Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise

Following the publication of the papers collected in Harold Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology, ethnomethodology, at least for Garfinkel, became wedded to a developing conception of and comparison with disciplinary sociology. At the heart of the envisioned disciplinary revolution lay a claim to ethnomethodology’s distinguishing phenomenal domain and central research directive, that people are continually engaged in the witnessable work of organizing what they are doing as they are doing it. This paper is a critique of the Garfinkelian ethnomethodology that actually developed: the paper illustrates Garfinkel’s minimal engagement in field research, with Garfinkel seeming to be neither concerned about nor particularly good at it. No one was trained in the rigors of field work and, far from taking up the detailed, real-world examination of the autochthonous organization of immediately present, ongoing activities, ethnomethodological studies were indistinguishable praxeologically from disciplinary sociology, much as they are today. Never moored to its intended phenomenal domain, the ethnomethodological project became a wonderland for theorists, apologists, and general partisans, the privates and generals in a cause that they little understood.