the ways in which ethnographic materials
  are analyzed
• It is not that in our capacity as ordinary
  members we do not analyze ethnographic materials
  - clearly an account of whats happening at work
  or a family members account of his or her day is
  open to analysis - but that as members (at home,
  at work, at play, etc.) we do so in different
  ways to professional ethnographers.
• For example, classifying descriptions or treating
  family members objectively - professional
  approaches and methods have no place in members
  analyses and are not answerable to them
• See Harold Garfinkel Studies of the routine
  grounds of everyday activities, Studies in
  Ethnomethodology, pp. 35-75, Prentice-Hall, 1967.

9
Professional Analysis

• Marked by different approaches and practices
• They come packaged in reports - i.e.
  professional ethnographies are textually rendered
• Even visual ethnographys rely on texts and,
  following the post-modern turn, rightly or
  wrongly, may be construed of in textual ways
• More importantly, those texts are rendered or
  constructed in one of two fundamental ways
• Through formal analysis, which renders
  ethnographic materials in terms of coding
  schemes, taxonomies, grand theories or
  narratives, models and other situationally absent
  descriptions.
• See Harold Garfinkel and Harvey Sacks On formal
  structures of practical action, Theoretical
  Sociology (eds. McKinney, J.C. and Tiryakian,
  E.), pp. 160-193, Apple-Century-Crofts, 1970.
• Ethnomethodologically, through thick description
  of the practical action and practical reasoning
  exhibited by members in the unfolding course of
  their activities together. That is thick
  description pace Gilbert Ryle who coined the
  phrase, but not Clifford Geertz who popularized
  it and made it answerable to formal analysis.
• See Gilbert Ryle The thinking of thoughts,
  University Lectures No. 18, University of
  Saskatchewan 1971. http//lucy.ukc.ac.uk/CSACSIA/V
  ol14/Papers/ryle_1.html
• Wes Sharrock and Robert Anderson Epistemology,
  Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences (ed.
  Button, G.), pp. 51-76, Cambridge University
  Press, 1991.

10
The Primacy of Description in Analysis

• Both approaches recognize that analysis is
  intimately bound up with description - that the
  way in which you describe something is
  reflexively connected to your analysis.
• For example, consider the following sentence
  The baby cried. The astronaut picked it up.
• When you read this sentence the chances are that
  they hear something strange, that something is
  not right about it.
• What is wrong is that the method of description
  does not fit the scene. The method at work here
  is one of membership categorization devices or
  MCDs (Sacks 1972).
• Harvey SacksThe baby cried. The mommy picked it
  up, Lectures on Conversation (ed. Jefferson,
  G.), Volume 1, Lecture 1, Spring 1966, pp.
  236-242, Blackwell Publishers, 1992.

11
Description and Analysis

• MCDs come in families quite literally we might
  speak of mother, father, brother, aunt,
  cousin, etc., as belonging to a family of
  categories. Similarly, the categories
  protestant, catholic, buddhist, etc.,
  belong to the religious family of categories.
• The example The baby cried. The astronaut picked
  it up. violates this ordinary members method of
  description, however (as you might intuitively
  recognize).
• The descriptive categories baby and astronaut
  are incongruent within the context of the
  sentence and the scene it describes.
• Baby and astronaut do not belong to the same
  family of MCDs, they do not fit together, and so
  they sound strange.
• If we substitute astronaut for mommy,
  however, the sentence starts to make sense, as
  the categories mommy and baby belong to the
  same MCD.
• See Jeff Coulter Logic ethnomethodology and
  the logic of language, Ethnomethodology and the
  Human Sciences (ed. Button, G.), pp. 20-50,
  Cambridge University Press, 1991.

12
Description and Analysis?

• Of course it might asked if we are really
  analyzing anything here? In response to that we
  might briefly consider Sacks account of the
  sentences properly construed.
• When I hear The baby cried. The mommy picked
  it up. one of the things I hear is that the
  mommy who picks the baby up is the mommy of the
  baby. Now its not only the case that I hear it
  that way - and of course theres no genitive
  there to say its mommy picked it up, his
  mommy, her mommy - when I hear it that way a
  kind of interesting thing is that I also feel
  pretty confident that all of you, at least the
  natives among you, hear that also. Is that
  magic?
• Its not magic of course but a matter of methods
  of description and MCDs in this case, which as
  natural language speakers or natives we all
  share and exploit to reason about - to analyze -
  the events we attend to.
• So, the way in which things are described - the
  methods employed, whether lay or professional -
  are intimately bound up with how things are
  analyzed then, and this has a consequence for how
  ethnographies get done.

13
Reflexivity of Description and Analysis

• In producing ethnographic texts, both formal
  analysis and ethnomethodology have an abiding
  concern with reflexivity, but in very different
  ways.
• Formal analysis is largely concerned with
  analytic reflexivity, a notion which came into
  focus following the crisis of representation that
  marked the post-modern turn in the social
  sciences
• Analytic reflexivity (and its variants, e.g.,
  positional reflexivity, textual reflexivity) is
  directed towards critical self-reflection in
  order to understand the ways in which the very
  act of ethnography and ethnographic reportage
  shapes our understanding of the social
• And is concerned to find solutions to the
  professional belief that there is an inevitable
  degree of cultural and subjective bias built into
  the act ethnography and ethnographic reportage
• See Doug Macbeth On reflexivity in
  qualitative research two readings, and a third,
  Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 7, pp. 35-68, 2001.

14
Analytic Reflexivity and EM

• EM respects the good sense and tradition of
  critical reflection
• It does not except what Egon Bittner calls the
  the self-indulgent concentration that marks
  analytic reflexivity
• Concern with the ethnographers cultural context,
  position, influence, bias, textual practices,
  etc., pre-dates the post-modern turn
• And Bittner was fiercely critical of it then as
  ethnomethodologists are now, suggesting that such
  forms of self-absorption represent a pallid
  ideology of cultural relativism
• Egon Bittner Objectivity and realism in
  sociology, Phenomenological Sociology (ed.
  Psathas, G.), pp. 109-125, John Wiley, 1973.
• Mike Lynch Against reflexivity as an academic
  virtue and source of privileged knowledge,
  Theory, Culture, and Society vol. 17, pp. 27-53,
  2000.

15
So What is EMs Interest in Reflexivity?

• We are not now interested in professional
  beliefs but in that outlook which takes over
  when something must be done, for example, when
  someone must do what needs doing to successfully
  take a plane across the country. The point here
  is that when someone has business with the world,
  or any part of it, he must be prepared to deal on
  the worlds terms. What these terms are is not
  reliably taken from what the timid have to say.
  Instead, the terms are, from case to case, in
  what even the most radical of the radical comes
  to see when he sees that sometimes some things
  have to be done, and sometimes there is no
  getting around certain things, no matter what, in
  spite of all rational considerations. Egon
  Bittner
• EM is interested in the practical achievement of
  social phenomenon
• In how things are done by parties to them, by
  members, and done congregationally,
  collaboratively, in concert with others
• I.e., in how things are done as the socially
  organized affairs of everyday life
• Reflexivity is an essential and indispensable
  feature of this achievement

16
Reflexivity in Ethnomethodology

• The reflexivity of accounts
• We offer the observation that persons, in that
  they are heard to be speaking a natural language,
  somehow are heard to be engaged in the objective
  production and objective display of everyday
  activities as observable and reportable phenomena
  What is it about natural language that makes
  these phenomena observable-reportable, i.e.,
  account-able phenomena? The interests of
  ethnomethodological research are directed to
  provide, through detailed analyses, that
  account-able phenomena are through and through
  practical accomplishments. We shall speak of the
  work of that accomplishment in order to gain the
  emphasis for it of an ongoing course of action.
  Garfinkel and Sacks (1970)
• Accounts are features of talk and talk is a
  feature of all social settings
• Ethnomethodology suggests that it is through
  talking - through the ongoing production of
  accounts - that members reflexively produce the
  social settings they inhabit as objective
  features of everyday life
• EM is exclusively dedicated to uncovering how in
  the ongoing production of their accounts - in
  their work together - members come to organize
  everyday life and reflexively produce the
  everyday settings they inhabit
• It is here, however, that ethnomethodologists
  start to fall out

17
Orienting to the Reflexivity of Accounts

• Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
• EM developed by Garfinkel, CA by Sacks
• Often spoken about in the same breathe, as if
  they were concerned with the same things
• To some extent they are but there are fundamental
  differences between the two, which impact on
  analytic treatment of the reflexivity of accounts
• The difference revolves around formulations
• Formulations are integral features of talk, when
  we talk we formulate remarks, questions,
  greetings, disputes, etc.
• Formulation is a pervasive moment-by-moment
  feature of talk that never stops - open your
  mouth and you are doing it again (and you need
  not even do that much)

18
Handling Formulations

• CA takes it that the work of everyday life is
  to be found in members formulations and has,
  over the years, uncovered a turn-taking
  machinery organizing the production of talk and
  the organized affairs of everyday life
• Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail
  Jefferson A simplest systematics for the
  organization of turn-taking in conversation,
  Language, vol. 50, pp. 696-735, 1974.
• EM takes it that while an accountable feature of
  everyday life, formulations do not make the
  work of everyday life - and thus the socially
  organized production of everyday settings -
  available
• Instead the work of everyday life becomes a
  feature of the turn-taking machinery the work of
  everyday life has been substituted by CA for an
  analytic apparatus then
• Mike Lynch, M. Scientific Practice and Ordinary
  Action Ethnomethodological and Social Studies of
  Science, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Mike Lynch and Dave Bogen Harvey Sacks
  primitive natural science, Theory, Culture and
  Society, vol. 11, pp. 65-104, 1994.

19
EM Treatment of Formulations

• While formulations do work - i.e., are
  constituent features of greetings, questions,
  disputes, and the rest - they are not the work
  of setting
• Rather, formulations make the work of a setting
  observable and reportable or account-able.
• What the work is - what members practical
  achievement of congregationally produced everyday
  settings (workplaces, homes, football matches,
  etc.) consists of - is not shown by examining
  members formulations then, even if those
  formulations are part and parcel of the settings
  ongoing production here and now
• So, while EM recognizes formulations and pays
  foundational attention to them, it is not in the
  same way as CA
• For EM, analytic attention is not to be directed
  towards members formulations per se - and work
  attributed to the workings of an analytic
  apparatus - but to the practical actions and
  activities accomplished by members over the
  unfolding course of doing and recognizing
  formulations.
• It might otherwise be said that while members
  formulations provide the initial focus for EM
  study and analysis, the work they accomplish is
  the primary object of analysis, as it is in the
  work that formulations do that the social
  organization of everyday settings becomes visible.

20
Making Work Visible

• So EM is different to CA in that is concerned to
  uncover what work talk accomplishes rather than
  how talk works
• How does EM go about uncovering work - i.e.,
  the practical, socially organized achievement of
  everyday life?
• Like social science research generally, by
  consulting or eliciting information from
  members. The question is, how is consultation
  done?
• Fundamentally, essentially, without evasion, EM
  suspends the use of social science methods as a
  means of consultation - and that includes
  theorising
• Why? Because EM sees theorising not only as a
  means of representation but reflexively as a
  method of description, which involves rendering
  everyday life in terms of a priori, situationally
  absent formulations
• Harvey Sacks Sociological description,
  Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 8, pp. 1-16,
  1963.
• Melinda Baccus Sociological indication and the
  visibility criterion of real world social
  theorising, Ethnomethodological Studies of Work
  (ed. Garfinkel, H.), pp. 1-19, Routledge and
  Kegan Paul, 1986.
• And what EM wants to get at in the first instance
  is members formulations, and in the second

21
Methods and EM

• Whose methods?
• As Garfinkel and Wieder (1992) put it,
• Just in any actual case a phenomenon of order
  be it paid labour, domestic life, play,
  education, prison, driving, walking down the
  street, etc. already possesses whatever as
  methods methods could be
• Or as Lynch (1993) describes EMs position on
  methods,
• Methods (whether avowedly scientific or not)
  do not provide a priori guarantees, and the
  initial requirement for an ethnomethodological
  investigator is to find ways to elucidate methods
  from within the relevant competence systems to
  which they are bound.
• As far as EM is concerned, whatever method
  might be is not to found in the academy, in
  social science tutorials, seminars, lectures,
  textbooks, and the like
• Other than as objects of EM study, as the academy
  is an everyday setting possessed of its own
  methods just as every other setting in everyday
  life is possessed
• So you know as a member what sorts of methods are
  at work in your academic and/or research
  setting, but what methods are at work in the
  everyday settings you are researching?
• That is the animal in the foliage EM is after -
  members methods
• Consequently, EM has no work for methods to do -
  that is, textbook methods and the like - so it
  dispenses with them

22
Abandoning Method

• But surely methods are required?
• The point is that no special methods are required
  to uncover members methods - nothing that
  requires a social science degree
• You may, however, require a degree in some other
  discipline
• If you want to uncover members methods in
  mathematics, for example
• See Eric Livingstone The Ethnomethodological
  Foundations of Mathematics, Routledge and Kegan
  Paul, 986.
• Harold Garfinkel An ethnomethodological study
  of the work of Galileos inclined plane
  demonstration of the real motion of free falling
  bodies, Ethnomethodologys Program Working Out
  Durkheims Aphorism, pp. 263-285, Rowman and
  Littlefield, 2001.
• Why? Because uncovering the methods with which
  everyday activities are possessed requires that
  you have a vulgar competence in those very
  methods

23
Developing Vulgar Competence

• The unique adequacy requirement of methods
• for analysts to recognize, or identify, or
  follow the development of, or describe phenomena
  of order in local production of coherent detail
  the analyst must be vulgarly competent in the
  local production and reflexively natural
  accountability of the phenomena of order he is
  studying. We will replace the abbreviation
  studying with the specific requirement that the
  analyst be, with others, in a concerted
  competence of methods with which to recognize,
  identify, follow, display, and describe phenomena
  of order in local productions of coherent detail.
  These are uniquely possessed in, and as of, the
  objects endogenous local production and natural
  accountability. (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992)
• Vulgar competence means that you can understand
  how what it is that members are doing is being
  done so as to reflexively produce the organized
  affairs of everyday life
• That how consists of the work of the matter and
  methods organizing the works production, and
  it is as Garfinkel puts it EMs distinctive
  prize
• We shall consider what that prize consists of in
  the next section on radical studies of work

24
Ethnomethodologys Prize

• Radical studies of work
• What are they?
• Develop an answer to that question by looking at
  their origins
• Edmund Husserls phenomenology
• The Idea of Phenomenology (trans. Hardy, L.),
  Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.
• Concerned with the production of objective or
  positive knowledge in the natural sciences
• Husserl wanted to understand how positive
  knowledge is possible
• Not questioning truth or correctness, that is for
  the sciences themselves to do.
• Instead, wants to understand on what foundations
  positive knowledge stands and emerges from
• EM not doing phenomenology but inspired by
  Husserls studies and those of his protégés,
  Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
  because the focus of their studies, because of
  what it is they are oriented to

25
Phenomenological Origins

• The possibility of objective knowledge
• Foundations positive knowledge originates from
  the natural attitude where objects are given
  in various ways to experience as
  objects-existing-in-a-world-out-there,
  independent of the particular observer.
• Husserls problem To say that positive knowledge
  is, in the various technical ways of the natural
  sciences, given by an objects availability to
  experience is not enough to account for objective
  knowledge. Husserl wants to know how it is
  possible for objective knowledge to be given in
  the first place?
• More precisely, Husserl wants to know how it is
  possible for knowledge to make contact with an
  objective world and so transcend individual
  experience

26
Making Contact with a Transcendent

• Sources of knowing
• what is unclear is the contact with a
  transcendent that is ascribed to knowledge, to
  knowing knowing is something other than the
  known object How can I understand this
  possibility? Naturally, the answer is I could
  only understand it if the relation itself could
  be given, as something that could be seen.
• Positive knowledge is given in the relationship
  between the knowing subject and known object
• What does that relationship consist of?
• Natural science account formal methods described
  in scientific texts
• The problem with formal methods descriptions
• Formal methods and descriptions are certainly
  not useless, and learning to compose step-by-step
  instructions is an important point of scientific
  training, but such accounts do not provide the
  stable grounds for reproducing a practice.
  Although it is possible to reproduce an
  observation from a written description, a text
  can only allude to what eventually may count as a
  replication of the observation It might be more
  advisable to say that methods accounts are part
  and parcel of the concerted practices that enable
  them to be descriptive and instructive. Mike
  Lynch Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action
• Formal methods rely on some unspecified
  phenomenon - the relationship between knowing and
  known object consists, then, of undocumented
  sources of knowing

27
Documenting the Undocumented

• Unpacking the knowing-known relationship
• The optical discovery of pulsar NP 0532
• Done by astronomers John Cocke and Michael Disney
  on the evening of January 16th 1969
• John Cocke, Michael Disney and Don Taylor
  Discovery of optical signals from pulsar NP
  0532, Nature, vol. 221, February 8th, 1969.
• Imagine the situation in the astronomy
  community in 1968. A graduate student doing some
  ordinary measurements of radio stars has come
  across a phenomenon that is truly extraordinary.
  A star is blinking on and off ten times per
  second. How could this be? How could a star turn
  its radio emissions on and off so rapidly? In any
  star there exists a fire of incredible
  temperature - hotter than the largest furnace on
  earth. How could it turn on, then off, over and
  over again?
• Astronomers all over the world begin to look for
  other pulsars, and sure enough, such objects
  are everywhere in the skies All, however, can
  only be detected by their radio waves Would
  anyone locate a pulsar which emitted so much
  energy that it could be observed with ordinary
  light? Some of the most famous astronomers
  enter the race, equipped with the world's largest
  telescopes. The winners, however, are two unknown
  young scientists who had only recently met.
  Whats more, they had never before operated a
  telescope. The American Institute of Physics
  http//www.aip.org/history/mod/pulsar/pulsar1/01.h
  tml
• So how did Cocke and Disney come to know pulsar
  NP 0532?

28
Optical Discovery of Pulsar NP 0532

• Studying the nights work
• Garfinkel, Livingston and Lynch got their hands
  on audio tape recordings of the nights work from
  the American Institute of Physics
• They examined the tapes to see how Cocke and
  Disneys observations were shaped over the night
  in their work together and in the company of
  another astronomer, Bob McCallister
• Harold Garfinkel, Eric Livingston and Mike Lynch
  The work of a discovering science construed with
  materials from the optically discovered pulsar,
  Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 11, pp.
  131-158, 1981.
• Having examined the tapes they focused
  particularly on how the astronomers work evolved
  from identifying a vague object-of-sorts (which
  had neither demonstrable sense nor concrete
  astronomical reference in the first instance), to
  identifying a transcendent Independent Galilean
  Object (IGO) - a pulsar - available to the
  scrutiny of the wider scientific community.
• In details of the astronomers talk together, the
  tapes documented an unfolding series of
  observations or scientific episodes over the
  course of which pulsar NP 0532 came into view.
  How?

29
Unpacking the Observations

• Examining account-able features
• Observation 18.
• McCallister Theres a nice dip on the side of
  that sky. Im going to turn this thing the
  oscilloscope down.
• Disney Weve got a bleeding pulse here.
• Cocke Hey! Wow! You dont suppose thats really
  it, do you? Cant be.
• Disney Its right bang in the middle of the
  period. Look, I mean right bang in the middle of
  the scale on the screen. It really looks like
  something from here to at the moment to me.
• Cocke Hmm.
• Disney And its growing too. I wont believe it
  until we get a second one pulse.
• Cocke I wont believe it until we get the
  second one and until the thing has shifted
  somewhere else on the horizontal axis of the
  screen.

30
Account-able Features of Obs. 18

• Working up a sense of the known object
• a nice dip on the side of that sky reveals a
  pulse but it is not a given pulse, not a
  practically observable and practically objective
  pulse, but a dubitable pulse, one whose
  facticity, which although suspected, is doubted
  at this point in time.
• The pulse represents a potential Independent
  Galilean Object, which in the current flow of
  their talk assumes the status of a vague
  object-of-sorts an object whose facticity stands
  in need of verification.
• Consequently, Cocke and Disney formulate
  technical conditions providing for the prima
  facie facticity of the object to-hand. These
  conditions include
• 1) reproducing the Observation such that a
  second pulse is detected,
• and 2) looking for a shift in the objects
  on-screen representation.
• This latter condition is predicated on the
  suspicion that the visibility of the object
  right bang in the middle of the scale may be an
  artefact of the technology a subsequent correct
  reading should place the object elsewhere on the
  screen.

31
Verifying the Object

• Observation 19.
• Disney Beginning.
• Disney My God, its still there. Its as good
  as it was, or better than it was last time.
• Cocke It disturbs me, thats right in the
  middle of the screen.
• Disney It isnt John, look.
• Cocke Its moved a little bit.
• McCallister If you get the right frequency then
  itll be more or less the same place, wouldnt
  it?
• Disney It should be more or less, you wont be
  exactly the same place.
• Disney Thats a bloody pulse isnt it.
• Cocke Lets move off that position and do
  somewhere else and see if we get the same thing.
  I hope to God this isnt some sort of artefact of
  the instrumentation.

32
Doing Verification Work

• Reproducing the observation, subject to emerging
  contingencies
• Condition 1 is readily satisfied in this
  Observation, indeed its better than it was last
  time.
• The satisfaction of Condition 2 is still in
  dispute, however. Although the on-screen
  representation of the pulse has shifted a little,
  it is not enough to determine whether or not the
  pulse is some sort of artefact of the
  instrumentation.
• Judgements as to the facticity of the object
  to-hand are suspended and a further technical
  condition is formulated.
• Condition 3 specifies moving the telescope (.25
  of a millimetre northwards).
• This positional check confirms that the equipment
  is working properly and results, in the following
  Observation, in the reproduction of the pulse and
  a shift in its on-screen position corresponding
  to the movement of the telescope
• The readings have been verified to their
  satisfaction and they conclude that a pulsar has
  been observed.

33
Formalising the Object

• Observation 22
• Disney We should be able to work out how many
  photons coming in per second to this pulse,
  right?
• Cocke Well, we should be, yeah.
• Disney Can we get the actual number can we
  read off digitally the number of photons in each
  channel subsequent to this?
• Cocke Oh yeah.
• Disney Now the fun begins, weve got to write
  out some sort of programme to reduce this tape
  and have the whole lot go in so
• Cocke I dont think we need to reduce the damn
  tape.
• Disney No.
• Cocke We have wed have to reduce the tape
  only if we saw nothing or just a bare little hint
  of something.

34
Making the Object Available

• Measurement
• Having established the facticity of the object,
  the astronomers formulate ways in which the the
  object may be found and verified by other members
  of the astronomical community.
• In order to achieve this, they examine their data
  for its measurable properties (such as photons
  per second).
• With these exact measures, other astronomers
  may reproduce the observation, and in the
  technical ways of their discipline, see Pulsar NP
  0532 for themselves.
• The Crab Pulsar, discovered by radio
  astronomers in November 1968, was seen to pulsate
  in optical light in January 1969 (Cocke et al.
  1969) by three groups within a matter of days.
  Brian Kern (2002), PhD Thesis, Optical
  Pulse-Phased Observations of Faint Pulsars with a
  Phase-Binning CCD Camera

35
The Knowing-Known Relationship

• Lived work
• Examining the accountable features of the nights
  work revealed the lived work whereby Cocke and
  Disney came to know pulsar NP 5302
• That work consisted of an unfolding series of
  observations populated by a host of concerted
  practical activities
• The nights work was socially organized in terms
  of configuring the equipment, doing verification
  work (including reproducing observations subject
  emergent contingencies), formalising the object,
  and so on
• It was through this unfolding, socially
  organized, course of lived work that a vague
  object-of-sorts came into view and was
  transformed into a definite astronomical object
  having properties that exist independent of the
  people, the place and the equipment with which it
  was discovered and which make it available to
  others

36
So What?

• The lived account and the formal account
• At no point in Cocke and Disneys account of NP
  0532 does the lived work of the objects
  production and recognition - its discovery -
  figure
• The lived work of the discovery - of how they
  come to see and know NP 0532 - is completely
  absent from their account (as it is absent from
  scientific accounts generally)
• The source of knowing - the lived work - is
  entirely absent, yet it is through this work that
  the relationship between knowing and known object
  is given (and account-ably so)
• The lived work is substituted for the formal
  account and divorced from what Husserl called the
  vital practices from which the possibility of
  knowledge emerges
• There is, then, what Garfinkel calls a gap in
  the literature, not only of scientific practice,
  but of everyday activities generally and it is
  towards filling this gap that the radical studies
  of work programme is directed

37
Why Radical?

• Inverting the accounting relationship
• Suspending the use of formal methods to account
  for everyday activities
• And instead orienting to, focusing on, and
  treating as a topic in their own right, the
  vital practices organizing the lived work of a
  setting as made available in members accounts
• Natural organization instead of formal
  organization then how things are organized on
  the ground by parties to them (not dispensing
  with the formal (e.g., method, procedure, rules,
  etc.) but, where it is an issue, unpacking how
  it is concertedly achieved
• A note on vital practices and members methods
  the two terms are different ways of speaking
  about the same thing and that is the visibly and
  materially embodied ways in which people concert
  their everyday activities and get them done
• There are other terms too work-practice is
  very common these days and, a phrase that
  propelled the radical studies of work programme,
  the missing interactional what of formal
  studies

38
The Missing Interactional What

• The orientation of EM studies
• Harvey Sacks speaks of a curiosity in the work
  and history of the social sciences the missing
  interactional what in lay and professional
  studies of organization. Several observable
  phenomena make specific what he is talking about.
  1) Available for observation is the omnipresence
  of accountable organizations of commonplace
  activities like families, faculties,
  traffic, welfare agencies, hospitals,
  manufacturing plants, city governments, or
  street gangs. 2) It is a matter for observation
  too that endlessly many inquiries accompany these
  accountable organizations as constituent features
  of them. It is to be observed in these
  accountable organizations and their inquiries
  that the occasioned, embodied, interactional
  just-so just-what of ordinary activities remains
  ignored, unknown, unsuspected, and unmissed as
  technical phenomena. 3) Finally, there is to be
  observed that 1) and 2) taken together compose a
  technical phenomenon that is discoverable, is
  consequential, and for the study of naturally
  organized activities is criterial. The phenomenon
  consists of the essential, used, and ignored
  relevance to the collaborated production of the
  orderliness in, of, and as ordinary activities,
  of the occasioned, embodied, interactional
  just-so-and-just-what of ordinary activities.
  Harold Garfinkel, unpublished manuscript

39
Working the Orientation

• Studying and representing naturally organized
  activities
• Focus on lived work as articulated in members
  accounts, or shopwork and shoptalk as
  Garfinkel puts it
• Harold Garfinkel Ethnomethodologys program,
  Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 59 (1), pp.
  5-21, 1996.
• Examine shopwork and shoptalk to identify its
  endogenous socially organized features - i.e.,
  the organizational features that are internal to
  and exhibited by that shopwork and shoptalk
  (e.g., configuring the equipment, doing
  verification, and formalising objects in
  astronomical work)
• Representing the social organization of everyday
  activities in terms of their witnessable
  haecceities - i.e., the specific details of
  everyday activities that make them the activities
  that they recognizably are
• So, not just doing verification, for example,
  but doing verification by formulating
  verification conditions, reproducing the
  observation in accordance with those conditions,
  and formulating further verification conditions
  to rule in or out artefacts of the technology
• Through description of haecceities EM seeks to
  exhibit the ways in which everyday activities are
  naturally organized by parties to them

40
Exhibiting Social Organization

• Durkheims social facts
• Social structures that exist above and beyond
  the individual and shape his or her everyday
  activities (IGOs)
• These structures of action are formally specified
  in the social sciences (e.g., Marxs model of
  capital, Webers bureaucratic model, Parsons
  social system, and more recently, actor-network
  theory)
• Formal studies seek to explain social facts but
  not do not show how they come into existence as
  lived features of members everyday activities,
  recognized, produced and shaped by them in their
  work together
• Distinctively, EM does not attempt to explain
  Durkheimanian social facts, but to show or
  exhibit them as and in details of their
  concerted, real world, real time achievement
• EM studies do NOT correspond to Durkheims
  social facts. Nor do they copy Durkheims social
  facts. Nor do they imitate, represent, write in
  place of, offer as a plan, schema, essence, or
  model for Durkheims social facts. Instead they
  exhibit Durkheims social facts Described
  from the bottom up each study specifies the
  particular social facts identifying orderliness
• Harold Garfinkel Autochthonous order
  properties of formatted queues,
  Ethnomethodologys Program Working Out
  Durkheims Aphorism, Rowman Littlefield,
  2002.istinctive constituents

41
Generalizing Exhibits

• EM doesnt
• Generalization is part of the formal social
  science machinery that EM eschews
• Generalization begs the question of validity,
  which EM addresses not by formalising its
  findings (through quantitative methods, for
  example), but by the availability of its studies
  to members
• EM studies are corrigible sketches of social
  organization, and may as such, be agreed with or
  contested by members (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992)
• EM studies are also studies of situated action
  and do not set out to make claims about the
  society at large (so again, we have no work for
  generalization to do)
• That is not to say that there is no ubiquity to
  EM studies, that EM is micro social science -
  e.g., CA and the turn-taking machine

42
Other Ubiquitous Settings

• Understanding work, organization and technology
• Propelled by early studies (e.g., of the nature
  of rules and procedures in organizations)
• Egon Bittner The concept of organization,
  Social Research, vol. 32, pp. 239-255, 1965.
• Don Zimmerman The practicalities of rule use,
  Understanding Everyday Life Toward the
  Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge (ed.
  Douglas, J.D.), pp. 221-238, Routledge and Kegan
  Paul, 1973.
• Lead to adoption of EM in industrial IT research
  labs (Xerox, Intel, Microsoft and many other
  companies besides)
• Lucy Suchman Plans and Situated Actions The
  Problem of Human-Machine Communication, Cambridge
  University Press, 1987.
• Graham Button (ed.) Technology in Working Order
  Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology,
  Routledge, 1992.
• Instrumental in development of Computer Supported
  Cooperative Work
• See the Association of Computing Machinerys
  digital library http//portal.acm.org
• Now a diverse field of study both in terms of IT
  research and the new domains that computing is
  moving into (domestic life, health, science,
  education, etc.)
• Driven by the need to understand how people
  actually work together and organize everyday
  activities in diverse settings

43
A Final Word Either/Or?

• The law of the excluded middle
• With its rejection of formal machinery at all
  points, EM is often construed as being
  antithetical to formal social science research
• And ethnomethodology certainly provides the
  grounds for making a sustained critique, one
  which sets up an either/or choice
• While it is true that you cannot do EM studies
  through formal means without losing EMs prize,
  that does not mean that FA and EM need be at
  loggerheads
• Rather than see EM as competing with FA, it might
  be more profitable to see EM as complementary to
  FA
• EM will always be alternate an incommensurable as
  a research approach, but in exhibiting social
  facts EM provides insights that FA cannot and
  never will be able to (and, of course, the
  inverse is true)
• The only choice to be made is whether or not to
  repair the gap in the literature and extend
  social science knowledge of everyday life

44

• A copy of this presentation, including
  references, is available online _at_
• www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/axc/EM_presentation.pdf