The Management of Temporality: Ethnomethodology as Historical Reconstruction of Practical Action

Abstract

There has been a cleavage within the sociological community regarding the question of reflexivity. While some see ethnomethodology as inevitably adopting a constructivist point of view and argue that it can in no way avoid the problem of referential reflexivity, others cherish Harold Garfinkel's teaching that ethnomethodology should not be engaged in an ironic mode of theorizing and argue that the problem of referential reflexivity is totally misconceived. In this article, after showing why the advocates of referential reflexivity fail to indicate the nature of constructive work involved in the ethnomethodological studies of practical action, I will analyze some of the ethnomethodological studies of scientific practice conducted by the antireflexivists and demonstrate that, despite their arguments to the contrary, the antireflexivists are engaged in an ample dose of constructive work to render a sequence of experimental action intelligible. More specifically, I will argue that antireflexive ethnomethodologists' alleged recovery of the temporally situated logic of the members involves the narrative logic of history.Ever since Harold Garfinkel hit the responsive chord of the Anglo-American sociological community by publishing his provocative Studies in Ethnomethodology (1 967), ethnomethodology has spawned a wide variety of theoretical debates among social theorists and philosophers (Coleman ). In what has been called the ethnomethodological respecification (Garfinkel 199 l), ethnomethodology is heralded to be on a different "track" from conventional sociology. In contrast to the conventional social theory in which the aim of a theory is conceived to accurately represent the objective social reality, Garfinkel and his associates (Button 1991) disavow such an aim and respecify sociology as an intellectual endeavor to delineate in descriptive detail how the intersubjective world of actors is reflexively maintained and made visible in temporally extended social actions. It is thus well known that their work has been concerned with the study of "endogenous" organization of social action in which theoretical categories invented by the theorists have no role to play.It is however less well known that there is a cleavage within the sociological commuDirect all correspondence lo Kyung-Man Kim,

‘If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry’: Emotional labour, reflexivity and ethics-as-practice in a qualitative fieldwork context

“…Utilising a feminist and science and technology studies-inspired approach to what they term ‘microethics’ (informed perhaps most notably by the work of Sandra Harding), they rightly stress that ‘Reflexivity in research is not a single or universal entity but a process – an active, ongoing process that saturates every stage of the research ’ in which ‘our social and political locations [as researchers] affect our research’ (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004: 274, emphases added). It is the special singling out of ‘the research’, italicised earlier, and the inevitable square bracketing ‘[of researchers]’ which often accompanies accounts of reflexivity that Lynch (2000) would ultimately problematise (for different ethnomethodological approaches to this issue, see Kim, 1999). Guillemin and Gillam’s (2004: 274) chosen subheading – ‘Using Reflexivity in Research’ – will undoubtedly peeve scholars, like Lynch (2000), whose sensitivities towards the overly virtuous status frequently attributed to reflexivity as an ethical-imperative-cum-silver-bullet solution to ‘ethical dilemmas’ are particularly heightened.…”

Social Performance as Cultural Critique: Critical Theory beyond Bourdieu and Habermas

“…1 Criticisms of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology from the constructionist point of view can be found in my (Kim, 1999) and Pollner (1991). 2 Because I have confined my discussion of child abuse to America in the 1960's and afterwards, my argument as to the birth of child abuse cannot be generalized to other countries in other time periods.…”

“…Criticisms of Garfinkel's ethnomethodology from the constructionist point of view can be found in my (Kim, ) and Pollner ().…”

Can Bourdieu’s Critical Theory Liberate us from the Symbolic Violence?

“…The violence inveterately done by such a theorization thus amounts to killing the embeddedness of action in duration. Bourdieu's (1990b, p. 385) argument that the objective representation of the practical logic of agents is nothing but a social construction available only within the scholastic situation or skholè-in which all the contingencies and temporal urgency associated with the pursuits of practical ends are "neutralized" chimes with that of ethnomethodologists who have been concerned with the detailed delineation of how social actors' intersubjective world is reflexively maintained and made visible in temporally extended social actions (Garfinkel, 1967;Kim, 1999;Sharrock & Button, 1991). In any community of practitioners, according to ethnomethodololgists, members develop and regularly apply intersubjective standards to assess the rationality of their own activities.…”