Ethnomethodology

This paper aims to develop a new understanding of normativity based upon the priority of the ordinary. By relying upon diverse sociological and philosophical traditions, the paper seeks to emphasize the ordinary tacit assumptions which provide the basic structure of our experience of the world and its normative features. The general argument is that, whereas sociological traditions of social interactionism shed new light upon the “empirical fact of normativity”, ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism offer a theoretical account of normativity which is consistent with the picture of normativity which emerges out of these empirical descriptions. The paper synthesizes the main achievements of these traditions into a unified account of normativity.

L’article propose une revue de littérature des travaux français qui se sont intéressés aux usages des technologies de la communication dans une perspective ethnométhodologique et conversationnelle. La première partie, théorique et historique, décrit la structuration de ce champ de recherche en France en retraçant ses ancrages épistémologiques, méthodologiques et institutionnels. La deuxième partie rend compte des travaux réalisés sur les trois principaux terrains d’enquête: la vidéocommunication, les interactions sur téléphone mobile et sur les plateformes conversationnelles d’internet. L’article met en évidence les apports de l’ethnométhodologie à la sociologie des usages, de la communication et des technologies, à travers notamment le traitement original des notions d’usage, de pratique et de contexte qu’elle rend possible.

"Table of content:

1: Introduction
2: Praxis and Practice Theory: A Brief Historical Overview
3: Praxeology and the Work of Giddens and Bourdieu
4: Practice as Tradition and Community
5: Practice as Activity
6: Practice as Accomplishment
7: Practice as the House of the Social: Contemporary Developments of the Heideggerian and Wittgensteinian Traditions
8: Discourse and Practice
9: Bringing it All Together: a Toolkit to Study and Represent Practice at Work



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Doing the ethnomethodology of a French TV news, this article aims to highlight some of the typical features of news story, and the way that one mobilizes sex categories for broadcasting. Taking into account the discursive components provided by the audiovisual text (talk, picture, caption and sound), I look at first into the means displayed for producing the facticitiy, the reality, the "publicity" (Habermas) and the "newsworthiness" of the event which is reported. Afterwards, in relation to the representation of a "doing gender" which ends the "recognition-type description" of the main protagonist of the story, I focus on the issue of the televisual accomplishment of an identity which is both professional and sexual. Actually, I will show that that character is not an authentic stockbreeder as far as it is a woman too. Raising that point, I will bring finally some clarifications concerning the analysis of sex categories, the question of their saliency in interaction more particularly.

Participant observation is employed in any academic discipline or professional field requiring in-depth studies of everyday life. The article describes the key processes of undertaking participant observation involving joining members of a social group, learning how to participate, and undertake fieldwork. Methodological issues such as validity, generalisation and representations are discussed in relation to the collection and analysis of data. Participant observation whether open or covert is seen to involve a continuous reflection on ethical issues and contributes to the inclusion of the voices of those who are marginalised or rendered invisible in public debates.

In order to study collaborative information behaviour (e.g. information search, creation, and sharing) in the work environment, it is important that we take into consideration its embedded nature in collaborative work, however not many studies have actually taken this into consideration. In conducting fieldwork, we studied group task management in the work of IT product hardware designers. The study shows how understanding the details of information activities embedded in task management allowed us to generate some ideas for transforming task management into a more collaborative activity, and for reembedding task management more thoroughly into their work practices together with the practitioners. The paper discusses how taking an ethnomethodological approach can be fruitful for researchers who want to gain a close understanding of actual collaborative information activities and their embedded nature in work, and how understandings of this kind can be important for developing ideas ...

This paper aims to describe the asymmetric interactions between lawyers and lay people in courtrooms, The hearings are an interesting environment where we can observe these interactions between experts and lay people. The research is based on the 20 hearings of the "Juges de Proximité" in courtrooms in southern France counting over sixty hours of observation in five different courts. The "Juges de Proximité" were created in 20030 They are non-professional judges who have the law graduation, They treat small civil claims and the misdemeanors. The main goal is to provide a thick description of these interactions for analyze with the ethnomethodological
point of view. As a result, I could describe a reflexive activity between lawyers and lay people. In one hand, the lawyers explain the law in ordinary language while the lay people make a struggle to understand the legal assessments for practical purposes. This activity is possible due to the capacity of creating cognitive tools using contextual accounts. Finally, the court hearings work allows observing how the law is accomplished with the cognitive tools which are developed by the interactions of lawyers and lay people.

This paper analyses how a Big Issue vendor approached passers-by and how they responded, how recognizable courses of social and economic activity were interactionally produced from initiation through to some conclusion. The paper recovers how the vendor's work was contextually embedded in the urban landscape, how it was constrained by, and actively shaped, the social order of the street. Drawing on video-audio recordings the paper contributes to a growing body of ethnographic and ethnomethodological research which has emphasized the embodied, contingent and interactional character of economic activity. By examining such materials, the paper is well positioned to describe how the vendor found his market on the street, social interventions that propelled passers-by into buying behaviour. The paper sheds light on now familiar encounters which occur millions of times each week in the UK and beyond.

In this article we present an ethnomethodological study of a controversial case of ‘friendly fire’ from the Iraq War in which leaked video footage, war on video, acquired particular significance. We examine testimony given during a United States Air Force (USAF) investigation of the incident alongside transcribed excerpts from the video to make visible the methods employed by the investigators to assess the propriety of the actions of the pilots involved. With a focus on the way in which the USAF investigators pursued their own analysis of language-in-use in their discussions with the pilots about what had been captured on the video, we turn attention to the background expectancies that analytical work was grounded in. These ‘vernacular’ forms of video analysis and the expectancies which inform them constitute, we suggest, an inquiry into military culture from within that culture. As such, attending to them provides insights into that culture.

The design of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) affords for, and itself produces, non-response situations that are not possible in FTF or telephone interaction. These system-occasioned non-responses produce almost isomorphic stimuli to participant non-responses. Situations thus arise in which non-responses are interpersonally accountable despite agentive ambiguity. This study explores four intersections of participant-action and system-occasioned non-responses. An extension to Pomerantz's (1984b) 'pursuing a response' problems/solutions is proposed. The impact of IRC's design on its popularity is discussed in contrast to more recent chat systems. Suggestions are made for active and passive presence and non-response accounting features in future chat systems.

This edited collection is concerned with talk and activity inside cars, with examining the interior of a car as socially rich and meaningful. The papers here are concerned with both social interaction as the intertwining of multiple modalities of language, the body, and artefacts of the interior material world of the car, as well as with how the car’s movement in time and space through particular external physical surroundings contributes to, or is accomplished by, social interaction. Methodologically, the papers are primarily informed by principles and insights of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and multimodal interaction analysis.

In this collection the car is considered as a ‘place’ or ‘space’ for meaningful and mediated activities. The papers examine how the physical and spatial configuration of the car, and its possibilities for mobility, can constrain or afford particular interactional practices, social activities and understandings, and impact upon language and processes of interaction. Interaction in cars creates particular demands, opportunities and orientations for its participants, as the car moves through the semiotically rich external environment. Generally, the papers consider driving as not merely a requisite competence for accomplishing travel from point A to point B, but as occurring itself as a situated activity that is integrated with ordinary conversation.

Most research on driving and automobility follows one of two broad directions: driving safety research; and the social and cultural meanings of automobility and driving. Driving safety research, on the one hand, is mostly dominated by studies conducted within a psychological and cognitive scientific framework. In social sciences and human geography, on the other hand, such dominant approaches to driving and drivers have increasingly been critiqued for undermining the cultural and sociological meanings of automobility and driving. Consequently, with the emergence of ‘mobility studies’, scholars have begun to study the social, cultural, and ideological meanings and discourses of the car, car cultures, driving cultures, driving practices, automobility, road systems, and traffic systems, as parts of modern life.


The papers in this special issue can therefore contribute to interdisciplinary dialogue between social scientific and psychological driving research. Further empirical knowledge is needed of how people organize their talk and embodied activities for social activity in cars, and relative to the contingencies of the driving situation and the physical and spatial layout of the car. By drawing on a specific empirical research methodology that relies on recorded data collected from real-life situations inside the car, the papers of this collection can add to the important interdisciplinary discussion that surrounds driving, safety and automobility, and provide food for thought by addressing central issues, raising questions, and perhaps even by providing some answers.

The chapters are:

Pentti Haddington, Maurice Nevile, and Tiina Keisanen
'Meaning in motion: Sharing the car, sharing the drive'

Eric Laurier, Barry Brown, and Hayden Lorimer
'What it means to change lanes: Actions, emotions, and wayfinding in the family car

Pentti Haddington
'Movement in action: Initiating social navigation in cars'

Maurice Nevile
'Interaction as distraction in driving: A body of evidence'

Tiina Keisanen
' “Uh-oh, we were going there”: Environmentally occasioned
noticings of trouble in in-car interaction'

Lorenza Mondada
'Talking and driving: Multi-activity in the car'

Marjorie Harness Goodwin and Charles Goodwin
'Car talk: Integrating texts, bodies, and changing landscapes'

Elizabeth Keating and Gene Mirus
'The eyes have it: Technologies of automobility in sign language'

Chaim Noy
'Inhabiting the family-car: Children-passengers and parents-drivers on the school run

Der Vortrag entwirft eine Soziologie der Kapazitäten inklusive zentraler Konzepte: Vollzugs-, Bezugs- und existentielle Probleme; ausgestattete und eingestellte Apparate der Problembearbeitung; Operationalisierung der Problemarbeit qua formativer Objekte; bedingte Kapazitäten.

L'anthropologie culturelle de facture interprétativiste a fait place à une variété d'approches: réaliste et critique (le droit doit être cherché au-delà de son apparence formelle), pluraliste (l'expression du droit ne se réduit pas au droit étatique), praxéologique (le droit s'observe dans sa performance pratique ordinaire).

This is an exciting addition to the dynamic, multidisciplinary field of membership categorization analysis. Bringing together the biggest names in MCA this landmark publication provides a contemporary analysis of the field and a platform for emerging researchers and students to build upon.

The book sets out the current methodological developments of MCA highlighting its analytic strength – particularly when examining social identity and social knowledge. It provides a sophisticated tool of qualitative analysis and draws from a wide range of empirical studies provided by global scholars.

The culmination of years of international research this agenda-setting text will be essential reading for academics and advanced students using membership categorization across the social sciences; particularly in media and communication studies, sociology, psychology, education, political science and linguistics.


Contents.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Membership Categorization Analysis. William Housley and Richard Fitzgerald

Chapter 2: De Reifiying Categories. Rod Watson

Chapter 3: Prospective and Retrospective Categorization: Category proffers and inferences in social interaction and rolling news media. Elizabeth Stokoe and Frederick Attenborough

Chapter 4: Categorization Work in the Courtroom: The ‘foundational’ character of membership categorization analysis. Christian Licoppe

Chapter 5: Challenging Normativity: re-appraising category, bound, tied and predicated features. Edward Reynolds and Richard Fitzgerald

Chapter 6: Omnirelevance in Technologized Interaction: Couples coping with video calling distortions.. Sean Rintel

Chapter 7: Membership Categorization and Methodological Reasoning in Research Team Interaction. William Housley and Robin Smith.

"MCA provides an orientation, set of questions, and identification of discrete discourse devices to aid understanding of the moral work  being accomplished by speakers’ and writers’ as they  select  category terms and tie them to descriptions.  Fitzgerald and Housley’s Advances in Membership Categorization Analysis brings together cutting edge theoretical explication with fascinating examples ( YouTube posts, intimates video chatting, a review board assessing parole, a research team meeting, online breaking news updates)  and is a must-read for anyone interested in identities and interaction."

Karen Tracy
Professor and Chair. Department of Communication,

"A state of the art collection which is essential reading for anyone interested in social identity and social order."

David Silverman
Goldsmiths' and King's College, London, and University of Technology, Sydney

"Membership categories are central to the organization of culture.  They set up inferential relations between classes of people, they implicate actions and thoughts, and they mark moral statuses.  Membership categorization analysis develops the tradition of work started by Harvey Sacks and shows that the issues he explored are still urgent and significant.  In this volume an A-list of contributors provide state of the art analyses that illustrate the ongoing vitality of membership categorization analysis.  It is essential reading for anyone interested in this topic."

Jonathan Potter
Professor of Discourse Analysis, Loughborough University

"Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley are to be congratulated for further developing the field. In taking up such questions as the ethnomethodology of categorization (a masterful discussion by Rod Watson), the omni-relevance of categories, the precise nature of the connections between categories and predicates, the temporal reference of category usage, the relationship of categorization to “doing being ordinary” and the place of categorization in the “social life of methods,” the contributors truly bear out the promise expressed in the title of advancing membership categorization analysis."

Peter Eglin
Wilfrid Laurier University

本文主要探討科技（technology）與隱私（privacy）之間的關係。其中較為主要的觀點是，科學與技術發展在人們對於隱私概念的認知與實作上，構成不同程度之變化。本研究將從技術哲學觀點出發，輔以俗民方法學對於社會成員在日常生活中之實作的探討，並以行動數位設備或所謂「穿戴式科技（wearable technologies）」為例，提出對科技與隱私之關係在理論上不同的觀察。本研究在過去已建立之隱私研究的基礎上，發展「隱私實作（doing privacy）」概念，並期待可以適切地理解隱私概念內涵在電子媒介與網際網路時代的變化。本研究嘗試探究使用者的「隱私實作」是如何透過新技術的使用來完成，以及該實作對使用者成員而言具有的意涵。本研究的結論有二：第一，從理論觀點來看「隱私不再」的現象時指出，人們的隱私實作並不一定在嘗試維護或保有傳統上的隱私觀點，而是透過實作來建構、形塑新的隱私觀，此一新的隱私觀也透過新技術的開發與使用，反過來與使用者共同建構這個新的隱私概念。第二，從實作的觀點，隱私或許不再具有價值中立性，而是「訊息／身體」這組區別運作出來的突現物（emergent）。相較於過去將隱私視為一種「權利」，新型態的科技所形塑出來的隱私概念毋寧是一種反身性運作的暫時性成就（ongoing accomplishment），也更具有與科技共構、共生的特性。本研究也主張，此一特性在嘗試理解現代科技與隱私概念之構成的關聯性上，將扮演重要角色。

The study mainly concerns the relationship between technology and privacy. It focuses on the idea that the development of science and technology to a great extent comes from people’s changing recognition of and practices of privacy. Inspired by the philosophy of technology and then through the observation of layperson’s daily practices from ethnomethodological perspective, the study examines how wearable devices with self-tracking technology “re-shape” people’s understanding of privacy with an emphasis on a transformation from “information as body’s environment” to “information as body’s environment”. The discussion of the transformation leads to at least two concluding remarks. On one hand, “privacy no more” indicates that people’s privacy practices with self-tracking technology are not necessarily maintaining or solidifying the traditional viewpoint of privacy; instead, they are used to construct a different one. On the other hand, privacy may not be value-free; rather, it emerges from the distinction of information and body. The concept of privacy re-shaped by self-tracking technology becomes reflexively an ongoing accomplishment. The aim of the study is to investigate how people’s “doing privacy” is accomplished with the intervention of self-tracking technology, whether voluntarily or not, and to contribute to a further understanding of the relationship between privacy and technology.

À partir d’une enquête ethnographique au Musée national d’art moderne, cet article explore les enjeux de la documentation des collections : chaque œuvre possède en effet son dossier, où sont consignées toutes les informations qui concernent sa carrière au sein du musée. J’examine plus particulièrement le traitement de sa partie dite confidentielle, qui cristallise un certain nombre d’enjeux relatifs à la circulation du savoir sur les œuvres. En croisant analyse de contenu et observation des contextes d’usage des dossiers, j’étudie trois exemples de données confidentielles pour rendre compte de leur signification située. Mon étude montre comment le dossier offre une mise en perspective originale des œuvres, en manifestant leur attachement à l’institution et aux personnes qui s’en occupent.

Übung macht bekanntlich den Meister. Was aber, wenn ein Tun als immer weiter zu perfektionierende Kunst aufgebaut wird, so dass kein Können endgultig ausreicht? Wenn dieselbe Pirouette, so glänzend sie auf der Bühne erscheint, im Training doch stets unvollkommen bleibt? Diese Ethnografie erkundet das Üben als einen grundlegenden Aspekt aller menschlichen Praxis im Kontext des klassischen Balletts, wo es sozial ausdifferenziert, dramatisiert und als ewig unvollendet entgrenzt wird.

Im Rahmen ihrer eigenen Ballettausbildung verfolgt die Autorin die Praktiken der Perfektionierung, um den Erwerb praktischen Wissens
mikrosoziologisch aufzuschließen. Das Buch zeigt, wie Fertigkeiten als solche relevant, aufgefuhrt und anerkannt werden. Es rekonstruiert die Bedingungen für Körper als kompetente Einheiten, wie sie tanzend auf den Theaterbühnen, aber auch im Alltag und in soziologischen Theorien erscheinen. Der empirische Fall ermöglicht so Antworten auf grundlegende
Fragen der Praxistheorie: Woraus besteht ein ›Können‹? Was geschieht mit Körpern, wenn sich Personen Fertigkeiten aneignen?

Four stars in the night sky have been formally recognised by their Australian Aboriginal names. The names include three from the Wardaman people of the Northern Territory and one from the Boorong people of western Victoria. The Wardaman star names are Larawag, Wurren and Ginan in the Western constellations Scorpius, Phoenix and Crux (the Southern Cross). The Boorong star name is Unurgunite in Canis Majoris (the Great Dog). They are among 86 new star names drawn from Chinese, Coptic, Hindu, Mayan, Polynesian, South African, and Aboriginal Australian cultures.

Mit dem Begriff " Ethnomethodologie " ist nicht etwa eine Methodologie wissenschaft-lichen Forschens bezeichnet, sondern ein spezifisches Forschungsinteresse an den " Me-thoden " der Teilnehmer. Die dem ethnomethodologischen Ansatz zugrunde liegende Idee ist einfach: Wenn unsere Alltagswelt einen sinnvollen, strukturierten und geord-neten Charakter hat und wenn dies durch kontinuierliche Arbeit der Teilnehmer der Alltagswelt erreicht wird, dann muss es dafür bestimmte Methoden geben. Diese Me-thoden stehen im Fokus ethnomethodologischer Studien. Die Ethnomethodologie stellt also einen Untersuchungsansatz dar, der die klassische soziologische Frage, wie soziale Ordnung möglich ist, so stellt, dass man sich dem alltäglichen Handeln der Mitglieder einer Gesellschaft zuwendet, in dessen Vollzug die sinnhafte Ordnung erst herge-stellt wird. Die Ethnomethodologie als einen speziellen soziologischen Ansatz zu betrachten, wie es in diesem Beitrag im Wesentlichen geschieht, entspricht allerdings nicht ihrem Selbstverständnis. Sie selbst versteht sich eher als eine radikale Alternative zur (her-kömmlichen) Soziologie, zu der sie sich letztlich in einem " asymmetrischen und in-kommensurablen " Verhältnis sieht (vgl. Garfinkel/Wieder 1992; auch Garfinkel 1988 und 2002). Darüber hinaus entziehen sich Ethnomethodologen selbst in der Regel einer theoretischen Rede über Ethnomethodologie und empfehlen stattdessen, den Zugang zur ethnomethodologischen Vorgehensweise über konkrete Fallstudien zu suchen. Der folgende Versuch einer Überblicksdarstellung ist also notwendigerweise beschränkt und selektiv und bedarf auf jeden Fall der Ergänzung durch die unmittelbare Auseinan-dersetzung mit empirischen ethnomethodologischen Arbeiten. Schließlich erwachsen auch aus der spezifischen Begrifflichkeit der Ethnomethodologie gewisse Schwierig-keiten für eine einführende Darstellung, insbesondere insofern die meisten dieser Be-griffe nur in englischer Sprache vorliegen. Auch grundlegende ethnomethodologische Arbeiten (z. B. Garfinkel 1967; Sacks 1992) liegen bis heute nicht in deutscher Überset-zung vor und in der deutschsprachigen Bildungsforschung ist der ethnomethodologi-sche Ansatz kaum aufgegriffen worden.

Firstly, the Roman Catholic «prehistory» of contact between the Panoan groups of Bolivian Amazonia and Jesuit, Franciscan and lay clergy missionaries is described. The paper then analyses the continuity of the evangelization process by diverse evangelical denominations, describing three missionary experiences with the Chacobo since 1955 to the present day. Finally, general insights are proposed relating the anthropological problem of religious conversion.