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Originally from the Society for Social Research at the University of Chicago

HAROLD GARFINKEL
Studies in Ethnomethodology

Chap. 2 ''Studies of the routine grounds of everyday activities''

From the point of view of sociological theory the moral order consists of the rule governed activities of everyday life. A society's members encounter and know the moral order as perceivedly normal courses of action - familiar scenes of everyday affairs, the world of daily life known in common with others and with others taken for granted. Garfinkel is concerned with the activities of everyday life and that which is taken for granted, he is interested in how things are perceived and defined. He wishes to explore it as a topic and as a methodology. Sociologists commonly overlook the socially standardized and standardizing, ''seen but unnoticed'' expected background features of everyday life. This is a glaring oversight because the member of society uses background expectancies as a scheme of interpretation. Garfinkel bases his arguments and conclusions concerning ethnomethodology on a series of 'breaching' experiments, in which students deliberately breech the understood, but unspoken, rules of everyday encounters. These experiments are not really experiments, but more like demonstrations.

We begin first by exploring common understandings. Understandings cannot possibly consist of a measured amount of shared agreement among persons on certain topics. Garfinkel illustrated this point with an example of conversation between two people. When one examines the exchange, one realizes that there are many things that are understood between two people, especially those who have a standing relationship, than are actually mentioned. Also, many understood matters were understood on the basis of what was unspoken, the temporal series of utterances determined what was understood, and matters that were understood in common were understood only in and through a course of understanding work that consisted of treating an actual linguistic event as document or representation of some other real, experienced event. Of course, understanding also hinges on prior relationships and events, as well as the form of conversational interaction. Sometimes what is said is specifically vague and what is expressed may only be understood through further exchange.

Garfinkel argues that all of these realizations about conversation point to underlying properties of conversational exchange and the rules which govern them in daily life. Persons require these properties of discourse as conditions under which they are themselves entitled and entitle others to claim that they know what they are talking about, and that what they are saying is understood and ought to be understood. To test his hypotheses, Garfinkel sent forth a legion of students to conduct conversational breaching experiments. Students were instructed to question everything they were being told by asking what was meant. Example:
(S) I had a flat tire.
(E) What do you mean you had a flat tire?
When these experiments were conducted, the students often received responses of puzzlement, anger, concern, and frustration. Such responses demonstrated the importance of shared knowledge and understanding, as well as the rules which govern exchanges in conversation.

Other experiments and their conclusions included the following. In no one experiment was student participation 100%. There were also some variations in responses in all cases.

- Undergraduate students were asked to spend 15 mins. - 1hr. in their homes viewing its activities as if they were boarders with no history in the household. Persons, relationships, and activities were described without respect for their history, for the place of the scene in a set of developing life circumstances, or for he scenes as texture of relevant events for the parties themselves. Students were surprised to see how personal the interactions and treatments of others were, and how formal manners and protocol were often disregarded. Family members were confused, angered and often hurt by students' formal behavior. Students were often relieved when the experiment was over. Conclusion: Background understandings (mutually recognized texture) are necessary for adequate recognition of commonplace events.

- In a variant, students were asked to act as boarders in their own homes for the same length of time. They were supposed to be formally polite, and again unassuming in regards to relationships, common patterns of behavior, and the set up of the household. Familial response again involved anger, suspicion, frustration, and the like. In most cases, families vigorously sought to make the strange actions intelligible and to restore the situation to normal appearances. Explanations by family members were sought in previous, understandable motives of the student: overwork, sickness, personal troubles. When offered explanations by family members went unacknowledged, there followed withdrawal by the offended member, attempted isolation of the culprit, retaliation and denunciation. At the end of the experiment, students filled their families in on the little experiment, and while he families were forgiving, many were not very happy about playing the role of the guinea pig. Unlike the first experiment, relief was often only partial, and anticipatory fears were low. Conclusion: This too supports the idea that background knowledge is important and is understood as such when it is shared.

Background understanding has important social affects, but he role that a background of common understandings plays in the production, control, and recognition of these affects, however, is terra incognita. The existence of a definite and strong relationship between common understandings and social affects can be demonstrated and some of it features explored by the deliberate display of distrust, a procedure that produced highly standardized effects for Garfinkel. Distrust was chosen because on the everyday level, to treat a relationship under a rule of doubt requires that the necessity and motivation for such a rule be justified. Another experiment was in order: Students were instructed to engage someone in conversation and to imagine and act on the assumption that what the other person was saying was directed by hidden motives which were the real ones. Most students tried this with friends or families, and reported little embarrassment, but many hurt feelings on the part of the interactants. The two students who interacted with strangers were unable to complete the interaction.

... Garfinkel came up with a new set of experiments designed to breach common understandings and produce confusion. All of the experiments satisfied 3 conditions: the person could not turn it into a joke or deception of any kind, the person could not 'leave the field' or have sufficient time to redefine the real circumstances, and the person would be deprived of consensual support for an alternative definition of social reality. One experiment was:

- Medical students were interviewed under the pretense of discovering why a med school interview was such a stressful situation. The interviewer posed as a rep from a prestigious school. During the 3 hour interview, the interviewer would play for each student a recorded interview with someone who had bad manners, was pompous and rude, and all in all a general 'bad interview', but the interviewer would act as if the recorded interview was ideal. The med students were then asked for their opinions and analysis. Results: Almost all students fell for the line. They often asked what others thought and after initial derogatory opinions, they worked hard to reconcile their previous statements with the interviewer's positive view of the recorded tape. 22 of 28 students felt marked relief when the experiment was explained to them afterwards.

Garfinkel is very critical of previous studies which treat individuals as cultural dopes who simply reproduce society without being aware of it. Such studies treat common sense rationalities of judgment as epiphenomenal. To test the idea of people being judgmental dopes, another experiment:

- Garfinkel sent out 120 students to stores where they were required to pick an item and offer to pay a price other than the one that was marked on the item. Most trials were conducted by offering a lower price for either an item under $2 or an item over $50. Most students found the most tense part of the experiment to be the anticipation phase, before they approached a sales person for the first time. Anticipatory fears declined for those with multiple trials. There was less discomfort in bargaining for high-priced merchandise, and more results of price negotiation. Sales persons can be dismissed as either having been dopes in different ways than current theories of standardized expectancies provide, or not dopes enough. A few showed anxiety, occasionally one got angry.

Such findings suggest that one can make the member of the society out to be a cultural dope by portraying individuals as those who follow rules when in actuality they have anticipatory fears of alternate situations, by overlooking the practical and theoretical importance of mastering fears, or if upon arousal of troubled fears, an individual strives to avoid the very situations in which they might learn about their fears. The more important the rule, the greater the likelihood that knowledge is based on avoided tests.

In standardized theories, persons may also be made out to be dopes by either over-formalizing, or over-simplifying the effects and texture of the environment, or by portraying routine actions as those governed by prior agreements, and by making the likelihood that a member will recognize deviance depend upon the existence of prior agreements.

In conclusion:
The study of common sense knowledge and common sense activities consists of treating as problematic phenomena the actual methods whereby members of a society, lay or professional, make the social structures of everyday activities observable.