Society self-organizes through the practical actions of its members.
The notion of ethnomethodology is not part of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ). The concept began to be used in the 1960s with reference to a current of sociology and social psychology that maintains that the social world is constructed continuously and daily, constituting itself as an intelligible and objective reality .
Self-organization
According to ethnomethodology, the social world self-organizes through the practical actions carried out by the members of a community . This implies that neither political activity nor the State are responsible for this order.
For ethnomethodology, in short, individuals produce everyday social activities and, at the same time, give them meaning. The American Harold Garfinkel (1917-2011) is noted as the creator of this aspect that attributes the central role to the person in the production of society .
Unlike what was postulated by other sociologists, Garfinkel maintained that the act of the human being comes first and then the laws appear. Ethnomethodology, in this way, believes that subjects modify laws according to the context, and not that laws change human actions.
Order and structures
The determination of the social order is given by the successive interpretative acts of people. These acts give meaning to everyday life and generate social facts , says ethnomethodology.
Regarding social structures, ethnomethodology defines them as processes that cannot be separated from the practices of individuals. These are not, therefore, fixed states.
Currents
Specialists in ethnomethodology began to investigate so-called "social deviance" in different contexts, including medical, judicial and educational . To do this, they started from "perceived normality", a concept developed by Garfinkel according to which human beings actively work to normalize the differences we perceive between what we expect and what actually takes place. In other words, given that total coincidence between the ideal and reality is impossible, once we have both elements in front of us we draw a middle point that we consider normal .
From this a different sociology of knowledge emerged, which was no longer limited by prescriptive rationality but took into account knowledge as something that is developed and maintained in society. Below we will see three of the investigations that arose thanks to these advances.
Featured research
Garfinkel and a group of students studied work practices . While these were generally normal activities, his special interest was in the fields of physics and mathematics. It all started when they understood that most sociology studies did not delve into the jobs themselves, but rather used them as a context. In other words, the data that was usually studied were the characteristics of its members but not the activities they carried out.
Communication in children is one of the topics of interest in ethnomethodology.
On the other hand we have the conversation , which was the focus of other ethnomethodology studies. In this framework we can highlight the organization of language when having informal conversations, such as telling anecdotes, making jokes or even greeting each other on the street. Several documents with unprecedented data remained from this investigation.
Cognitive sociology , a term coined in 1974 by Professor Aaron Cicourel , was the focus of other research, later continued by H. Mehan . Both worked in the educational field and believed that for sociology one of the fundamental problems was language competence. By studying the way in which people who are mute or blind from birth, children and students communicate with their teachers, they created an interesting study that relates ethnomethodology to linguistics , cognitive psychology and anthropology .