Introduction

Phenomenological sociology is a constructivist approach that can be presented through four fundamental ideas, which unite its research directions.

First, common-sense ideas dominate men who take the world for granted.

Second, society is continually produced and reproduced by its members.

Third, individuals have practical rather than philosophical concerns, which explains their attachment to routines.

Fourth, society is overwhelmingly a mental process. Although phenomenological sociology continually remembers that thought and action influence each other, the cognitive processes that govern it are at the center of the investigation. Phenomenology is interested in studying the structures of consciousness (Collins 1985, 204). For his part, Habermas wrote that Schutz and Luckmann, two authors we will meet shortly, remain tied to the model of the philosophy of consciousness (Habermas 1987, vol. II, 129).

After a brief introduction dedicated to Edmund Husserl, this chapter will explore Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology, Berger and Luckmann’s social construction of reality, and Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology.

Edmund Husserl

Phenomenological sociology takes its name from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and indicates the interest in everything that can be known through the senses: Everything that appears. The subject matter focuses on understanding how humans perceive things in their surroundings through experience (Sokolowski 1999, 2). The term “phenomenon” originates from the Greek word “appearance.”

Husserl, a contemporary of Cooley and Mead, was born in Prossnitz, Moravia, into a family of Jewish origin, belonging to the German-speaking minority. He converted to Lutheranism in 1887 but did not establish significant relations with the Christian or Jewish community. Husserl was the teacher of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the last years of his life, he suffered the consequences of Nazi politics, which he, however, accepted with firmness and without repentance: “Death saved him from the worst” (Sini 1965, 7), which occurred in 1938, just before the world plunged into the abyss. His library was secretly moved from Germany to Lovania between 1938 and 1939 to prevent its destruction by the Nazis.

He was a professor at the University of Gottingen and in Freiburg until 1929. He was a student of Franz Brentano (1938–1917), from whom he derived the idea that consciousness is intentional in that it always refers to something other than oneself. Intentionality denotes the capacity of human consciousness to concentrate on or direct its attention toward something, also referred to as “aboutness” (Duranti 1999, 134).

I will dwell only on Husserl’s ideas that are most useful for understanding the fundamental assumptions of phenomenological sociology. It is doing him wrong, but here, Husserl interests me in terms of other authors. His fundamental concepts in a chapter on phenomenological sociology are lifeworld, natural attitude, and epoché.

For Husserl, the lifeworld is the world of lived and concrete life, consisting of goals, needs, and emotions. In the lifeworld, the natural attitude dominates, that is, the attitude of the common man, who accepts the world without question as a predetermined phenomenon. Husserl writes that the lifeworld is “pre-reflective” and “intuitive.” We find it already given and take it for granted. If the common man takes the world for granted, the philosopher must problematize it, embracing what Husserl calls the “epoché,” a term from the Greek epì (on) and échein (to hold).

The phenomenological epoché is an invitation to keep the meanings “above” suspended in parentheses.

How?

Abandoning the natural attitude to assume that of the viewer. To succeed in this undertaking, the philosopher must suspend the recognition of reality. Therefore, the phenomenological epoché is a way of approaching the world, a mental attitude that requires a profound change in our usual way of perceiving phenomena.

While the epoché of the ancient skeptics involved the total suspension of judgment, the phenomenological epoché suspends judgment only on the world here for us. The phenomenological epoché forbids us to consider the world in front of us as existing as we do in practical life and positivistic science. Husserl wants to grasp things by overcoming the prejudices that shape the way of seeing the world.

The epoché performs precisely this function: suspending, or putting in brackets, the presuppositions of common sense to achieve a disinterested knowledge capable of grasping the essence of the phenomena. The Husserl epoché invites us to consider things as if they appeared before our eyes for the first time.

If I had to find a keyword to make this chapter easier to read, it would be: “Description.”

Sociologists who follow the phenomenological approach believe that the role of sociology is to describe how we see the world around us as accurately as possible. Still, our “sight” is social in the sense that our concepts influence it, and our concepts are influenced by the culture in which we are immersed and that we take for granted. Therefore, phenomenological sociologists start from the description to go further. They are interested in describing what individuals see to study why they see one way rather than another. Only in this way can sociologists understand how individuals develop similar perceptions to those of others and how they construct a shared understanding of the social world.

Up to now, I have regarded theories as an indispensable element of knowledge, and I have made what we see depend on the theories we use. For example, we have before us a battalion engaged in a war. Conflict theorists may observe soldiers mutinying when ordered to carry out tasks that could lead to their death in enemy fire. On the other hand, functionalist theorists will notice how all the interconnected parts that make up that battalion cooperate to remedy the mutiny so that the army continues to function to achieve its goals.

Husserl denies that theories help us gain a deeper understanding of the world.

He believes that theories are explanations and not evidence. Husserl frustrates the efforts we have made so far: to understand the world, we must, first of all, free ourselves from theories and start from the evidence, that is, from the world of life, which is a pre-theoretical and pre-categorical world. Phenomenology invites us to become aware of life itself. The epoché, also known as “bracketing” in phenomenological research, is not simply one of the main themes of phenomenology. To put the world in brackets is, quite differently, its “decisive theme” (Sini 2012, 157; Heap and Roth 1973, 357).

Phenomenological sociologists acknowledge the existence of the outer world, but for analytical purposes, they choose to withhold belief in its existence temporarily. This means intentionally refraining from making judgments directly or indirectly related to the outer world. In brackets, we need to include the existence of the external world and the scientific propositions from all fields of study (Schutz 1962, vol. I, 104–105).

If you don’t comprehend epoché, you won’t be able to delve into more advanced levels of phenomenological research.

An anti-positivist impetus possessed Husserl.

In his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, whose main manuscript dates back to 1935–1936 but which was published posthumously in 1954, Husserl argues that European culture is in decline due to the dominance of the objectivist view imposed by the triumph of the natural sciences. The world of science, a symbolic world based on physical-mathematical parameters, has ended up obscuring the lifeworld. A fact that is all the more serious because it is the lifeworld that supports the world of science, not the other way around. The world of science could not exist without the pre-theoretical and intuitive lifeworld. The European sciences are not in crisis because they have lost their scientificity or ability to know the world.

Not at all.

They are in crisis because they have forgotten the absolute importance of the lifeworld; they have forgotten that man is the ultimate goal of all human activities, including scientific activity, which is a realization of the human spirit. Husserl makes a severe judgment and writes that science, or rather, science shaped by positivism, has nothing more to tell us because it excludes, in advance, the most urgent problems of man, which, especially after the Great War, are the problems of the meaning of human existence.

Our lives are plagued by existential problems, which positivistic science neglects. Men can find their meaning only in the lifeworld, which is the sphere of everyday life certainties practically tested by the ordinary man and considered unconditionally valid in human life, before any need for a scientific foundation (Husserl 1970, 381). The lifeworld is the “tissue” of intersubjective background understandings (Harrington 2006, 341). All those formations that provide motivations for personal behaviors, such as associations, groups, and cultural formations, also belong to the lifeworld (Forni 1972, 89).

Husserl rejects the idea of explaining the lifeworld with the tools of science. If anything, it is the science that must be traced back to the practical problems of the lifeworld. Today, however, positivism, with its idea of truth and objectivity, has also affected philosophy and the vision of the world, which wither in a gloomy decadence.

Yet science hasn’t always been like this.

At its dawn, and in its first development, science accepted specifically human questions, and, for this reason, it had great significance for that European humanity which has been shaped in a completely new way since the Renaissance. In that reshaping, science played a leading role. Husserl excludes that science can make sense if it takes into consideration only what is objectively ascertainable. Let me be clear: He does not accuse science of being subservient to the ruling class, as happens with the Frankfurt School, but of carrying out its practices independently from the lifeworld. Husserl does not even reject technique or any particular sciences but claims that science must remember that living subjects invented its techniques and operations, the concrete men, to whom science must return.

Husserl raises questions about the meaning of human existence and its relationship with science.

Schutz’s Phenomenology of the Social World

Alfred Schutz sought to harmonize Husserl’s phenomenology, of which he was a pupil, and Weber’s interpretive sociology. Referring to the latter, he conveyed European phenomenology into American sociology. Born in Vienna into a middle-class Jewish family, he fled to the United States in 1939 to escape Nazism. When he arrived in New York, he worked in a bank and, in 1943, thanks to his philosophical training, he began to hold some evening courses in social philosophy at the New School for Social Research, where he was a professor until his death.

The first and most important of Schutz’s work is The Phenomenology of The Social World, published in 1932 (Schutz 1967) and Collected Papers in three volumes, which appeared between 1962 and 1966. Reflections on the Problem of Relevance was posthumously published in 1970 (Schutz 1970).

Schutz is a rich and complex thinker. His sociology is based on various concepts, some already present in Husserl, such as the lifeworld, the ordinary man in the unquestioned reality of everyday life, common sense, epoché, and typification (Husserl 1970, 209).

While Weber dealt with the construction of types in the scientific field, Schutz deals with it with reference to the common man’s everyday life.

For Schutz, all ordinary men develop types, not just sociologists. The common man has to work out types of things, people, and situations, to wander around the world without stumbling constantly. The aim of this incessant typification activity is practical and non-cognitive. The common man’s problem is to act pragmatically and not overthink critically. The ordinary man is so absorbed in practical life that he is not aware of the cognitive activity in which he is constantly engaged. He lives on typification he derives, in small part, from direct experiences and, in great part, from socialization. Almost everything that the ordinary man knows is something that has been said, transmitted, or indirectly reported to him. The ordinary man’s mind is dominated by commonsense ideas, which he uses to classify the world for practical purposes. Everything is pigeonholed into pre-established cognitive schemes. Schutz’s basic idea is Weberian: Empirical reality is pure chaos, which man must order by resorting to typologies. To classify is to simplify.

Weber’s sociologist takes care of typifying every time he/she faces social research; Schutz’s ordinary man deals with typifying in all moments of life and in all spheres of activity in which he is involved. Weber’s sociologist creates typologies, unlike Schutz’s ordinary man, who receives them ready for use.

Taking up Husserl’s idea, according to which science rests on the lifeworld, Schutz argues that the sociologist constructs his/her ideal types by drawing on common-sense knowledge, which he/she derives from the world of everyday life. It follows that the sociologist’s ideal types are “types of types” in the sense that the sociologist constructs his/her scientific types on the types already existing in everyday life.

Rather than creating ideal types, the sociologist builds them on existing ones, creating “second-degree constructs” (Schutz 1953). The sociologist moves in a world of already existing types since all knowledge, not only sociological knowledge, is based on the construction of types. Typification is not a specific procedure of sociological knowledge but rather the general process of knowing (Izzo 1994, 337–338).

The fundamental difference between scientific rationality and common-sense rationality is as follows: The scientist equips him/herself with a series of procedural rules to critically reflect on his/her thought and knowledge, searching for consistency and rigor; the ordinary man, on the other hand, is completely disinterested in such cognitive procedures and does not care about the inconsistency or approximation of his knowledge, if this ensures the desired practical results. In short, common-sense rationality considers the social world valid until proven otherwise. Schutz, taking up another Husserl theme, argues that sociologists should strive to understand the practical rationality with which the ordinary man explains and gives meaning to reality instead of trying to impose his rationality on the lifeworld.

We will soon see that these ideas of Schutz will be central to the founder of ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel.

Schutz indicated the three postulates for constructing scientific models of the social world at the foundation of the sociologist’s activity.

First, the postulate of logical consistency. The conceptual frameworks must be expressed with the highest degree of clarity and conceptual distinction in compliance with the principles of formal logic. Respect for this postulate guarantees the objective validity of the social scientist’s theoretical constructs. Their rigidly logical character is a key difference between scientific and common-sense thinking in everyday life.

Second, the postulate of subjective interpretation. The social scientist must develop a model of the individual mind to which to attribute a series of typical contents and then explain the facts observed as the result of the activity of that mind. This postulate guarantees the possibility of tracing every human action, and its results, to the subjective meaning that the action, or its result, has for the actor.

Third, the postulate of adequacy. The constructs of the social scientist must be consistent with the constructs of the experience of social reality according to common sense. Simply put, the scientific model describing an action should align with everyday common sense so that those who perform the action can comprehend it in the context of their lifeworld. This means that second-degree constructs must be consistent with first-degree constructs.

More than rational, the ordinary man is reasonable. He uses reasonableness to solve the practical problems of everyday life. The antithesis that haunts the ordinary man is not true/false but probable/improbable. Knowing an event’s probabilities to verify itself makes you more likely to avoid risks and dangers.

The ideal types perform many functions useful to the urgent needs of daily life.

First, they allow time to be taken away from critical reasoning and invested in practical life. Second, they streamline the interaction between individuals, indicating to the individual what to expect from other individuals and situations before coming into direct contact. Third, they make routines possible, the foundation of practical life. Fourth, they allay the anxiety produced by the unknown and the unexpected. Typologies can perform these practical functions only if there is an intersubjective world of meanings, that is, if they are shared. Suppose the types are different for each individual. In that case, the meetings become complicated, and the routines are blocked, with the consequence that the individual is forced to subtract time from practical life to invest it in speculative life, with which to explain the unexpected. Schutz placed intersubjectivity as the basis of social life. Even the simplest interaction, such as asking questions, presupposes a series of common-sense constructs.

In summary, individuals have the same mental schemes, based on common sense, transmitted from one generation to another through socialization, which creates a world of obvious intersubjective meanings. The result is that individuals take the world for granted because they suspend all doubts about it.

Ordinary men periodically question one or another taken-for-granted segment of their lifeworld. Still, the cultural foundation of the social world, its “taken-for-grantedness” and “commonness,” remains unchallenged and unthematized.

Box 12.1: The Phenomenological Paradox

Phenomenological sociology aims to question the established order. With phenomenological sociology, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the obvious becomes problematic. The philosopher’s task, as Schutz conceives it, is to dig under the skin of the ordinary man’s pre-reflective attitude to reconstruct the world of common sense (Gorman 1977, 37).

Referring to the studies of William James, Schutz recognizes the existence of a multiplicity of worlds or orders of reality. These worlds, which James calls “sub-universes,” are probably “infinite” in number. There is the world of the senses or physical things, the world of science, religion, and the supernatural, the world of madness and extravagance, and the world of individual opinions. The popular mind perceives the existence of these sub-worlds in a disordered, incoherent, and disconnected way.

The popular mind forgets the others when it dwells on one of them. However, a dominant world, a paramount reality, imperiously imposes itself on the individual. It is the world of everyday life, made up of family, loved ones, and everything urgent. Men can divert their attention from the other sub-worlds, making them disappear. But if they wanted to ignore the reality of everyday life, their awakening would be abrupt because the reality of everyday life is the reality that touches their skin. It is the reality in front of us when we open the front door or find ourselves in an elevator with other people or an iron cage while we are engaged in a Mixed Martial Arts fight.

In phenomenological sociology, what is beautiful, cultured, or refined is unimportant. What is close is important. The fundamental antithesis is not relevance/irrelevance but proximity/distance. The first antithesis is subsumed in the second. Hence, the phenomenological paradox that what appears vile, squalid, and repulsive can become the most important fact of our lives. The reality of everyday life is the supreme reality, the paramount reality. The most pressing of all man’s pragmatic problems is death or the “fundamental anxiety.” Fear and awareness of death are the fundamental basis of all our life projects. Death anxiety drives men to act and think. It is the ordering principle of the hierarchy of our priorities (Schutz 1962, vol. I, 228).

Schutz’s Stranger

In The Stranger, published in 1944, Schutz describes the typical phenomenological attitude toward the social world.

A stranger is an adult who finds him/herself in an unfamiliar environment and must learn new ways of thinking and behaving to be accepted permanently or at least tolerated by the group he/she approaches (Schutz 1944, 499).

Schutz suggests that the stranger par excellence is the immigrant, which he also places at the center of his essay, but specifies that a stranger is also the future husband who wants to be admitted to his fiancée’s family, the son of a farmer who enters college, the citizen who settles him/herself in a rural environment, the recruit who joins the army. Schutz excludes from the stranger category the visitor and the guest interested in establishing only temporary contact with the group. The visitor approaches but does not have the problem of adapting. The Stranger describes the phenomenological attitude and condenses the fundamental principles of Schutz’s sociology.

The sociologist is a disinterested scientific observer whose task is to observe, describe, and classify the social world as clearly as possible, using rigorous concepts and respecting the postulates of logical consistency, subjective interpretation, and adequacy.

The ordinary man is inconsistent because hi interests are not integrated within a unitary system. His life projects, those relating to work, free time, and the many social roles he assumes, are only partially organized, and, above all, their hierarchy changes continuously, based on the growth of personality.

The ordinary man’s knowledge is only partially clear for the simple reason that he is not interested in fully understanding the general principles governing the relationships between the elements of his world. He is satisfied with finding a well-functioning telephone service and, normally, he does not ask himself any questions about how that device works and the physical laws that make it possible to function. He is not concerned with knowing how the goods he buys in stores are produced or where the money he pays for them comes from. He takes it for granted that his interlocutors will understand what he says and will respond accordingly; no wonder all this happens. Furthermore, the common man does not seek truth or even certainty. He is only interested in information about what is likely to happen to him to guess the possibilities or risks that his ordinary practical activities will go as planned. From his pragmatic point of view, the fact that the subway works tomorrow is as certain as it is certain that the sun will rise.

Finally, the “thinking as usual” of the ordinary man, that corresponds to Max Scheler’s idea of the “relative natural view of the world” (Scheler 1980, 74), is contradictory, to the point that he can consider valid two incompatible statements. As a father of a family, he may have opinions inconsistent with those he has as a church member on many moral, political, and economic issues. All this contradiction does not necessarily arise from a logical error. The common man’s thought passes from one level of reality to another without being aware of the changes he should make in each step. So far, logic has been primarily concerned with the logic of science, while Schutz believes that it must begin to deal with the logic of everyday thought seriously and its “of course assumptions.” Yet this ordinary system of knowledge, inconsistent, contradictory, and only partially clear, appears to the in-group members to be coherent, clear, and non-contradictory. They believe it provides a reasonable chance for understanding and being understood by others.

In this passage, Schutz condenses all the fundamental ideas we will find later in the works of Berger and Luckmann, Garfinkel, and feminist theorist Dorothy Smith.

In Schutz’s own words:

Any member born or reared within the group accepts the ready-made standardized scheme of the cultural pattern handed down to him by ancestors, teachers, and authorities as an unquestioned and unquestionable guide in all the situations which normally occur within the social world. The knowledge correlated to the cultural pattern carries its evidence in itself-or, rather, it is taken for granted in the absence of evidence to the contrary. It is a knowledge of trustworthy recipes for interpreting the social world and for handling things and men in order to obtain the best results in every situation with a minimum of effort by avoiding undesirable consequences. The recipe works, on the one hand, as a precept for actions and thus serves as a scheme of expression: whoever wants to obtain a certain result has to proceed as indicated by the recipe provided for this purpose. On the other hand, the recipe serves as a scheme of interpretation: whoever proceeds as indicated by a specific recipe is supposed to intend the correlated result. Thus it is the function of the cultural pattern to eliminate troublesome inquiries by offering ready-made directions for use, to replace truth hard to attain by comfortable truisms, and to substitute the self-explanatory for the questionable. (Schutz 1944, 501)

Well, the stranger does not share these basic premises of the in-group members, and precisely for this reason, he is the man—here is the phenomenological attitude—who questions everything that seems indisputable to him. However willing he may be, the stranger cannot integrate, with a simple act of the will, the story of a native group never met before into his biography. He does not participate in the history of that group, whose memories cannot be poured into him as if he were an empty vessel. The stranger recognizes that the group has a history that does not belong to him.

Regarding the in-group members’ taken-for-granted premises, the stranger has a different perspective. As a result, the stranger questions everything that seems indisputable to them. Despite his/her willingness, the stranger can’t simply integrate the story of a native group he/she has never met into his/her life story with a mere act of willpower. He/she is not involved in the history of that group, and their memories can’t be implanted like an empty vessel. The stranger acknowledges that the group has a history that doesn’t pertain to him/her.

The consequence of all this extraneousness is that he/she interprets his/her new social environment on the basis of the patterns of his/her “thinking as usual” coming from his/her native group, but which will soon prove inadequate to grasp the meanings of the new group.

At this point, the stranger faces three problems.

The first is that the group to be approached is no longer just a theoretical problem. He/she must enter that group, which requires him/her to think about the group and interact with its members. He/she must move from thought to action and transform him/herself from a disinterested observer to a would-be member. The group, which he/she has before, is no longer just a distant subject of his/her thought. Schutz, using a theatrical metaphor, which will become central in Goffman’s books, and which shows his influence on the dramaturgical approach, speaks of “cast,” “stage,” “actors,” and “co-actors” to describe the passage of the stranger from the condition of onlooker to that of candidate member

The second problem is purely cognitive. The more the stranger approaches the group and its environment, the more his/her preconceived schemes about the new group prove inadequate and in need of being corrected and filled with new content.

The third problem is that the approaching stranger realizes that the cognitive scheme of his/her native group is inadequate for interacting with the group he/she approaches. That interpretative scheme serves to interpret the external group abstractly and not to interact with the members that make it up. Schutz here introduces an important difference between two cognitive schemes, namely the scheme of interpretation, which serves to look from afar, and the scheme of orientation, which serves to interact.

The stranger soon realizes that his/her scheme of interpretation is an isolated, lifeless scheme without real content, full of preconceptions, prejudices, and misunderstandings. It is a scheme whose protagonist, the other, can never speak. As the stranger gets closer to the new group, he/she comes to the realization that his/her usual way of thinking doesn’t hold up under direct experience and social interaction. This is similar to a language student transitioning from passive to active knowledge. By talking about the stranger, Schutz describes the mental approach with which phenomenology sociologists should conduct research in the field.

Schutz’s Homecomer

In The Homecomer, published in 1945, Schutz develops a theme by which Garfinkel will be profoundly influenced: Routine at home.

The family routine is a perfectly tested machine, not only to allow its members to continue “thinking as usual” but also to absorb the unforeseen events that disturb the way of life at home: Unforeseen events that, right within that same routine, must be chopped up, shredded, dissolved, and diluted, to be easily expelled as waste elements from the familiar scene.

Furthermore, Schutz describes family routine as a barrier to existential anxieties, a central theme in Giddens’s theory. The possibility of repeating the same actions over and over confers beneficial security to the body and mind. It is so beneficial that family members fight ardently to defend the organized pattern of routine at home. This does not mean the family cannot accept new and disturbing events like illness and death. It means the family even has a routine to deal with non-routine situations in the home world: “Paradoxically formulated, there is even a routine way for handling the novel” (Schutz 1944, 371).

Life at home is a life led in primary groups, a term that Schutz, as we know, derives from Cooley. However, Schutz believes that the concept of the primary group is highly ambiguous and proposes a distinction between face-to-face relationships and intimate relationships to improve its heuristic capacity.

A face-to-face relationship is a type of relationship in which the participants share space and time as long as their meeting lasts. The community of space means that each participant can immediately and directly observe the facial expressions and gestures of the other. The community of time implicates that each actor participates in the flow of the other’s inner life.

However, face-to-face relationships show a variation in intensity. Meeting your loved one and finding yourself next to a stranger on a subway are examples of face-to-face relationships but with a very different level of emotional involvement and content.

Schutz criticizes Cooley for stating that face-to-face relationships are characterized by intimacy, but this is not always true since not all face-to-face interactions are intimate. Kindergarten, marriage, friendship, and a family group do not consist of a primary, permanent, uninterrupted face-to-face relationship, but rather a series of intermittent face-to-face relationships.

The situation is different for life at home, where each actor participates in the life of the other, which he/she incorporates into his/her autobiography and which he/she transforms into an element of his/her personal history. What each inhabitant of the house is and what he/she will become is co-determined by his/her participation in the primary affective relationships of the native group. This emotional dynamic is broken when one of the members leaves the house. By putting an end to the community of time and space, he/she becomes a “separate person.”

The separated person, that is, the man who has left the home group, such as the soldier who writes letters from the front to the loved ones, establishes an intimate relationship with the native group, which is, however, mediated by a perceptual scheme based on experiences and memories of the past. His life is projected into another dimension. He now lives on typifications no longer based on the community of space and time. The soldier writes the letter to whom? The recipient may have changed because he/she has to face new challenges and situations. Still, in the writer’s typification, the addressee retains the characteristics he/she had in the last face-to-face meeting. This explains the astonishment, and sometimes the pain, of the soldiers at the front who do not feel understood by those who have remained at home. At times, the soldier’s letters deal with matters irrelevant to the home group.

When the soldier returns home, he is baffled to see that his native group is unable to understand the new person he has become, with all its load of pain and suffering endured at the front. Mental life has changed for everyone and is, at times, incompatible. Schutz touches upon the tragic condition of the veteran, who returned from the war and fell into a relational void, difficult to repair. The war made intersubjectivity a problematic fact. The routine from the past cannot be repeated in the exact same way in the present.

How can we conclude this section on Schutz?

I want to focus on the implications of his reflection on sociological research for ethnographic research. Giampietro Gobo, commenting on Schutz’s essays, invites the aspiring researcher to “denaturalize” the world, that is, to get rid of the typical attitude of the ordinary man inspired by a naive realism which sees the social scene as natural, usual, obvious, and taken for granted (Gobo 2010 149). When conducting phenomenology-based ethnography, it is recommended that researchers adopt what Schutz calls the “attitude of the stranger.” This involves observing and paying attention to details to understand and act competently within the group being studied fully. The ethnographer should note the seemingly insignificant details that other participants may overlook. By reasoning like a stranger, the researcher can access the underlying structures of the culture being studied, which requires temporarily suspending his/her natural attitude (Gobo 2010, 149–150).

Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality

Berger and Luckmann declare that symbolic interactionism, in general, and Mead, in particular, strongly influenced them. Additionally, they attended lectures by Schutz at the New School for Social Research in New York during the 1950s.

Berger and Luckmann are critical of Parsons’s theory but fully share the effort to integrate different disciplines and perspectives. They, too, argue that the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism harms sociology and announce that they want to integrate the perspectives of Weber and Durkheim. Society, they explain, is a sui generis reality precisely because Weber and Durkheim are both right. Society is built by a mental activity, which expresses subjective meanings, and, at the same time, has an objective factuality.

Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, published in 1966, is supported by two fundamental concepts: Reality and knowledge.

Reality is everything that happens around us, and we cannot eliminate it with an act of the will; knowledge is the certainty that reality exists.

The internal organization of the volume is consistent with the declared attempt to keep Durkheim’s objectivism and Weber’s subjectivism together. The book consists of only three chapters. The first is dedicated to the fundamental concepts that support the work, the second to society as objective reality (Durkheim’s objectivism), and the third to society as subjective reality (Weber’s subjectivism).

Berger had followed the lectures of Schutz at the New School for Social Research in New York in the 1950s.

Berger and Luckmann’s phenomenological sociology is based on two fundamental assumptions we have become widely familiar with.

The first is that the ordinary man takes the reality in which he lives for granted.

The second is the intentionality of consciousness, which is always directed toward an object. Whether the man contemplates the panorama of New York or is confronted with inner anguish, the consciousness processes involved are intentional. Individuals create social reality with their intentional thoughts and actions.

How exactly?

Social reality is constructed through a dialectical process consisting of three fundamental moments: Externalization, objectification, and internalization. Before analyzing them, we must become familiar with the vocabulary and method of our authors.

In this first section, I will explore three fundamental concepts of Berger and Luckmann: Social reality, language, and typification.

In the second section, I will deal with the dialectical process that gives life to the world of everyday life.

Finally, I will offer two examples to simplify their theory. The first is taken from the life of a terrorist and the second is the formation of an engaged couple.

The Reality of Everyday Life

Let’s start with the concept of social reality.

According to Berger and Luckmann, consciousness perceives different spheres of reality. There is a reality that touches our skin and a more distant reality, which consciousness generally places in the background to give precedence to the nearby reality. Consciousness perceives reality based on a criterion of distance/proximity in space and time. It recognizes that the world is made up of multiple realities and can move through them but has the clear perception that there is only one paramount reality, which imposes itself in a threatening manner. The reality of everyday life takes precedence over all other spheres of reality because it is dominated by pragmatic needs imposed by face-to-face encounters, which are also the most intense. In the direct encounter, the other imposes on us the reality of its existence in a pragmatic, massive, and indisputable way.

In the part of the book in which they refer to Durkheim’s objectivism, Berger and Luckmann explain that the reality of everyday life appears to be “objectified,” that is, composed of a set of objects and forces, which appear to our consciousness to exist before its appearance on the scene.

The ordinary member endowed with common sense knows that the world of everyday life is as real and self-evident to others as it is to him.

Time is one of the objective forces that men must contend with.

Daily life has a coercive time frame everyone has to deal with. Time was before we were born and will also be after we die. Men are aware of their inevitable death and know that their time is finite. The temporal structure of everyday life stands before human beings as a factuality with which they must deal and synchronize their projects.

This is the Durkheimian face of Berger and Luckmann.

Let’s now pass to the Weberian face, analyzing “language,” the second concept we set out to tackle.

The Language

The reality of everyday life lives on “signification,” a particular case of objectification, or the human production of signs, with which men express their subjective meanings.

Language is the most important sign system of human society and the main means of maintaining the common objectification of everyday life. Language continually reaffirms objectification and reminds us that a certain type of organization governs the world. Thanks to language, the reality of everyday life presents itself as an intersubjective world, a world that the individual shares with others. The whole fabric of human relationships is supported and ordered by language, which provides the coordinates for living in society and attributes meaning to all objects. Language is essential to our daily lives as it allows us to communicate with others effectively. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to have a comprehensive understanding of language to comprehend fully the world surrounding us.

Language allows you to connect different spheres of reality: Far and near and past and future. Thanks to the ability of language to transcend the “here and now” of individual existence, men can build an incredibly complex social reality. Language allows you to link events and people, temporally and spatially separated. Language, with its power of transcendence and integration, can actualize entire worlds at any time. Language makes the absent present, unites divided peoples, and forms alliances with unborn generations. Language builds a bridge between different spheres of reality, allowing us to access regions inaccessible to our daily experience. Language constructs symbolic buildings, which tower over us like gigantic forces belonging to another world. Language is an objective force that allows us to express our subjectivity.

The Typification

We are ready to face the third fundamental concept of Berger and Luckmann’s sociology of consciousness: Typification.

Berger and Luckmann, in deference to symbolic interactionism, write that direct encounters are very flexible and not predetermined and that the interchange of subjective meanings makes any predetermined model blow up. However, individuals almost always interact similarly based on predictable patterns, which raises the question: If the interaction is such a fluid and dynamic fact, why do we find such widespread regularity around us, which allows us to take the world for granted?

Typification is the answer.

When humans see another person, they tend to fit them into a mental scheme. Our interlocutor thus becomes a “man,” a “European,” a “buyer,” a “jovial type,” and so on. Our daily life is a flow of typifications. We perceive social reality through a continuous stream of categorizations. These mental categories become increasingly vague and impersonal as they distance themselves from the “here and now” of the face-to-face situation. Men schematize and classify everything that moves around them. They thrive on typification schemes, without which the routines of daily life would not be possible. Man typifies all sorts of events and experiences. Thanks to typification, ordinary men know what to do in direct interaction and how to react to the events affecting their daily lives. Without typification, men would no longer be able to recognize relatives, colleagues, and public officials, getting lost in the indefinite chaos of empirical reality. Relationships, near and far, and therefore all relationships, are modeled by typification, which works until a disturbing element intervenes, which calls them into question.

In Berger and Luckmann’s sociology, the social structure appears as an eminently mental phenomenon, supported by typifications. Their definition of social structure requires particular attention for its anthological value: “Social structure is the sum total of these typifications and of the recurrent patterns of interaction established by means of them” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 32).

Put simply, the social structure is each of us who typifies and thinks that others will behave in a certain way. Berger and Luckmann lead us into a mental world which also includes dialogue with the dead and with posterity. The reality of everyday life is shaped not only by our direct interactions with living people, but also by mental interactions with our predecessors and future generations. Our mind typifies everything, including the dead and the unborn, who sometimes enter the reality of daily life imperiously, as evidenced by the fact that the common man is often willing to sacrifice his life in the name of past or future generations with whom he talks through a typification process.

Dead and unborn, intended as typified products of the mind, can intervene in our lives and influence our choices.

In summary, Berger and Luckmann include ancestors and future generations in the reality of everyday life. This is possible thanks to language, which has the power to build worlds with real strength.

Reality as an Objective Reality

In the second chapter, Berger and Luckmann explain that human nature is very plastic and that men can assume very different behaviors because they are culturally unsettled. Ethnologists have documented that man is capable of anything from a sexual point of view to the point that it is no longer possible to affirm that man has a “sexual nature.” If anything, he has a sexual culture, not a sexual nature. Man’s genetic code does not contain information to distinguish between legitimate and illegal sexual behaviors. The incest taboo is a cultural construct and not a genetic fact. In all fields of activity, men can act in very different ways precisely because they depend much more on culture than chromosomes. Man is instinctively underdeveloped.

In short, men can assume the most varied behaviors. Yet, they act in orderly and predictable ways, primarily in the sexual field.

How can society be transformed into an objective force capable of closing the broad horizon of human possibilities?

Asking such a question means asking oneself about the process of the constitution of the social order, which Berger and Luckmann reconstruct, page after page, showing how it gradually arises from the intentional actions of individuals. The formation of society is a necessary condition for a man to be a man. Men can escape the animal condition only by associating themselves with other men.

I will study the social construction of the established order following all the steps indicated by Berger and Luckmann.

Habitualization is the first step toward the constitution of social order.

Berger and Luckmann invite us to conduct a thought experiment and imagine a man on a desert island. Although he is completely alone, even our imaginary man must get used to his business. Habitualization offers the great psychological advantage of reducing the possibilities for action the individual must consider to realize their pragmatic goals.

Suppose he wants to build a canoe out of matchsticks. Well, there are at least a hundred ways to succeed in this feat. Habituation prevents men from getting lost in all the possibilities available to them. It allows them to find direction and guidance in their actions, which they could not find in their biology.

Habitualization performs two fundamental functions in the process of building the social order.

The first function is to keep nervous tensions under control, which arise from evaluating a thousand different ways of acting. A man who has to choose between a thousand different ways of carrying out a pragmatic action ends up falling into a vortex of psychological tensions. Too many possibilities create great anxiety.

The second function is to allow the individual to take action quickly, freeing up a large amount of time to make important decisions. Habitualization allows men to do a lot and think little; it allows them to focus on a specific issue, offering them the additional advantage of devoting themselves to developing innovative ideas. Routine makes change possible because it frees up time to think about innovations. This example is not found in the work of Berger and Luckmann, but it seems useful to me to better understand this important passage of their thought. While the man on the deserted island builds the canoe mechanically, thanks to habitualization, he thinks of a way to build the oars. By always acting in the same way, men save time and energy, which they can invest to achieve new goals. Habitualization is an important psychological process that helps reduce the burden of making choices. By becoming familiar with certain situations, we no longer have to start from scratch each time we encounter them, which saves us time and effort.

Habitualization concerns both social activity and non-social activity.

The second step toward constructing the social order is institutionalization, which originates from habitualization.

If at least two people commonly share it, any recurring way of acting creates an institution. Institutions fix human action, creating a system of mutual expectations. Thanks to institutions, human conduct is fixed in pre-established patterns.

Institutions are subject to two conditions. First, they must have a history. Second, they must provide a pattern of conduct.

With institutionalization, social control is also born. Individuals must account for each other in terms of why they are not acting in a typical and, therefore, predictable way. If we say that a particular area of human activity has been institutionalized, we are essentially saying that it has been placed under social control.

So far, we have considered an isolated man. But what happens when the isolated man meets another?

A group is born.

Institutionalization saves time and effort for a group of two people, who, thanks to routine, are also freed from the anxiety that comes from not being able to predict the behavior of others. Trust and social roles are established to promote stable communication within a group. This leads to the division of labor and innovative ideas, resulting in more frequent practices that become institutionalized and form new routines in a continuous cycle.

Roles allow institutions to exist in the lives of individuals. Without roles, the institutional order could not exist. The two individuals, who met on the desert island, are building a wider common background. As their life together progresses, they have established taken-for-granted meanings and routines. They can perform tasks with little effort and without causing concern for each other’s safety. Everyday occurrences have become mundane and ordinary in their shared life.

We have thus come to the objectification of institutions.

Institutions become objective when they take on a historical character. Historicity produces objectivity.

The son, born from the union between those two individuals on a desert island, finding the institutions already formed, has the impression that they possess a reality of their own that imposes itself on him from the outside with its coercive force.

The objectivity of the institutions remains fragile as long as the group is made up of only two individuals, but is strengthened with the arrival of the offspring and the growth of the group. When many individuals have the impression that reality is endowed with objective force and autonomous life, it will be increasingly difficult to convince each of them that two individuals created everything and that the group itself governs everything.

With the passing of the years and then the centuries, history makes it increasingly difficult to retrace all the steps that have led up to the present. To the child, the social world seems natural, obvious, and taken for granted, like the language he/she has learned, whose conventionality he/she cannot understand because the historicity, which is the secret of objectivity, escapes him/her.

The individual cannot understand institutions through introspection. He/she must leave his/her inner hole and resort to historical studies. But it is a vain attempt because when he/she studies the genesis of institutions, thousands of other individuals around him/her continue to externalize the social world, reinforcing its objectification.

It is, however, crucial to remember that a social world can only be established with the birth of a new generation that inherits the collective order. The reason is now clear: The social world is objectified when it is inhabited by a group of people who do not know the history of its formation: “The reality of the social world gains in massivity in the course of its transmission” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 58).

In addition to being objectified, the social world requires it to be justified in the eyes of those who have not participated in its formation. To justify means to legitimize. This requires that all children be told a common story about the formation of the society in which they live. Nobody should allow themselves to redefine reality. To discourage individual attempts at redefinition, society introduces sanctions so that children and adults toe the line. Legitimation not only explains to individuals why they should take a specific action, but it also provides them with an understanding of why things are the way they are.

The greater the institutionalization, the more controlled and predictable the actions become. Routines safeguard the reality of everyday life.

The relationship between the founders of a new social order and their offspring is crucial. The legitimation problem of the social order does not arise for the two protagonists who have given birth to a new social reality. Both of them know every step of that founding process. They know its whole history. The children don’t, and they have to learn it. In the two founders, the history of the society coincides with their biography. In the children, on the other hand, history and biography are broken.

Berger and Luckmann conceive aloneness as a nightmare for the human psyche and see institutionalization as an essential good.

Re-proposing an idea that we have already encountered in the pages on Durkheim’s anomie, our authors explain that men are unable to attribute meaning to their existence with their own will and must necessarily rely on institutions in order not to fall into the terror of a meaningless life, where death would become a terrifying phenomenon. The fundamental function of institutions is to alleviate fear. Man is incapable of leading a meaningful existence outside the conventions of society. By “nightmare,” Berger and Luckmann refer to the condition of men who fail to grasp the meaning of their existence. Thanks to Durkheim, they know that this condition can be so terrible that it causes men to kill themselves.

We’re not done yet.

In addition to habitualization, institutionalization, objectification, externalization, and legitimation, Berger and Luckmann add internalization as the last piece of their theory of reality as a social construction. Internalization refers to the process of bringing the external social world into one’s consciousness during socialization.

Before we proceed, it is useful to clarify the meaning of each term to avoid confusion in the dense plot.

Berger and Luckmann’s reasoning began with a thought experiment: The two authors imagined the encounter between two unknown adults on a desert island.

When two people start repeating certain behaviors regularly, it is called habitualization.

Habitual behaviors give rise to a stable and predictable behavior: This is institutionalization.

After the couple has a son, he grows up seeing established institutions and assumes they have inherent power. This is known as objectification.

Whenever the father, mother, and son comply with the institutions, they make the social world an external phenomenon. This is externalization.

The Internalization of Reality

I have stated that The Social Construction of Reality is divided into two parts.

In the first part, the authors rely on Durkheim’s theory of social facts to explain why society appears to the consciousness of its members as an external and coercive reality.

In the second, they rely on Weber’s theory to explain how the individual produces this society with its own actions. To fully comprehend reality, it’s essential to incorporate Durkheim’s and Weber’s theories since reality has objective and subjective dimensions.

In these pages, Berger and Luckmann reduce their vocabulary to three essential concepts, externalization, objectification, and internalization, which require our full attention.

Society must be understood in terms of an incessant dialectical process comprising these three moments. The two authors specify that these moments must not be conceived as phases of chronological succession. Any analysis that isolates only one of these elements is insufficient since these three phases simultaneously characterize a society.

For the individual, however, a different discourse applies. In the life of each individual, there is a temporal succession.

What is the first step with which the individual enters society?

The individual begins their entry into society with internalization, which takes place through socialization, with which the individual settles in the objective world of a society or one of its sectors.

Berger and Luckmann distinguish between primary socialization and secondary socialization.

Primary socialization transforms individuals into members of society, impressing the “base-world” in their conscience. Secondary socialization, on the other hand, concerns those individuals already socialized who have to enter a specific sector of the objective world of society or the “underworld.”

Primary socialization is more important than secondary because it provides the background for all subsequent socializations which the individual will encounter in life. Both the base-world and the underworld are characterized by three elements: Cognitive, normative, and affective. In summary, socialization imprints in the conscience the concepts to understand (cognitive elements), the rules for interacting (normative elements), and the feelings to unite the members (affective elements).

I can proceed synthetically with the process of internalizing the social world since Berger and Luckmann re-propose Mead’s theory of self-development.

Internalization can only occur thanks to the child’s identification with the people who are emotionally important to him/her. Primary socialization can be said to be complete when Mead’s generalized other crystallizes in the child’s consciousness. It is only at this point that the relationship between subjective reality and objective reality becomes symmetrical and the individual perceives the harmony between the “inside” and the “outside.” Obviously, the child cannot choose the people who are important to him/her and has to make do with the parents who happened to him/her.

The whole process of internalization, as we also know from Mead, requires language, the most crucial aspect to be fully absorbed.

Berger and Luckmann summarize their theory of reality as a social construction thus: “Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 58).

Two Examples

Let’s explain the formation of a new social reality, born from the encounter between two individuals who fall in love and become a couple through the three moments of the externalization, objectification, and internalization dialectical process.

Two strangers get to know each other at a party and decide to date, giving birth to a new reality, the reality of their loving union, which they renew daily through a series of routines. In the externalization phase, the engaged couple creates their engagement and re-creates it, going out together, kissing in public, involving their friends in jealous quarrels, etc. In externalization, individuals are creative actors who impact the surrounding environment.

In the phase of objectification, the loving union takes on an ordered and preordained form, which is imposed on everyone. The couple establishes the internal rules of their union, and the permissible behaviors toward friends, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, etc. Furthermore, the couple establishes how others, the outside world, should behave toward themselves. The loving union takes on an objective force supported by language, which continually reaffirms the reality of that engagement. The union has become an external and coercive reality, which reverberates on its creators. Knowing the power of language in holding up common objectification, the engaged couple will not accept anyone saying their engagement is not real. Both will be ready to battle over the adjectives the others use to describe their union.

In the internalization phase, the engaged couple internalizes their union as an objective reality. Their engagement exists in their consciousness and accompanies them everywhere, even when they are physically distant and cannot interact face-to-face. Through the dialectical moment of internalization, the engaged couple imprints the objectified social reality in their conscience, establishing a harmony between their subjective meanings and objective reality. Language is important in the formation and dissolution of the group. The most frequent way to put an end to a loving union involves the use of language. The two lovers tell each other that the story is over and take care to tell the others too.

The Asymmetry Between Objective and Subjective Reality

Now I want to address a topical question: What happens when there is no harmony and correspondence between the subjective and the objective reality or between the internal and external worlds?

This is the case of the typical radicalized European citizen, who internalizes the subworld of violent Islamism after a process of secondary socialization. He/she has a serious problem of identity, which arises from the lack of agreement between the Islamist contents of his/her conscience and the surrounding world, based on the secular nature of the state and the separation between the political and religious spheres.

One of the ways offered to the European jihadist to re-establish the symmetry between objective and subjective identity is to move to the domains of the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, or elsewhere.

An example of the asymmetry between objective and subjective reality is the case of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Islamic fundamentalist self-proclaimed Isis soldier who killed soldier Nathan Cirillo while standing guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, Canada, on October 22, 2014.

In a long letter, Michael’s mother, Susan, explained that her son had acquired a new identity and that, once he came into conflict with the Canadian world, he had tried to go and live in a country dominated by a rigorous and traditionalist conception of Islam to find the right symmetry between his Islamist ideas and the surrounding society. When the police suspected Michael wanted to go to ISIS domains, they withdrew his passport. According to his mother, feeling compelled to live in a Western country made Michael “go crazy,” causing him to explode violently.

The words of Susan, Michael Bibeau’s mother, deserve careful reading because they clearly express the conflict resulting from the lack of symmetry between objective and subjective identity:

[…]. As a person and mother I am horrified by the actions of my son, […]. What about Michael, if I try to understand his actions, for me he was an unhappy person at odds with the world. In his final days, I would add mentally unbalanced. Religion and Islam what his way of trying to make sense of the world, I don’t think he succeeded. It did not bring him peace. My son did not want to have much to do with me or my husband. […]. He was troubled and spoke of religion, and religion is not a subject I can easily relate with. So our conversations were one sided where he would talk about religion and I would listen. What did he talk about at our final lunch, he talked about religion, how it was good. How I was wrong to pursue the materiality of this world. He had come to Ottawa to try and get his passport. He ultimately wanted to go to Saudi Arabia and study Islam, study the Coran. He thought he would be happier in an Islamic country where they would share his beliefs. He mentioned that he had applied more than one month ago and thought the difficulty in getting it was the name of the reference he had given. So he had come to Ottawa to try and convince them to give him one. He said that Shaytan was testing him. This was not new, he often spoke of the devil and his attempts to entice people to him. I want to correct the statement of the RCMP I never said he wanted to go to Syria, I specifically said Saudi Arabia. […]. If I try to understand the motivations of my son, I believe his passport was refused and that pushed him into action. He felt cornered, unable to stay in the life he was in, unable to move on to the next one he wanted to go to. He was mad and felt trapped so the only way out was death. I believe he wanted death but wanted it not at his own hand because that would be wrong according to Islam. Maybe he also wanted to strike back at the government who had refused him, the fact that he killed a soldier and went to Parliament would indicate that, they are symbols of government. Regardless of the motivation, that was wrong and despicable. I am just trying to provide context, no justify his actions. (Orsini 2016, 176–181)

Reification

All this discourse on the objectification of the social world will have brought to mind what we studied on reification in Lukács in the chapter on conflict theory: What relationship exists between objectification, of which Berger and Luckmann speak, and reification?

First, Berger and Luckmann clarify that, by reification of social reality, they refer to the idea that the products of human activity have a non-human or even superhuman origin, for example, the idea that the social order is the product of divine will or the consequence of cosmic law. Reification implies that man is unaware that he is the architect of society: “The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanized world” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 82). The risk of reification is always present in the process of objectification.

In summary, Berger and Luckmann’s position is that reification represents the extreme level of objectification.

If men, while living in an objectified world, are aware that the social world is the fruit of their creation and that, therefore, they can modify it, then there is no reification.

Berger and Luckmann explain that reification can concern roles and not just institutions.

An example of social role reification is when we say that we are forced to act in a certain way due to our roles as fathers, husbands, army generals, archbishops, etc.

Reification can also concern identities.

In this case, individuals are identified with the typification that society has made of them. According to Berger and Luckmann, this is not always a negative or afflictive fact for those who live the experience of the reification of their own identity. In the case of Jewish people, for example, reification can be experienced as a positive fact. If the individual is deeply proud of being Jewish, thinking that he/she cannot be anything other than what he/she is will take on a positive meaning in his/her eyes (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 108–109).

The Social Construction of Reality has had many functions in the history of contemporary sociological theory, including the circulation of Schutz’s teaching throughout the academic world. One of the strengths of The Social Construction of Reality is the clear and flowing prose of Berger and Luckmann.

Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology deals with cognitive processes.

Ethnomethodology questions everything that ordinary man takes for granted. Whether they like it or not, ethnomethodologists end up stripping individuals and groups of all their certainties. Ethnomethodology studies the meanings that the group members take for granted and on which they base their routines to help maintain social order. Men, taking for granted what they do, end up creating routines that reproduce the social order. To study the meanings that group members take for granted means going to the foundations of the social order. That’s what ethnomethodology does.

Defining ethnomethodology is difficult because Harold Garfinkel was never good at defining the school of which he was the founder.

When he tried to define the fundamental phenomenon of ethnomethodology, he produced “clarifications” of this tenor:

For ethnomethodology the objective reality of social facts, in that and just how it is every society’s locally, endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, members’ work, with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement, or buy-outs, is thereby sociology’s fundamental phenomenon. (Garfinkel 1988, 103)

This lack of clarity has created an abundance of exegetes, resulting in each interpreter of Garfinkel proposing his definition of ethnomethodology. We have hundreds of definitions, all very similar, thankfully. In terms of definitions, we are spoiled for choice. One of my favorites is by Randall Collins, who defined ethnomethodology as “the study of commonsense practical reasoning” (Collins 1988, 274).

To avoid confusing the reader, I will deal with Garfinkel’s most difficult concepts at the end of this section. These are the concepts of “accountability,” “indexicality,” “reflexivity,” the “unique adequacy requirement of methods,” and “the documentary method of interpretation.”

Box 12.2: Garfinkel’s Tragic Life

Garfinkel was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a Jewish family of small traders. In 1946 he began his doctorate at Harvard, which he obtained in 1952 under the guidance of Parsons, but he also attended Schutz’s lectures at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1954, he became a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Los Angeles in California (UCLA). In 1987, he retired from teaching and acquired the title of professor emeritus. Garfinkel admired Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action: “Ethnomethodology has its origin in this wonderful book,” as he defined it (Garfinkel 1988, 104).

Garfinkel uses the term ethnomethodology for the first time officially in his Studies in Ethnomethodology, a collection of essays published in 1967, which is also his major work. However, he developed this particular perspective in the late 1940s. The term came to his mind in 1954, during research on the deliberations of juries in American courts, when he realized that the judges discuss, reason, and form their decisions, using common-sense reasoning like any ordinary man (Hill and Crittenden 1968, 7).

The best-known and most appreciated ethnomethodologists include Deirdre Boden (Boden 2009), David Sudnow (1972), John Heritage (Heritage 1984), Harvey Sacks, the founder of conversational analysis (Clift 2016, 40), Don Zimmerman (Zimmerman 1988), Melvin Pollner, Michael Lynch, and Aaron V. Cicourel, who introduced the term “cognitive sociology” (Cicourel 1973).

Garfinkel and Durkheim

Garfinkel starts from Schutz’s idea, according to which the members of society take the world for granted. On this basis, he develops new concepts and an original research method to challenge traditional sociology. Ethnomethodology presents itself to the world as an upheaval of all previous ways of doing sociology and even attacks symbolic interactionism, including the Chicago school. During the 1960s, symbolic interactionists considered themselves as new, while ethnomethodologists viewed themselves as even newer.

While Durkheim’s sociology aims to explain social facts, Garfinkel aims to explain how they are constituted. Durkheim tries to explain the variation in suicide rates with the variation in the types of social integration, while ethnomethodology studies how cases of sudden death are considered suicides (Ten Have 2005, 30).

Durkheim asks: “Why did that person commit suicide?” and Garfinkel wonders: “Why do we consider that person’s sudden death to be suicide and statistically classify it as such?” Durkheim wants to know; Garfinkel wants to know how we know. Durkheim wants to classify; Garfinkel wants to classify how we classify. Durkheim wants to explain, Garfinkel wants to explain how we explain.

Ethnomethodology aims to transform the objective reality of Durkheim’s social facts into an object of investigation (Zimmerman and Pollner 1970).

Durkheim starts from the idea that an objective and coercive social reality imposes itself on individuals from the outside.

Garfinkel appreciates Durkheim and credits him with having raised the fundamental question he investigates: The existence of social reality endowed with an impersonal power. Garfinkel believes that this reality is built daily by individuals. Durkheim is also aware of this but is interested in the final product and does not investigate how this construction occurs. Durkheim’s starting point is the idea of society being an external and coercive force on the individual (Vom Lehn 2014, 89).

In principle, social reality exists today and may not exist tomorrow. Still, since it always exists, Garfinkel wants to understand the reasons for this persistence, this “immortality of ordinary society,” to use an expression that is dear to him. This raises a fundamental question: Why do individuals continue to construct their reality even when it is, for them, who are its builders, afflictive and degrading?

The answer is that the members of society build and reconstruct reality every moment because they are unaware that they are building it. For ethnomethodologists, we are all somewhat guardians of this world. The very fact of taking the world for granted is a pressure for others to do the same. The secret of the social order’s successful reproduction is that it does not cost effort. It is simple enough not to think critically, which Garfinkel’s man finds very easy since the members have no interest in analyzing their practical common-sense actions (Garfinkel 1967, 8). In short, the members of society reproduce reality. Still, they think that it reproduces itself or, more often, they do not think at all, have no doubts, and do not ask themselves any questions because, in their eyes, the world is natural.

In this naturalness, ethnomethodology presents itself as a shocking fact, which contrasts with the methods of investigation of traditional sociology.

Since there is a difference between scientific and everyday rationality (Garfinkel 2006 [1948]), ethnomethodology makes problematic what appears to the common man as a-problematic. The ethnomethodological approach involves questioning what people typically assume to be true, which can be risky as it challenges the foundations of their daily lives and their trust in the world around them. Society members do not like their habits of being upset. Let us recall what Schutz wrote: Men create a routine for everything, even to deal with situations that alter the routine. Schutz’s “natural attitude” concept is key to Garfinkel’s explanation of how individuals act in ordinary circumstances, unknowingly reproducing the social order.

In the breaching experiments conducted at home, Garfinkel confirms this intuition of Schutz and discovers that family members use various strategies to absorb problematic situations into the usual routine. However, if the routine remains disturbed, family members become aggressive.

We have already seen how important trust between men is in Banfield’s research in Montegrano. Without trust, all that remains for men is chaos and fear (Luhmann 1979).

Garfinkel’s experiments attack trust.

Garfinkel’s Breaching Experiment

One of the techniques used by Garfinkel to make the world taken for granted problematic is the breaching experiment, which can be defined as a violation of norms and social roles to examine people’s reactions.

The breaching experiments are not a complete novelty: They resemble the exploits of Allen Funt (1914–1999), the inventor of the television program Candid Camera (1947).

Garfinkel’s focus was not on studying individual psychology mechanisms but rather on analyzing the strength of common-sense assumptions. He also examined the resistance that groups or societies had toward destabilizing the moral and social order (Gobo 2010, 44).

Garfinkel asked some students to behave abnormally at home, speaking only when asked and addressing other family members in the typical formal ways that characterize the patron of a pension. The student, for a minimum of fifteen minutes and a maximum of one hour a day, should have behaved politely and respectfully, even asking parents for permission to use the bathroom or to be able to take a glass of water. In two cases, the parents traced their child’s anomalous behavior to some personal problem of his/her unknown to them; in another case, they decided to believe it was a joke, thus avoiding questioning their home routine. Another couple thought their daughter’s kind behavior was a strategy to ask for something from the family.

In the remaining four-fifths of the cases, the parents became aggressive toward their children, rebelling against attempts to upset the family routine. Parents accused their sons of being selfish, bad, crazy, stupid, and rude (Garfinkel 1967, 47–48).

Five out of forty-nine students refused to conduct the breaching experiment, and four failed. One of them was afraid of aggravating the precarious heart condition of her mother. She had realized that the disruption of the home routine can be such a destabilizing experience as to have repercussions on the health of family members.

Garfinkel enjoyed recording parents’ reactions, which his students diligently reported to him.

Here are some of the more interesting reactions of parents to their children: “What’s your problem?” “What’s wrong with you?” “Have you been fired?” “Are you sick?” “Do you think you are superior to others?” “Why are you crazy?” “Are you out of your mind or just stupid?” (Garfinkel 1967, 10)

Once the obvious meanings are laid bare, it is possible to show that what appears “natural” is not natural at all. In addition to behaviors, Garfinkel analyzes conversations to find the “implications” underlying the actions

Garfinkel asked his students to write on the left side of a sheet the dialogue between them and an interlocutor and then to dissect, on the right side of the same sheet, what they meant with their colloquial speech to make it more understandable.

A student reported a colloquy with his wife about their four-year-old son, Dana. This dialogue is so exemplary of Garfinkel’s approach to conversation that it is found in all the manuals that touch upon his thought.

Below, the student’s writing on the paper’s left side is reproduced, corresponding to the original speech. We can see how many meanings the two spouses take for granted in this dialogue about the child.

This taking for granted is possible because the dialogue takes place between two members of the same group, which has a “stock of shared knowledge.” The dialogue is sometimes incomprehensible to anyone who is not part of the family unit. The couple put many things “in brackets.” Thanks to their common stock of information, each can intuit, understand, and read between the lines what the other means (Garfinkel 1967, 25–26):

Verse

Verse Husband: Dana succeeded in putting a penny in a parking meter today without being picked up. Wife: Did you take him to the record store? Husband: No, to the shoe repair shop. Wife: What for? Husband: I got some new shoe laces for my shoes. Wife: Your loafers need new heels badly.

In the first sentence, “Dana succeeded in putting a penny in a parking meter today without being picked up,” the husband means that their child, having grown in height, was able to insert the coin into the slot of the parking meter relying only on his strength and, therefore, without being lifted by the father. In the second sentence, “Did you take him to the record store?” the couple continues to take many meanings for granted. The wife asks her husband if he went to the record store alone or with the child. The husband replies, “No, to the shoe repair shop,” meaning that he went to the record store alone, but he then took the child with him to the cobbler. The wife asks: “What for?” More precisely, she asks her husband why he needs to go to the shoemaker. The husband replies, “I got some new shoe laces for my shoes,” knowing that the wife knows, that is, being able to assume that the wife knows, that, in the previous days, a string of his brown shoes had broken, and this explains his decision to go to the cobbler. The wife replies, “Your loafers need new heels badly,” meaning that she had imagined that he had gone to the shoemaker not for the laces but to repair the heels of his loafers.

Those who read the written text may not know that the husband had a problem with loafers because this information does not appear anywhere in the conversation. Only the husband and wife have a common stock of information, which makes it possible to take such a large number of meanings for granted. This dialogue clarifies that ethnomethodology studies the implicit assumptions and meanings of the communication of the members of a group.

During a class, Neil J. Smelser presented a conversation about Dana to his students, without any explanation, and asked them to interpret the meaning of each sentence. Smelser observed that his students’ interpretations were influenced by their social background. For example, a student who grew up in a poor, black neighborhood assumed that when Dana “succeeded in putting a penny in a parking meter today without being picked up,” he had inserted a coin with a lower value and managed to avoid getting arrested by the police. The student interpreted the conversation between Dana’s parents differently than middle-class students because poor children are frequently targeted by the police for minor offenses (Smelser 2011, 86).

All these examples show that ethnomethodology introduced the investigation of the obvious (Zimmerman and Pollner 1970, 92; Pollner 1987, XII). Common-sense knowledge is useful for knowing when to laugh, cry, get angry, be surprised, feel sorry, rejoice, congratulate, and so on.

Instead of explaining social action on the basis of a theoretical process, which goes from top to bottom, ethnomethodology emphasizes real interactions in the background of society. Pollner contrasts Parsons’s “top-down” theorizing to Garfinkel’s “bottom-up,” judging the first “abstract” and the second “actual” (Pollner 1991, 371).

It’s becoming increasingly evident that we take the world for granted, but this doesn’t necessarily lead to a better quality of life. While normalcy may be comfortable for some, it can be painful for others. However, Garfinkel doesn’t seem to directly address this issue. Garfinkel, a student of Parsons rather than Marx, does not intend to disregard common sense and introduce a revolutionary new one. Nevertheless, his method has the potential to empower people, as demonstrated by the works of feminist theorist Dorothy E. Smith and researcher Aeron V. Cicourel. We will delve into this further in our discussion.

According to Cicourel’s research, police officers and judges tend to form opinions about the people they judge based on common stereotypes. For instance, they may assume that minors from broken families are more prone to criminal behavior than those from intact families (Cicourel 1968).

These common-sense ideas push judges to be biased toward the former, resulting in official statistics confirming a series of ideas on deviance resulting from preconceived schemes. In sum, how we think about juvenile delinquency affects how we treat minors, which then affects the statistics we use to support our initial assumptions. This circularity also applies to the analysis of suicides (Giglioli 1993).

Ethnomethodology contains a series of guiding principles that can help the weakest and most vulnerable groups become aware of society’s domination over them, with their complicity, as Bourdieu would say.

David Sudnow focused on how the public defender develops a negative idea of the accused, which he is called to defend in criminal courts, based on first impressions and a series of preconceived schemes based on common sense. When evaluating a defendant, the public defender notes various factors related to the general appearance of the accused, such as their race, demeanor, age, style of communication, and behavior during incarceration. These observations help the public defender understand the defendant’s place in the social structure. Their previous crimes are more important than the specific accusations against them (Sudnow 1965, 266).

Sudnow reports a series of contemptuous phrases pronounced by public defenders against their clients. Referring to one of them, a public defender says: “We just never get wealthier people here. They usually don’t stay in jail overnight and then they call a private attorney. The P.D. gets everything at the bottom of the pile. […]. I could tell as soon as he told me he had four prior drunk charges that he was just another of these skid row bums. You could look at him and tell.”

Sudnow made a noteworthy finding about how our cognitive processes replicate common sense. He observed that when a lawyer questions a defendant, their main goal is not to comprehend what the defendant truly did, but to seek validation for their assumptions about the defendant’s actions based on the social group they belong to. The questions posed by the public defender to their client are often framed in a way that confirms their own common-sense beliefs. When a public defender questions a defendant, their main focus is to establish how the case at hand relates to similar events rather than delving into the specifics of the details. The first question, in the case of armed assault, is: “How long had you been drinking before this all started?”

Ethnomethodologists focus on how deviance is defined by common sense, rather than treating it as an objective fact (Sudnow 1965, 267).

Sudnow’s research helps us understand the documentary method, one which Garfinkel takes over from Karl Mannheim (Sharrock and Anderson 1986, 47).

Garfinkel’s documentary method of interpretation is akin to the concept of the hermeneutic circle. It refers to the way people use interpretive procedures to create “documentary evidence” and then use this evidence to justify their interpretive procedures. This allows people to make sense of reality. However, it also means that the larger picture remains unchanged and is reproduced, even if reality challenges it, regardless of any threats to its persistence (Maynard and Heritage 2022, 9).

The Story of “Agnes”

The story we are about to tell demonstrates how painful it can be to live in a world we cannot take for granted.

In October 1958, Agnes went to the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, where she turned to Dr Robert J. Stoller for support. Agnes, the youngest of four children, was a nineteen-year-old white, single girl who worked as a typist for an insurance company.

Her father, a mechanic, died when she was a child, and her mother raised her children doing casual and semi-skilled work in an aircraft plant. Agnes received a Catholic upbringing, but she stopped believing in God. She had long dark blond hair, a pretty face, a rosy complexion, manicured eyebrows, and lipstick. Her body was attractive. She had large breasts and narrow hips. Garfinkel lingers on Agnes’s other details, in which she appears as a triumph of femininity. Until the age of seventeen, Agnes was treated like a man, but at nineteen, she decided to become a woman, following what she felt she was. In March 1959, she underwent castration surgery to replace her penis with an artificial vagina.

Garfinkel records thirty-five hours of conversations with Agnes.

When Garfinkel asks whether it is correct to compare her to a homosexual or a transvestite, she finds the comparison “repugnant.” Agnes cries, troubled by Garfinkel’s questions, which force her to confront her inner suffering and the constant fear that others will notice that she is alone and that she has no friends. This is a condition that has accompanied her since she was a child and which she describes by telling her drama of her lack of “normality.” In elementary and high school, Agnes was afraid that someone would notice that she had no friends or companions.

Through the story of Agnes, Garfinkel wants to demonstrate that even being a man or a woman is a practical achievement that must be accomplished every day at each new meeting.

Many men are not aware of this because their masculinity is a routine fact; on the other hand, Agnes is aware of how tiring it is to construct meanings when our identity is an everyday achievement. Agnes lives the painful condition of someone who cannot assume that others take it for granted that she is a woman.

It is as if Agnes were involved in a breaching experiment in reverse: Instead of destabilizing the routine, she has the problem of stabilizing it, putting on make-up, dressing and behaving like a woman, with the difficulty of having a past as a man and the constant fear of being unmasked for that “hole” of seventeen years in her biography as a man.

Agnes was condemned to live in a state of uncertainty regarding the reactions of others. Garfinkel defines Agnes as a “practical methodologist” because she must consciously reflect on everything she says and does (Garfinkel 1967, 180). Agnes struggles to integrate into the social world every morning at each new meeting.

Ruth A. Wallace and Alison Wolf, noting that Schutz was a Jew fleeing Nazism, see the element explaining his need to put the world in brackets in this biographical trait (Wallace and Wolf 1995, 242).

Wallace and Wolf’s observation is useful because it invites us to reflect on the condition of a discriminated man.

How can a discriminated man react?

He can do four things: Accept discrimination (Bourdieu’s symbolic violence), rebel against authority (Gramsci’s revolutionary reaction), put the social world in brackets (Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology), and try to change the world with the force of culture.

A discriminated man may ask, “Why do you discriminate against me?” and ask a new question to each new answer in an endless game.

On the one hand, ethnomethodology offers hope for change to discriminated groups, and on the other hand, it takes it away because Garfinkel’s man is not politically but cognitively conservative.

According to ethnomethodology, there is an abyss under the world we take for granted. Under our meanings, there are just ordinary men with their “thinking as always.” Being the sociological approach that brings man closer to the boundaries of madness, ethnomethodology causes restlessness and angst. And this is perhaps its greatest charm. Things that ethnomethodologists do to help people understand that they build social reality appear crazy to the ordinary man. Not surprisingly, the “guinea pigs” of ethnomethodologists, that is, the people who undergo their experiments, react by saying these words: “You are crazy!” “Are you out of your mind?” “Are you crazy?”

The social world is built upon arbitrary constructions vulnerable to crumbling if we refuse to accept conventional interpretations. Despite its flimsiness, the strength of social reality comes from the fact that people are fundamentally conservative, not in a political, but in a cognitive sense. We intuitively sense that these constructions are built over an abyss. We tend to avoid questioning them because we fear the entire structure might collapse (Collins 1985, 214).

Garfinkel takes up, albeit with different arguments, a central theme in Nietzsche, who described what happens to a man who questions common sense. From the chapter on Weber, the reader will remember the disturbing figure of the man with the lantern, the “madman,” who ran to the market shouting: “I am looking for God!” He caused great laughter around him (Nietzsche 1974, 181). Laughter, as we know, is one of the reactions provoked by the ethnomethodologists’ breaching experiments. All in all, from the point of view of ordinary man, ethnomethodologists are similar to Nietzsche’s madman.

Garfinkel places ordinary men on the same cable suspended in the void that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tells us about. Garfinkel’s social world is “a rope over an abyss” (Nietzsche 1917, 8).

Accountability and Social Order

The time has come to confront ourselves with the most difficult concepts of ethnomethodology. So far, we have told Garfinkel that the social order exists as long as it is taken for granted. Now, we have to enrich our lexicon and say that the social order’s secret depends on individuals’ ability to be “accountable.”

What is accountability in Garfinkel’s characteristic language?

We are accountable, for Garfinkel, when what we say, and do, is understandable to us and to others. We are accountable when we are “explainable.”

According to Garfinkel, every speech is a report, an “account,” a version of the facts, from which the meanings taken for granted by the member can be derived.

Accounting is the practice of making accounts, that is, of producing explanations, with which the actors give meaning to what they do, to what others do, and, more generally, to what is happening around them (Buttny 1993, 13–14; Orbuch 1997; Mondada 2022, 290).

For example, the worker explaining why he/she was fired offers an account, which can range from his/her relationship with colleagues, considered cynical and despicable, to the functioning of the world, judged to be unfair and merciless.

Even someone queuing in front of a bank counter offers a report if, when asked, “What are you doing?” he/she replies that he/she is queuing. For Garfinkel, individuals are continually engaged in accounting, not only when they receive a solemn question such as “Why were you fired?”

In Garfinkel, accountable is an adjective that indicates that the meaning of a concept or action is understandable for the listener and the observer. To say that a report is accountable means saying it is understandable and explainable (Attewell 1974, 183). Garfinkel’s idea is that we strive to make our actions accountable when interacting with others.

What does accountability have to do with the reproduction of the social order?

Here is the answer.

If what we do, or say, is not accountable, routine is blocked, and the social order finds an obstacle to its flow. To understand what happens when our reports are not accountable, let’s think about what happens when wanting to make fun of someone: We use a series of invented words to construct nonsense sentences with a confident and convinced tone. The listener becomes confused and tries to grasp our meanings to escape paralysis. Since our utterances are not understandable and explainable, the listener does not know how to interact. In most cases, if we continue to make ourselves non-accountable, the victim disengages, and the interaction ends. We should know what happens when we are non-accountable because that is exactly what happens in breaching experiments. Social actions for ethnomethodology have essential and fundamental accountability. The social organization must always be describable-explainable-understandable for the participants (Fele 2002, 53–54). No accountability, no social order.

In Garfinkel’s own words: “When I speak of accountable my interests are directed to such matters as the following. I mean observable-and-reportable, i.e. available to members as situated practices of looking-and-telling” (Garfinkel 1967, 1).

Another necessary clarification is that ethnomethodology does not verify whether the content of an account is truthful. It does not use statistics to determine whether it is true or false that immigrants cause economic damage to the country in which they live. Garfinkel and Sacks use the term “ethnomethodological indifference” to describe ethnomethodology’s stance toward accounts, a procedural policy that reminds us of Weber’s free value prescription. Ethnomethodologists abstain from all judgments of any account’s adequacy, value, importance, necessity, practicality, success, or consequentiality (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970, 345).

What member groups report must be analyzed to bring out the web of implicit meanings, that is, the world taken for granted by the speaker, and not to establish the degree of truth/falsity of what he/she expresses. Ethnomethodologists believe that the scientific articles of sociologists are also accounts and that sociologists conduct their research using the same common sense of the group members they study.

Member Or Individual?

Since we have begun to study Garfinkel’s vocabulary, let’s clarify another concept of his.

The reader may have noticed that, in this section on ethnomethodology, I have never used the word “individual,” instead of which I have always preferred to speak of the “member.” This is Garfinkel’s choice, behind which a precise methodology is hidden.

Ethnomethodology does not study the individual and not even interaction. It does not even study role and status. It studies the “member of society,” that is, man, as belonging to a group. Of this member, ethnomethodology is interested in a specific aspect: His/her taking meanings for granted. Ethnomethodological language, to mark its specificity, tries to avoid the use of the terms “actor,” “individual,” “person,” and “subject.” It prefers the notion of “member,” which is “the heart of the matter” in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970, 342).

The term “member” does not refer to a person. Members are those who master the language of their group and use it naturally. “Mastery of natural language” turns the individual into a member who takes for granted the meanings of the collectivity to which he/she belongs. The member is not the one who adheres to the group’s ideals but is the one who shares its meanings. The member is the one who makes him/herself understood. The word ethnomethodology is formed from the Greek “ethno” (people) and “methodology” (reflection on methods).

Ethnomethodology can be defined as the set of methods or procedures by which a people, that is, the “members” of a group, attribute meaning to the social practices of their daily life to achieve social order. Garfinkel is intrigued by the individual’s ability to create social order through their skills (Rawls 2002, 7).

Reflexivity, Indexicality, and the Unique Adequacy Requirement of Methods

After discussing accountability, I can deal with reflexivity, indexicality, and the unique adequacy requirement of methods (182) and the documentary method of interpretation.

Explaining reflexivity in sociology would require a separate treatise due to the conflicting interpretations of its meanings. My undertaking is even more difficult because ethnomethodologists do not have a univocal position on reflexivity. To give an idea of the complexity of the debate on reflexivity in sociology, it is enough to know that Lynch, making use of Malcolm Ashmore’s works on reflexivity (Ashmore 1989) and Steve Woolgar (Woolgar 1981, 1988), listed twenty different ways of conceiving reflexivity in psychology, systems theory, social theory, and cultural theory: mechanical reflexivity, knee-jerk reflexivity, cybernetic loopiness, reflections ad infinitum, substantive reflexivity, systemic-reflexivity, reflexive social construction, methodological reflexivity, philosophical self-reflection, methodological self-consciousness, methodological self-criticism, methodological self-congratulation, meta-theoretical reflexivity, reflexive objectification, standpoint reflexivity, breaking frame, interpretative reflexivity, hermeneutic reflexivity, radical referential reflexivity, and ethnomethodological reflexivity (Lynch 2000).

In what follows, I strive to proceed in the simplest and most orderly way possible to prevent the reader from getting lost in a disproportionate debate (Lewis-Beck, Bryman, Liao 2004, 934–935). To this end, I will present only Mead’s, Bourdieu’s, and Garfinkel’s conceptions of reflexivity, the authors we encountered in the previous chapters.

In symbolic interactionism, reflexivity is an object’s relationship with itself. According to Mead, reflexivity indicates the individual’s ability to become an object to themselves through the self. The individual takes the point of view of the significant other, and this mental journey affects their conduct.

This is not the meaning of Bourdieu’s reflexivity.

In Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, reflexivity indicates a virtue of the sociologist, who reflects on how he/she works strategically to accumulate symbolic power. In Bourdieu’s speech, those who practice reflexive sociology know, for example, that sociologists defend the research program most congenial to them. Bourdieu’s reflexivity distinguishes between sociologists who are virtuous and reflexive and those who, not being reflexive, are not even virtuous and, in the end, not even good.

There is also a third way of conceiving reflexivity, present in Bourdieu, which refers to the sociologist’s awareness of being socially conditioned in all phases of his/her research, what Bourdieu calls “sociology of sociology” (Wacquant 1989, 33). Sociologists are not perfect machines capable of photographing reality as such. Also, in this case, reflexivity is conceived as a virtue of the sociologist, which I highlighted in the previous chapter when I envisaged a section of the ethnographic notebook dedicated to the researcher’s emotions toward the group studied. In all these cases, reflexivity is synonymous with awareness, self-awareness, and self-understanding sociology, and is also understood as a form of humility and intellectual honesty.

This is not the meaning of Garfinkel’s reflexivity.

Garfinkel’s reflexivity refers to the procedures through which members carry out accountable activities that are tellable, understandable, and explainable. For Garfinkel, ethnomethodological reflexivity is not a noble subjective virtue; it is not a choice but a characteristic inherent in every human activity. From an ethnomethodological perspective, it is crucial to understand that reflexivity is not a choice, an optional trait, or a virtue, but rather an inherent aspect of how actions, including those performed and expressed by academic researchers, are comprehended and integrated into social environments. Reflexivity, in ethnomethodology, means that actions are self-explanatory. Ethnomethodological reflexivity also indicates that reports enter the process of constructing reality once they are accountable. Reflexivity indicates that the accounts reverberate on the situation they describe and that they construct.

Accounts are reflexive in that they hold the power to shape the situations they describe and aim to handle. The act of offering an explanation has the potential to alter the nature of the situation itself. For instance, if you realize that you have made a mistake while interacting with someone and take the initiative to clarify it, you are essentially changing the course of the interaction. This concept is true for everyone, from sociologists to the general public. When sociologists observe and report on social life, they inevitably influence the phenomenon they study. Subjects tend to behave differently when under observation, and their behavior may transform in response to how it is portrayed. Another way to say this is that social actors tend to alter their behavior in response to being observed and described (Ritzer and Stepnisky 2019, 170). Members’ knowledge and descriptions of the setting “turn[s] back” on it and become a constitutive feature of its organization (Pollner 1991, 372; Heritage 1984; Siegle 1986; Heritage 1984, 6).

Pollner distinguished two interrelated but distinct types of reflexivity in early ethnomethodology: Endogenous and referential reflexivity.

Endogenous reflexivity refers to how what members say and do in social reality constitutes social reality. Hence, both language and action do not merely react to pre-existing reality but also play a significant role in shaping it.

Referential reflexivity indicates that all sociological analysis goes back and reverberates on the reality studied, helping to shape it, which makes it difficult to speak of the “objectivity” of sociological research, a positivist myth disliked by Garfinkel (Pollner 1991, 372).

To say that an action is reflexive means that it preserves or modifies the surrounding context in every moment of its development and is made up of that same context.

In his Language and Social Reality, Lawrence Weider helped to understand what reflexivity is in ethnomethodology by resorting to the statement of a minor in a rehabilitation home, who tells the guard: “You know, I won’t snitch” (Wieder 1974; McCoul 1996, 95).

Let’s pay attention to the numerous reflexive aspects of this sentence. First, it defines the action of the minor, who will not be a spy. Second, it defines an action that happened before, when the guard asked the boy to betray someone’s trust. Third, it defines a system of rules within the group of inmates, which prohibits snitching. In addition, the minor establishes a system of roles that both he and his conversational partner must adhere to, creating a broader context for their interaction beyond the immediate circumstances.

In short, the statement “I will not snitch” enters the process of constituting reality in many ways. It puts an end to a certain type of discussion; it closes the door to a certain type of request; it diverts the interaction to a different track. The statement morally condemns the guard and leaves him uncertain about his knowledge of the matter he is investigating.

Wieder explains that there is a reflexive relationship between the statement of the minor and the type of social event of which the statement forms a part. By “reflexive,” Wieder means that the sentence affects social action and vice versa. All this discourse can be summarized as follows: Statements and actions use each other in a process of mutual elaboration. The type of reflexivity which ethnomethodologists speak of is an omnipresent feature of everyday activities inseparable from the activities themselves (Sassatelli 2000, 13).

To conclude, according to Garfinkel, knowledge and action are interdependent, and they reflexively influence each other.

Indexicality

Another distinctive concept of the ethnomethodological school is that of indexicality. The term “index sign” was introduced by the philosopher Charles Pierce, and later developed by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, to refer to the fact that an instrument receives its meaning from the context in which it is used.

Indexicality expresses the idea that the meaning of objects, and social practices, depends on the context in which they are born. In ethnomethodology, indexicality refers to how language and other forms of communication are influenced by the context in which they are used. This implies that the meaning of language is dependent on who uses it and when it is used.

It follows that “indexical expressions” are specific expressions that take on their meaning in the context in which they are pronounced. In the philosophy of language, an “indexical” refers to an expression whose meaning changes based on the specific context in which it is used.

In linguistics, examples of indexical (or deictic) expressions are personal and demonstrative pronouns (“I,” “you,” “this,” “that,” etc.) or some adverbs and temporal expressions (“here,” “now,” “tomorrow,” “soon,” etc.), the meanings of which are understandable only in a specific situation (Nunberg 1993). Deictics involve a linguistic reality internal to the sentence and an extra-linguistic reality external to the sentence.

An example of an indexical expression is the sentence “Dana succeeded in putting a penny in a parking meter today without being picked up” but also the sentence “I want you to take this” (Hanks 2001).

Both phrases are indexical because they can only be understood with reference to the specific situation in which they are pronounced. Indexicality is the act of indicating something that lies beyond what we say. Indexicality indicates something that clarifies the meaning of a sentence. Indexicality, that is, being linked to a context, is a fundamental aspect of natural language. In sum, language is seen as an action, and ethnomethodology highlights the arbitrary nature of the meaning of actions and explanations. This means that they lack an absolute foundation. However, explanations, once established, create a relatively inflexible order.

To truly understand the meaning of something, it’s important to consider the context in which it exists. However, it’s often assumed that people already have this context in mind. This is known as indexicality, where any particular item of significance is an index for what lies beyond it or a signifier of something greater than itself (Collins 1988, 276).

It is safe to assume that Garfinkel considers all utterances to be indexical. In his perspective, even the sentence “Ice floats on water” requires some specifications to clearly bring out its meaning.

Where does the ice float? In a drink at the bar or in a laboratory during a physics experiment? However, not all scholars agree with this idea of Garfinkel. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, for example, believes that it is possible to write literal and objective sentences that are understandable even to those unfamiliar with the context in which they were produced. Bar-Hillel cites an example of an indexical and a non-indexical statement. The statement “Close the door!” is indexical. However, the sentence “A closes the door d at time t!” is a non-indexical command (Bar-Hillel 1954, 365; Bonomi 1973).

Beyond this debate, a point to keep in mind is that Garfinkel, as already pointed out, is not interested in investigating the truth/falsity of a sentence. He is interested in the problem of its meaning.

The Unique Adequacy Requirement of Methods

And now, I deal with the unique adequacy requirement of methods.

What is its meaning?

According to the unique adequacy requirement of methods, every ethnomethodologist should become an expert in the social practices he/she intends to study. The researcher must learn boxing to conduct an ethnomethodological study on a group of boxers. Not surprisingly, Garfinkel invited his undergraduates and graduate students to become members of the group they intended to study.

To name just two examples, David Weinstein, a PhD student in the School of Social Sciences at UCI in the 1970s, enrolled in a truck driver course, but then his relationship with Garfinkel deteriorated, and he did not complete the PhD (Lynch 2019). George D. Girton, on the other hand, learned kung fu (Girton 1986).

Garfinkel wanted his students to become ethnographers with a higher level of competence than traditional ethnographers. It was not enough for Garfinkel to have his pupils closely observe members of a certain social milieu. He wanted them to become its members. His ideal ethnomethodologist is a sort of super-ethnographer, that is, an ethnographer with very high skills, which derive from the fact not of being among them, but of being like them to develop a very deep mastery of social practices to be studied through participant observation. Garfinkel, in the grip of an anti-theoretical impetus, wanted his young ethnomethodologists to strip themselves of all traditional techniques for data collection and all sociological theories to avoid “labeling” social phenomena with preconceived ideas to reproduce the investigated phenomena in the most detailed and faithful way possible. Lynch criticizes this radical approach in that it would deprive ethnomethodology of the support of all the other social sciences: Rejecting all known theories and methods of data collection is equivalent to escaping from science or, in any case, from the scientific community.

Garfinkel’s proposal to study social phenomena by rejecting the methods of investigation and conventional concepts to observe each situation in detail without conditioning raises a serious methodological question (Arminen 2008).

In his strong version, Garfinkel deprives ethnomethodology of any methodological rule that is clearly defined. The unique adequacy requirement of methods was judged as an extreme and radical consequence of the inevitable indexicality and reflexivity of the accounts.

If what happens in a boxing gym can only be understood by boxers or the ethnomethodologists who become such, what sense would it make to tell it to those who are not boxers? As a researcher develops a new method for describing and communicating their observations of the social world, they may encounter difficulty expressing their findings to those unfamiliar with the subject matter. For example, the nuances of a boxing gym may only be fully understood by boxers or ethnomethodologists who are well versed in the sport, making it challenging to communicate effectively with those outside of that realm.

Garfinkel’s proposal, if strictly applied, would hinder the study of many social groups, particularly deviant ones such as terrorists.

However, not all ethnomethodologists followed Garfinkel’s radical indications. Cicourel, for example, represents the less radical component of ethnomethodology, which is more open to dialogue with traditional social sciences (Gobo 2010, 45).

Ethnomethodology and Symbolic Interactionism

At first glance, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism seem like twin disciplines. In addition to being qualitative and micro-sociological approaches, they prefer face-to-face interaction and think that social structures arise from daily interactions between individuals.

However, these two sociological schools have some important differences, which Patrick Baert noted well (Baert 1998, 82–88).

Symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology have different philosophical origins. Symbolic interactionism is rooted in Mead’s concept of self, while ethnomethodology is influenced by Mead’s self, Parsons’s emphasis on social order, and Schutz’s epoché. Finally, we must remember the influence of the later Wittgenstein. However, the important differences between these two schools are numerous.

I mention some of them.

First, Garfinkel is more interested than Parsons in implicit cognitive activity, with which individuals give meaning to reality and transform it: Garfinkel attributes an important role to how people think and understand.

Second, Parsons explains the problem of social order with socialization, which allows for the internalization of social norms and values in the personality structure of individuals. Garfinkel finds this response unsatisfactory and prefers to explain the social order by the procedures individuals use to renew their interpretation of reality and common sense continuously.

Third, Garfinkel acknowledges that Parsons’s concept of the social actor is more proactive than Durkheim’s but still considers it insufficient (Crespi 2008).

Fourth, unlike Parsons, Garfinkel devoted himself far more to empirical research than to theory.

Unlike symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology is not an interpretative sociology that enhances the innovative and creative components of the social actor.

Symbolic interactionism suggests that the perception of reality during an interaction relies solely on the individuals’ interpretations. As a result, it can feel like starting from scratch with each interaction, and the concept of “reality” becomes negotiable, relative, precarious, and subject to misunderstanding, ambiguity, and uncertainty (Fele 2002, 42).

One criticism of Garfinkel that I cannot ignore is that he did not give due importance to power, violence, and coercion in explaining the reproduction of social order.

I end this chapter by giving the floor to Garfinkel to explain what ethnomethodology is, with its convoluted language.

On a page of Studies in Ethnomethodology, he writes that:

[Ethnomethodology] seek to treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually accorded extraordinary events, seek to learn about them as phenomena in their own right. [Its] central recommendation is that the activities whereby members produce and manage settings of organized everyday affairs are identical with members’ procedures for making those settings ‘account-able.’ The ‘reflexive,’ or “incarnate” character of accounting practices and accounts makes up the crux of that recommendation. When I speak of accountable my interests are directed to such matters as the following. I mean observable-and-reportable, i.e. available to members as situated practices of looking-and-telling. (Garfinkel 1967, 1)

Conclusion

This chapter has explored Husserl’s phenomenology, Schutz’s social phenomenology, Berger and Luckmann’s social construction of reality, and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology.

Three concepts by Husserl should be remembered: Lifeworld, natural attitude, and epoché or the invitation to keep the meanings “above,” suspended in parentheses.

Schutz suggests that we should “denaturalize” our world. This means that we should avoid seeing the social scene as natural, usual, obvious, and taken for granted, which is a typical attitude of the ordinary man inspired by a naive realism. Schutz’s study of the stranger and homecomer illustrates how certain individuals cannot take the world for granted due to external factors that are beyond their control. On the contrary, the phenomenological sociologist must consciously denaturalize the world through the phenomenological epoché. This is because the epoché requires a deliberate suspension of judgment to remove the natural attitude toward the world.

Berger and Luckmann introduced three fundamental concepts that we have explored: “language,” “typification,” and “paramount reality” or the world of everyday life dominated by pragmatic needs that imperiously imposes itself on the individual by face-to-face encounters. Language is the most important sign system of human society and the primary method of maintaining the shared objectivity of everyday life. Our daily lives are characterized by a constant flow of categorizations through which we perceive social reality. Typification teaches ordinary individuals how to interact and react to daily events. Social reality is constructed through a dialectical process consisting of three fundamental moments: “Externalization,” “objectification,” and “internalization.” The world could not become objective without internalization, which refers to bringing the external social world into one’s consciousness during socialization. Reification represents the extreme level of objectification. Reification occurs when human products have non-human or superhuman origins, such as the belief that social order results from divine will or cosmic law.

Garfinkel’s key concepts are “member,” “breaching experiment,” “accountability,” “indexicality,” “reflexivity,” “unique adequacy requirement of methods,” and “documentary method of interpretation.” By studying feminist theories, we will see that ethnomethodology is favored among scholars who belong to social groups that have experienced discrimination or who empathize with these groups. This is because ethnomethodology emphasizes that social life is an ongoing creation in which individuals play a central role. As they are never fixed, the meanings that underpin social organization are not set in stone and can be challenged and altered.

Self-Test Path

  1. (1)

    What does Husserl’s epoché prescribe?

  2. (2)

    Can you talk about typification in Schutz?

  3. (3)

    Talk about Schutz’s stranger.

  4. (4)

    What is “externalization,” according to Berger and Luckmann?

  5. (5)

    Please discuss the asymmetry between objective and subjective reality in Berger and Luckmann.

  6. (6)

    What is ethnomethodology?

  7. (7)

    What are the main differences between Durkheim’s sociology and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology?

  8. (8)

    Can you explain Garfinkel’s concept of accountability?

  9. (9)

    What is “indexicality” for Garfinkel?

  10. (10)

    Can you explain Garfinkel’s concept of reflexivity?

  11. (11)

    What are the main differences between ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism?

  12. (12)

    How is social order possible, according to Garfinkel?