Mandarin ethnomethodology or mutual interchange?

Abstract

Contributors to the 2016 Special Issue of Discourse Studies on the ‘Epistemics of Epistemics’ (EoE) claim that studies of epistemics in interaction (how participants display orientations to their own and others’ states of knowledge) have lost the ‘radical’ character of groundbreaking work in ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA). We suggest that the critiques and related writings are a kind of mandarin EM, lacking an adequate definition of ‘radical’, other than to invoke brief and by now familiar statements from Garfinkel and Sacks regarding the pursuit of ‘ordinary everyday activities’ and the avoidance of ‘formal analysis’. Drawing on Egon Bittner’s work, we further suggest that the EoE group shares properties and problems common to social movements claiming the mantle of radicalism. Because of their particular focus on CA and Harvey Sacks’ early work, we also demonstrate that Sacks was not, as asserted, preoccupied with the singularity of occasions. Rather, from his earliest available work (the 1964 lectures), Sacks pursued trans-situational aspects of sequential organization, and documented these not only through single cases but also through the comparative analysis of specimen collections. We conclude by considering how EM and CA are compatible endeavors, both in their engagement with traditional research topics – or what Garfinkel called ‘asymmetric alternates’ – and in their appreciation of generic features implicated in the assembly of social actions and social worlds. This implies a relationship of mutual interchange between EM and CA.

Keywords

Conversation analysis epistemics ethnomethodology radicalism

Introduction

In the collection of papers comprising the fall 2016 Discourse Studies Special Issue on the ‘Epistemics of Epistemics’ (hereafter, EoE), we find it difficult to comprehend what the bother is all about. If we were to isolate a consistent theme, at least in the core papers of the volume, it can only be described as a canard: the idea that Heritage’s work across three decades of writing about epistemic and related matters is somehow naively cognitivist, although ‘not explicitly’ (Lynch and Wong, 2016: 533). Correspondingly, it is alleged that the body of work on epistemics is premised on an ‘information exchange’, ‘information transmission’, ‘information transfer’ or ‘informationist’ conception of interaction. Claims to this effect can be found in Lynch and Macbeth’s (2016: 494, 497) introductory piece, Lindwal et al.’s (2016) discussion of the ‘recognizability of social actions’, Macbeth et al.’s (2016: 561, 566) consideration of the ‘oh’ token, and Macbeth and Wong’s (2016: 589) ‘part 2’ treatment of ‘oh’.

Such claims are, in short, groundless. Any careful reading of Heritage’s earlier work on ‘oh’, and later investigations into epistemic status and stance in the production and ascription of action, offers no support for the cognitivist claim or the related effort to lump the research with ‘traditional conceptions of communication as information exchange’ (Lynch and Wong, 2016: 531). Our best interpretation is that the Special Issue authors somehow missed the distinction between participants’ orientations to parameters of their knowledge – including how those orientations are displayed in their talk – and what the analyst is doing in describing those enacted orientations. Whether this oversight was naïve or willful, it distorts Heritage’s body of work to the point of caricature, and often beyond recognition.

Furthermore, the attempts at re-analysis and the rejoinders to Heritage’s (2018) rebuttal not only are ‘tedious’, ‘confused’ and ‘self-contradictory’, revealing fundamental misunderstandings of conversation analytic methodology (e.g. the role of second turns, third turns and collections as sources of evidence, the relationship between context-specific and more general analytic claims, and other key matters),¹ but also miss the forest for the trees. Indeed, going by the other papers in this issue, even the trees are not in focus. In any case, we wish to register the excitement with which the first main publication (Heritage and Raymond, 2005) on epistemics in interaction was met. Pomerantz’s (1984) previous work on preference organization in assessment sequences had already been massively cited and influential. Then, 20 plus years later, Heritage and Raymond (2005) proposed to build on her initial (Pomerantz, 1984: 57) insight that ‘with an assessment, a speaker claims knowledge of that which he or she is assessing’. Where Pomerantz (1984) concentrated on the asymmetries – and displays of preference – between agreeing and disagreeing evaluations in responsive turns, Heritage and Raymond (2005) delved more deeply into the internal design of both first and second assessments, focusing on how specific practices instantiate speakers’ claims to knowledge and their rights to make such claims.

The patterns Heritage and Raymond (2005) identified with respect to the use of devices for upgrading, downgrading and otherwise displaying whether a speaker’s access to a referent is primary, secondary or equal to that of a co-participant brought forward further levels of organization in assessment sequences to which Pomerantz’s (1984) own pioneering study, as it concentrated on preference structures as such, pointed, but did not fully explicate.² If any conversation analysis (CA) research is in line with Sacks’ (1984a) admonitions about ‘order at all points’, ‘close looking’ and the ability to ‘handle the details of actual events … formally’, Heritage and Raymond’s inquiry most certainly is.³

In short, the Heritage and Raymond (2005) article provides a powerful exemplar of the way initial findings of order in talk, and ostensibly conventional research reports of those findings, can be generative of further inquiry and insight. If Sacks (1984a) is right, analysis can always go deeper, stimulated by findings already in hand. By building on Pomerantz’s (1984) work, Heritage and Raymond (2005) in turn fostered a remarkable range of studies not only on epistemics per se, but also on turn design, turn-initial particles, action formation and other areas.

However, our purpose is not to address variations on the cognitivist/informationist theme or other criticisms leveled against Heritage’s work. Nor is it to further celebrate the groundbreaking and generative insights that the Heritage and Raymond (2005) study introduced and that subsequent reports have expanded on. Given the responses of Heritage (2018) and others in the current Special Issue, countering fundamental misunderstandings of epistemics research and of conversation analytic methodology more generally, we are taking a different tack. We are interested in the many assertions about ‘radical’ CA and ‘radical’ ethnomethodology (EM) in the introduction to the 2016 Discourse Studies Special Issue, and in subsequent work by Lynch and his associates. Since the charge is that studies of epistemics in conversation represent a ‘a regression from what is, or was, radical about CA’ (Lynch and Wong, 2016: 527, original emphasis), our question is, what exactly is this ‘radical’ element that the group is attempting to preserve? And what does the current pursuit of ‘radicalism’ portend for EM and the various research initiatives inspired by it?

What is ‘radical’ EM?

Let us start with what the word ‘radical’ means, and how it seems to be used in the writings of those in the previous Discourse Studies Special Issue. The Oxford English Dictionary (Brown, 1993: 2462) lists several definitions, the most relevant of which concerns the pursuit of (1) ‘far-reaching change’ and (2) ‘independence of or departure from tradition’. We refer to these definitions as D1 and D2, respectively.⁴

In their introduction to the Special Issue, Lynch and Macbeth (2016: 496) cite what they take to be Sacks’ (1984a: 22) articulation of ‘the radical point of departure’ from established social sciences in CA and EM:

I want to propose that a domain of research exists that is not part of any other established science. That domain is one that those who are pursuing it have come to call ethnomethodology/conversation analysis. That domain seeks to describe methods persons use in doing social life. It is our claim that, although the range of activities this domain describes may be as yet unknown, the mode of description, the way it is cast, is intrinsically stable.

What makes this radical, the authors say, is the recognition of the methods that participants use in their ‘myriad activities’, methods that ‘articulate intrinsically stable activities’ (Lynch and Macbeth, 2016: 496, original emphasis). Or, as Macbeth and Wong (2016: 575) put it, ‘EM and CA proposed radically alternate understandings: that everyday life was already in possession of the terms and resources for understanding its relentlessly achieved order’. These statements, highlighting ‘far-reaching change’, are in accord with D1.⁵ Additionally, the EM/CA approach is radical because it ‘refuses to privilege’ social science methodology over ordinary, commonsense ‘reasoning and practice’. EM/CA inquiries, in this sense, represent a ‘divestiture of academic authority’ (Lynch and Macbeth, 2016: 496).⁶ This is in accord with D2.

What else could ‘radical’ mean?

Because there is no extensive discussion in the Special Issue itself of what the authors mean by ‘radical’, we turn to other sources related to the Special Issue. In the summer of 2016, Lynch convened a group of scholars in Manchester, England, who have been working in a variety of fields and doing so with various ethnomethodological interests. On a website called ‘Radical Ethnomethodology’ (http://radicalethno.org/), several from this group have published papers that were presented at this meeting. Of the five papers, two are by Lynch, one of which has the title of the website. What can we glean about radical EM from this article (Lynch, 2016a)?⁷

As it turns out, there isn’t much to add to what is published in the Discourse Studies Special Issue. By way of Lynch (2016a: 2) quoting Garfinkel et al. (1988), we learn that EM eschews both the ‘universals of thoughtful proofs’ and the ‘effectiveness of crafts and shop techniques’ (D2) in favor of examining the ‘unremarkable lived possession of ordinary everyday activities’ (D1). This otherwise ‘unremarkable’ domain includes commonplace doings, accomplishments or co-productions and resembles what Sacks (1984a: 22) says in the earlier quotation, which also appears in Lynch’s (2016a: 2) paper from the Manchester conference.

It is repeated also how methodologically distinct EM and CA are from mainstream sociological inquiry, as Lynch (2016a: 3) disparages conventional students who are trained in ‘specialized analytical methods’ along with ‘programmatic efforts to see through the ideological “truths” that mask social reality’. Also belittled are not only the inquiry into ‘epistemics’ à la Heritage, but also the coding of conversation analytic data (Stivers, 2015; cf. Clayman et al., 2006; Mangione-Smith et al., 2003; Schaeffer et al., 2013; Stivers et al., 2009). This is in accord with Definition 2 of radical. Here, it can be noted that D2 is more about what radical EM is not than what it is. D1 and D2 (including the latter’s negative formulation) are succinctly captured in this statement (Lynch, 2016a):

Among the tendencies that mark ethnomethodology as ‘radical’ is the unabashed effort to pursue descriptions of observable, actual, real-worldly practices, but without taking on the baggage of empirical social science, and also without regressing into hyper-generalized interpretative glosses. (p. 8)

To be fair, there are ample times, some of which are quoted in Lynch (2016a: 8–11), when Garfinkel also characterizes EM methods by what they avoid; on the other hand, when Garfinkel’s statements are read in context, there are specifications about the (positive) methodological requirements for doing EM work. Indeed, the many critiques of traditional methods found in Garfinkel’s writings are almost always paired with ways in which EM can elucidate the ordered phenomena that such methods are unable to grasp.

We look largely in vain for statements in the Lynch paper as to the character of radical EM, finding mostly rehashes of Garfinkel’s own original statements. In a section of the paper on social theory, for example, Lynch (2016a: 9) dusts off a sentence from a paper in Sociological Theory, in which Garfinkel (1988) writes about ‘every society’s local, endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement …’ (p. 103). With this foundational quotation in hand, Lynch (2016a: 9) says that the relationship of Garfinkel’s work to theory ‘will be the focus of a number of questions’ in the group’s discussions. However, mostly what we read is a reversion to origin statements rather than any new or original statements of what radical EM is. Nevertheless, beyond the confines of explicit definitional statements, we detect a few clues or hints about what ‘radical’ EM and CA are supposed to involve.

Three hints about radicalism

First, EM has an incommensurable relationship with what Garfinkel called ‘formal analysis’, which can refer to any propositional, hypothetical or generalized type of statement, whether in professional or everyday life contexts. Garfinkel often illustrates the distinction between formal analysis and EM inquiry by way of instructions for doing a task (e.g. a diagram for putting a piece of furniture together). The abstractions involved in diagrams and written directives fall short in determining how the assembler is to accomplish the task as an embodied activity in time and space with the actual objects and tools at hand. Taken out of fuller discussions, the idea of incommensurability can be akin to the D2 version of radical, but also retains an aspect of D1. Lynch (2016a: 11) points out that, when Garfinkel (2002: 117) discusses EM’s incommensurability, he is describing how EM inquiry can ‘recover’ the ‘accountable work’ involved in those investigations done under the auspices of formal analysis, such as the reading of instructions. However, formal analysis cannot ‘do it the other way around’ – that is, use its techniques to gain access to EM’s phenomena. This asymmetry of ethnomethodological inquiry relative to formal analysis is, indeed, one of Garfinkel’s most fruitful ways of articulating EM inquiries.

A second hint as to EM’s radicalism is found in Lynch’s (2016a: 14) reference to Sacks’ ‘much broader and richer agenda’ relative to current CA. Here, Lynch refers to a favorite quotation from an unpublished work by Garfinkel and others (1988),⁸ in which there is reference to ‘latter day CA’ as configuring talk to be ‘structure’s mandarins’ by ‘ruling it’ in the manner of Chinese Imperial officials who bore the mandarin label. The title of our article harks back to this rubric, about which we will say more in due course. In Lynch’s (2016a: 14–15) account, Sacks’ pioneering efforts stand in contrast to ostensible mandarins elsewhere in the CA field, in that he used ‘the advantages to tape recording and playback to develop precise descriptions of the coordinated production of social actions’, but only in a preliminary way. In this passage, Lynch further claims that Schegloff initially supported Sacks in the attention to the singularity of episodes of talk, but such attention wanes in the development of Schegloff’s own ‘technical’ style of analysis and distance from the lived phenomena of talk in interaction. This statement echoes an earlier one of Lynch’s (2000a), in which he proposed that CA has become a ‘technical, professionally situated program of formal analysis’ (p. 529).

And it is here that the critique of the line of work in CA concerned with epistemics is fit: having backhandedly praised Schegloff for his support of Sacks, but found him wanting because he discounts ‘vernacular competence’ in favor of professionalized inquiry, Lynch (2016a: 17) proposes that epistemic inquiry takes the field ‘much further in a constructive-analytic’ direction. Not much is said about this, for immediately CA studies that do coding are invoked in support of the claim that CA ‘has become increasingly compatible with analytical social science’ (Lynch, 2016a: 18). Given that the overwhelming number of papers in the CA tradition remain outside of any coding enterprise, this alleged tie-in between CA and received methodologies or formal analysis is misleading if not entirely far-fetched. In any case, we are back to D2, where radical EM is such because it eschews such methods.

A third hint regarding radical EM appears near the end of Lynch’s (2016a: 22–23) essay, where he poses the question of how to preserve inquiry into ‘naturally organized ordinary activities’ while avoiding ‘the usual social science traps: abstracted empiricism, regressive self-reflection, and endless critique’. Once again, Lynch (2016a:9) also invokes a phrase from Garfinkel (2007:103) along with D2, providing the barest of hints as to what radical EM is. However, Lynch goes on to say, in a promissory note without much specificity, that tactics for ‘rebooting’ EM may be gleaned from Garfinkel’s archive, in his unpublished writings and in recent (Garfinkel, 2002, 2007) publications.

Taking stock

The purpose of the Manchester meeting was to discuss what ‘radical ethnomethodology’ is. But given the way that the term radical is bandied about, both in Lynch’s paper by that title and in the Discourse Studies Special Issue on EoE, it is surprising how devoid of content the available discussions have been. At best, we have suggestive references to (1) asymmetric alternates to formal inquiries, (2) the preservation of concerted activities in their specificity and detail, and (3) references to Garfinkel’s own work for inspiration on how to gain access to ‘naturally organized ordinary activities’. This is not much to go on. These formulations do little more than hark back to earlier statements that are now 30 to 50 years old (Garfinkel, 1967, 1988; Garfinkel et al., 1988), including lectures that Sacks (1992a, 1992b) was delivering in the late 1960s and early 1970s.⁹

So, we shall take a different tack on saying what ‘radical ethnomethodology’ is all about – at least for the assembled EoE group – by exploring the way the term radical can operate within a scholarly community. We suggest that the term is deployed in context as a rallying cry for a group that seeks to starkly differentiate itself from ‘traditional’ social science, and enforce that vision on fellow travelers.

On radicalism in social movements

We draw on the work of Egon Bittner, an early ethnomethodologist who studied with Garfinkel, collaborated with Garfinkel on Chapter 6 of Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), and was cited numerous times elsewhere in the book. Bittner wrote an important paper about radical movements, published in the American Sociological Review in 1963, in which he examines the organizational problems that arise when a small collectivity – such as contributors to the EoE Special Issue and the 2016 Manchester meeting – adopts the mantle of radicalism. Implicit in the EoE papers, and more explicit in the avowed purpose of the subsequent meeting – ‘to discuss and promote radical ethnomethodology’ (Lynch, 2016a: 14, original emphasis), is what Bittner (1963: 932–934) characterizes as the pursuit of a ‘unified and internally consistent’ schema of interpretation that adherents are obliged to reason from and uphold. Indeed, with only a glossy definition of what ‘radical’ EM or CA inquiry might consist of, the EoE group’s use of the term establishes ‘not a difference of degree but a juxtapostion of opposites’ (Bittner, 1963: 929) – casting ‘radical’ EM and CA as categorically different from traditional social science, from the purported formal analysis that has crept into Schegloff’s ‘technical’ version of CA, as well as the so-called ‘epistemics program’.

Certainly, not all the features that Bittner describes would characterize the radical EM movement – we are not saying the writings of those in the Special Issue or the articulations from Manchester correspond to radicalism as Bittner (1963) depicts it in any strict sense. His paper, posing an ideal type, recognizes the incompleteness of the list of defining features, as well as the imperfect fit between any group’s endeavors and those features.

The search for meaning

Radicalism seeks a unified, internally consistent view (Bittner, 1963: 929–932), and in particular one that contrasts sharply with that of ordinary society. Lynch and Macbeth (2016: 497, original emphasis) propose to ‘affirm the premises of CA’, and to ‘defend CA from a reversion to the established social science programs’, suggesting that latter day CA and epistemic inquiries have departed from their roots and have allied themselves with ordinary social science. The defensive posturing says little about what is therefore needed, beyond nebulous invocations of ‘a remarkably robust and even an elegant grammar of social actions’ (Lynch and Macbeth, 2016: 498). Such sloganeering nonetheless aims for a coherent form of ‘radical’ CA. The Manchester conference was more transparent in its search for meaning, as it was defined utterly in terms of its quest for ethnomethodological radicalism (Lynch, 2016a: 1).

Charismatic founders

A sense of charisma is attached to the movement and its leader(s) (Bittner, 1963: 936). In the EoE group’s writings there is an overwhelming preoccupation with and reliance upon foundational statements by the two main figures, Garfinkel and Sacks. Of course, charisma resides not in their personages as such, per Bittner (1963: 936), but rather their manner of articulating the grounds of EM and CA inquiries. Accordingly, there is a persistent concern with what these two could have meant when they developed their fields, coupled with a ritualistic invocation of language and terminology from their initial statements. This amounts to an ‘intensive concern’ for purity (Bittner, 1963: 937), rather than growth, development or advancement, and clearly the ‘epistemics program’, as the EoE group defines it, has contaminated CA almost beyond repair.¹⁰

A vulnerable adversary

According to the EoE group, the ‘epistemics program’ epitomizes trends in contemporary CA, much of which has strayed from its ‘radical’ EM foundations. Indeed, many have pursued inquiry into epistemic positioning in conversation, including Sacks, Schegloff, Pomerantz, Goodwin and other pioneering figures in CA,¹¹ as well as a growing number of contemporary scholars who have built upon these seminal insights and examined their relevance for a variety of action and sequence types, and across numerous languages and cultures (Clift and Raymond, 2018). And yet, in the EoE Special Issue, it is the singular figure John Heritage and his work that warrants special attention as a retrogressive force. Given the suggestion of an organized ‘program’, the EoE papers are noteworthy for their lack of substantial engagement with any other scholars or their work.

‘For tactical reasons’, says Bittner (1963), ‘it is advantageous to select a vulnerable adversary, but the principal point is to select one who can be succinctly pre-judged as evil, wrong and damned’ (p. 938). Accordingly, Heritage is alleged to adhere to a cognitivist, information-exchange model of conversational interaction, which ‘provides a constant and underlying motive force for the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction’ (Lynch and Macbeth, 2016: 494). And he has done so not only with recent studies in epistemics, but throughout most of his career. If the singular focus on Heritage is puzzling from a purely scholarly standpoint, nevertheless other benefits accrue from creating a target of ‘blame and hostility’: such a target ‘makes it possible to moralize by counter-example’ (Bittner, 1963: 938).

In this connection, we note that the selection of Heritage as a current target represents a shift for Lynch and his associates. In previous writings, similar critiques regarding unwarranted formalism and scientized pretensions were directed against leading conversation analysts including Schegloff (Lynch, 1993: 248–254) and Sacks himself (Lynch, 1993: Chapter 6; Lynch, 2000a; Lynch and Bogen, 1994). In the more recent writings of the Discourse Studies Special Issue, the shift to criticizing Heritage is associated with a remarkable rehabilitation of Sacks and (with residual reservations) Schegloff, whose newly discovered radicalism must now be shielded against Heritage’s sustained reactionary onslaught (Lynch and Macbeth, 2016: 497). These developments in the approach to CA’s practitioners underscore the vagueness and elasticity of the critical standards associated with the ill-defined ‘radical EM’ or ‘radical CA’ categories, and reveal their tactical deployment in the present context. The once-errant founders of CA are now mobilized to marginalize a new apostate, thereby demonstrating for others – not merely within EM but also CA and, by implication, other EM-inspired lines of work – how they may be held accountable to whatever ill-defined and shifting standards the would-be radicals choose to invoke.

In-group loyalties

It might seem strange for Lynch to have convened both a group of those who targeted Heritage’s career and the ‘epistemics program’ in their contributions to the Special Issue, as well as a select, by-invitation-only group to discuss radical EM in Manchester last year, except that it fits the pattern for radical movements. Bittner (1963: 938) notes the importance of strong loyalties among members of a ‘select group’, and the impetus to depict outsider sentiment against it for purposes of organization. According to the chronology sketched by Lynch and Macbeth (2016: 493) in their Special Issue introduction, regular meetings of the select group of critics were ongoing for more than 2 years prior to the EoE issue’s publication. These meetings culminated not only in the Special Issue, but also in the Manchester conference of the same year.

When the critiques finally appeared in Discourse Studies, Lynch and Macbeth (2016: 498) invited ‘debates and disputes’ for future issues of the journal, but at no time in the preceding years were any recognized contributors to the burgeoning subfield of epistemic inquiry in CA informed about or invited to participate in the discussions. The lone exception was an eleventh-hour invitation to Heritage himself – the target of the Special Issue’s long-planned cumulative attack – who was given a few weeks and a paltry space (the equivalent of a research note) in which to craft a response to the entirety of the Special Issue’s contents (five full-length papers). This is not the kind of behavior one normally associates with open scholarly debate, nor with genuine efforts to advance an area of research, but it makes sense as an exercise in public sanctioning and ‘radical’ boundary maintenance (Gieryn, 1983), managed by a select cadre of insiders.

Thus, we have Lynch and Macbeth’s (2016: 497, original emphasis) claim to ‘defend CA from a reversion to the established social science programs from which Sacks and Schegloff took their leave’, and in Lynch’s (2016a: 6) introductory paper for the Manchester conference we can read about how ‘some of Garfinkel’s and Sacks’ prominent successors are leading the way’ toward assimilation, having ‘little stomach for engaging in debate about their initiatives’. So, after a cabal of secretive communications, closed meetings and privately circulated manuscripts over a period of years, the contributors fault their targets for lack of engagement. The justification is that ‘[t]his meeting is more of a caucus for those of us who may be inclined to resist … “normalization”, than an effort to stage debate with others who are promoting it’ (Lynch, 2016a: 6). The sense of suffering, also an integral feature of radical movements (Bittner, 1963: 938), is palpable in the rationale for excluding those who might have something different to contribute.

The quixotic radicalism project

Efforts to maintain radical movements by way of enforcing a starkly alternative but internally consistent schema of interpretation are doomed to fail, says Bittner (1963: 934). The purity of the doctrine may be gradually abandoned through what Weber called the routinization of charisma, or there may be quixotic efforts to enforce strict adherence to articles of the doctrine. In the present case, processes of this sort are manifest in the ritualistic invocation of origin statements from charismatic EM forebears, as well as efforts to cleanse the field of the errant and the impure – efforts that in our judgment hold little prospect for success.

After all, Garfinkel’s profound and seminal writings are marked by internal tensions and divergent impulses (Clayman, 1995; Lynch, 1993; Wilson, 2012). These tensions and impulses are combined with a writing style that is often cryptic and makes few concessions to literature reviews, explicit research questions or other signposts of normal science and scholarly intent. Correspondingly, the field stimulated by Garfinkel’s work has been marked by considerable diversity and ferment (Maynard and Clayman, 1991), which shows little sign of abating. For example, Sormani’s (2016) recent study of experimental physics draws upon various distinct styles of ethnomethodological research – including ethnography, a focus on accounts and accounting practices, auto-ethnography of the researcher’s own developing competences, and video analysis of multimodal conduct – for each of its analytic chapters.

If the ill-defined radicalism project seems unpromising for the case of EM, it is a non-starter for CA. Although unquestionably an offspring of Garfinkel’s EM, CA has a complex parentage that also includes Erving Goffman’s structural conception of the interaction order and naturalistic style of research, as well as other sources (Maynard, 2013; Schegloff, 1992). The Garfinkelian strands that were most important in the development of CA are not identical to the ones being touted under the banner of ‘radical EM’ (a point to which we shall return). Furthermore, CA long ago matured into a distinct field in its own right, with a novel theory of the production and sequencing of intelligible human action and methods for studying these processes that are informed by, but not reducible to, any of its scholarly antecedents (Clayman and Gill, 2012). In its continued development, including an emerging dialogue with interactional linguistics (Clift and Raymond, 2018; Fox et al., 2013), CA practitioners increasingly address questions of interest to scholars from other areas of sociology (e.g. Heritage and Maynard, 2006; Maynard et al., 2002) and beyond sociology to a range of pure and applied scientific disciplines in which interaction plays a role (Antaki, 2011; Sidnell and Stivers, 2013). These developments are not some kind of heretical failing, but rather a sign that the approach is successfully capturing fundamental organizational features of the social world in ways that others, including ‘formal analysts’, find useful.

Was Harvey Sacks a radical ethnomethodologist?

In an apparent effort to delegitimize this wide-ranging CA work, one tactic (e.g. Lynch, 2017) has been to invoke Harvey Sacks as a benchmark, treating his early lectures and writings as largely aligned with Garfinkel and with the radical project. This dovetails, in a broad sense, with the suggestion that Sacks’ original initiatives – on social reasoning in membership categorization devices, accessed through vivid single case analyses – have been corrupted in latter-day CA by the shift toward specimen collections and sequential analysis (see also Lynch, 2000a). But the notion of a Garfinkel/Sacks unity of radical vision and subsequent conversation analytic ‘fall from grace’ must contend with a number of complexities and countervailing facts sketched briefly here (for fuller discussions, see Clayman, Maynard, and Heritage, forthcoming Maynard, 2013; Schegloff, 1992). Although his relationship to Garfinkel was undoubtedly significant and predates his shift from law school to sociology (Schegloff, 1992), Sacks chose Berkeley rather than the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for his sociological training, and did his early graduate work and initial dissertation research under the supervision of Erving Goffman.¹² Although Goffman’s specific topical interests (in face, stigma, total institutions, etc.) are little addressed, his (Goffman, 1983) overarching conception of the interaction order as an autonomous and structurally organized domain available to naturalistic observation permeates Sacks’ work (Schegloff, 1988). Indeed, Sacks’ enterprise may be understood as a creative synthesis of the Goffmanian interest in a directly observable interaction order together with Garfinkel’s insight that sense-making procedures, shared by social actors and recipients, are key to intelligible action operating within and upon this order (Heritage, 2001). Moreover, the addition of recorded interactional data and detailed transcriptions thereof yielded an approach that transcended the work of both of his mentors in its empirical power and scholarly accountability.

Sequential organization and generalization in Sacks’ early work

Contrary to the view that Sacks started out focusing on social reasoning and membership categorization and only later shifted his sights to sequential organization, both substantive interests are massively present in his earliest available work (Sacks, 1992a; Schegloff, 1992). The strongest evidence for this can be found in the first year (1964–1965) of Sacks’ transcribed lectures on conversation, which constitute the earliest written record of his empirical research. The initial lecture (Sacks, 1992a: 3–11), entitled ‘Rules of Conversational Sequence’, draws from a collection of greeting and identification sequences in telephone openings,¹³ and describes methods whereby call recipients can tacitly ask for callers’ names, and the latter can avoid self-identifying without explicitly refusing to do so. The next two lectures are also focused on forms of action in sequences. Other lectures are concerned with accounts and the social reasoning (associated with membership categories) underlying their production and understanding, but at least half of that first course of lectures addresses aspects of sequential organization. Any claim that Sacks was at first occupied exclusively or even predominantly with social reasoning to the exclusion of sequential matters is thus demonstrably incorrect.

Furthermore, whereas some EM scholars, especially those associated with ‘post-analytic’ and ‘radical’ EM variants, propose that the use of specimen collections in pursuit of empirical generalizations is a corruption of Sacks’ initiatives (e.g. Lynch, 2000a, 2016a), in reality Sacks fully embraced these intertwined methods and goals. The generalizing impulse, much like the focus on sequential organization, permeates his lectures and was evident from the beginning. He repeatedly argued that ‘the methods people use in doing social life’ – whether they be methods of social reasoning or action sequencing – operate as trans-situational ‘devices’ for performing specifiable tasks. Although he insisted on documenting these methods in the contextual detail of specific interactional episodes, reflecting Garfinkel’s influence and explicitly credited to him (see Sacks et al., 1974: 727), Sacks’ (1984a: 26) his objective also was to excavate what was generic and exportable from such materials:

Thus is it not any particular conversation, as an object, that we are primarily interested in. Our aim is to get into a position to transform … our sense of ‘what happened’, from a matter of a particular interaction done by particular people, to a matter of interactions as products of a machinery.

Sack returned, again and again, to the language of conversational ‘devices’, ‘mechanisms’ and ‘machinery’, lexical choices that underscored the analytic objective clearly articulated in this passage (see also Raymond, 2018).

Harvey Sacks (1964) and the use of collections

Again revealing is Sacks’ (1992a: 3–11) first published lecture (Fall of 1964), which exemplifies how this avowed objective both infuses his analytic work and is pursued through the analysis of specimen collections. The lecture is launched not with a single case, but rather a collection of three cases (call openings to a suicide prevention center), analyzed comparatively and supplemented with additional cases later in the lecture. The first two cases share a common sequential pattern, namely, that the caller’s first turn at talk is type-fitted to the call recipient’s previous turn: a greeting occasions a return greeting, and self-identification prompts reciprocal self-identification. From this pattern, Sacks (1992a) derives ‘a procedural rule’ (p. 4) regarding the sequential implicativeness of the first turn for what follows it. He then turns to the third excerpt, a ‘deviant’ case in which an initial self-identification (‘This is Mr. Smith … ’) does not obtain a fitted response, but rather a claim of hearing trouble (‘I can’t hear you’). Focusing on the sequential consequences of this departure, Sacks notes that it occupies the place where reciprocal self-identification would otherwise have been, and makes relevant additional turns that further displace what was due. He then offers a generalization based on a larger set of cases and their outcomes: when callers exhibit such ‘hearing trouble’ in the call opening, usually their name never comes to be provided. This pattern suggests that ‘hearing trouble’ can serve as a generic ‘device’ to avoid giving a name without explicitly refusing to do so, a provisional conclusion subsequently reinforced by presenting two additional exhibits of the same practice deployed to the same end.

There is considerable attention to case-specific detail throughout this lecture, but Sacks is plainly uninterested in such detail as an end in itself (cf. Sharrock, 2000). Indeed, he glosses over the particulars distinguishing his various instances of ‘hearing trouble’ (e.g. I can’t hear you, vs Your name is what?, vs Smith?), which subsequent research has shown to involve distinct practices for other-initiated repair, mobilized to somewhat specialized ends. Just as some particularities may be disregarded to capture a common organizational role within the system of repair (Schegloff et al., 1977), Sacks is pursuing a common exploitation of the repair machinery that operates in much the same way across surface differences in its talk-based realizations.

The analytic strategy in this first lecture is by no means exceptional; the interest in trans-situational ‘devices’ for sense-making and action infuses nearly all of Sacks work, including lectures and papers devoted to single cases. His single-case analysis of a children’s story (Sacks, 1972) deploys and re-explicates an analytic framework of membership categorization devices previously developed to understand accounts in an entirely different context (calls to a suicide prevention center). His single-case analysis of a conversational joke (Sacks, 1978) yields a plethora of widely applicable insights about the sequential structures and turn-taking arrangements through which extended tellings (jokes, stories, etc.) are launched, delivered and concluded.

In none of this work is the irreducible singularity of each occasion a major focus, let alone a barrier to analysis that transcends the particulars of the case under examination.

In sum, viewing Sacks’ early work as closely aligned with Garfinkel on this point, and as a benchmark of uncorrupted purity, requires a degree of tunnel vision that overlooks or disregards the preponderance of evidence. From his graduate years, Sacks (1963) was motivated by an ambitious agenda that was by no means opposed to empirical social science, even though he expressed dissatisfaction with the abstractness of prominent approaches associated with Durkheim and Weber. He took an independent-minded stance toward the work of his mentors and other sources of inspiration (Schegloff, 1992), of which there were several. And he embraced innovations – Schegloff’s use of larger specimen collections, and Jefferson’s transcript notational system – that were perceived as advancing the empirical power of the field he was working to develop. The contrast between Sacks’ acceptance and use of these innovations, versus their sometimes-chilly reception by Garfinkel¹⁴ and other ethnomethodologists, underscores the distance separating him and his nascent enterprise from many of his fellow travelers in the wider EM field.

How Harvey Sacks was radical

So, was the early Sacks a ‘radical ethnomethodologist’? Our answer to this question is adumbrated by the preceding comments, but we recognize that it depends crucially on how that elusive ‘radical’ category is understood. If it is defined in ‘post-analytic’ terms (Lynch, 1993) that preclude any and all claims reaching beyond the singular occasion, then clearly not. On the other hand, in a variety of ways – the use of recorded data, the procedural approach to the production and intelligibility of action, and the starting assumption that the ostensibly ‘messy’ details of everyday talk would yield to an approach that seeks autochthonous order in them – Sacks’ work was profoundly innovative and cut against the grain of mainstream social science and linguistics, with far-reaching consequences that are still being discovered and developed. Far better to explore the territory to which those details and findings lead – including the organization of epistemics in everyday life – than to pursue some ill-defined, if not romanticized, ‘radicalism’ from which the work is said to depart.

A different view: The compatibilities of EM and CA – mutual interchange

While some in the EoE group and the Manchester conference lament the loss of a radical element in strands of EM and CA, in our view an element of this sort persists in both areas of inquiry. Putting aside EM and its substantial influence in such areas as Workplace Studies, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Science and Technology Studies, and focusing mainly on CA, we consider two conceptual angles from which this element may be more clearly seen: one arising from Garfinkel’s notion of ‘asymmetric alternates’ and the other from the generic practices of talk and embodied conduct.

On ‘asymmetric alternates’, formal analysis and CA

In his own reflections on the Manchester meeting, Lynch (2016b: 2) addresses Garfinkel’s pervasive preoccupation with formal analysis and his concept of ‘asymmetric alternates’ to such analysis, which bring forth ‘lived activities’. As Lynch (2016b: 2) remarks, ‘Formal analysis is not so much a “foil” in such studies as an invitation for ethnomethodological research into “what else” might be at stake in the production of activities’. Indeed, while using the concept of asymmetric alternates to highlight the distinctiveness of EM inquiry, Garfinkel also was relentlessly at pains to articulate a relationship to that with which it was asymmetric. When pursuing something more dialogic than unilateral critique, in other words, he saw EM studies as informative at the level of actual practice for what made ubiquitous formal analyses possible. In Garfinkel’s (2002: 115, original emphasis) own words, ‘… FA [Formal Analysis] and EM are both and simultaneously incommensurably different and unavoidably related. What do the two technologies have to do with each other? This is EM’s prevailing question’.

Asking this question, as Garfinkel did recurrently, implies a relationship of interchange and exchange rather than competition or critique. Mutually informative, cooperative investigation is declared to be ‘the prize’ in which competence in ‘both technologies’ (formal analysis and ethnomethodology and conversational analysis (EMCA)) means the possibility of true ‘hybrid studies’ (Garfinkel, 2002: 103–104). In this light, coding and quantification, when based upon prior CA findings regarding the ordered properties of talk and embodied conduct, and addressed to questions indigenous to other scientific fields and workplace environments, are entirely congruent with the hybrid-studies ideal. Accordingly, even as CA has moved in directions formulated as ‘applied’ (Antaki, 2011) by way of methods deemed ‘heretical’ (Clayman et al., 2006; Heritage et al., 2007; Maynard et al., 2010; Schaeffer et al., 2013; Stivers, 2015; Stivers et al., 2009), this aspect of CA remains entirely congruent with a key feature of the EM enterprise as Garfinkel envisioned it. Such studies are ‘radical’ in a forward-looking, rather than backward-looking, way. In our view, mutual interchange rather than adherence to some fundamental version of EM or CA by way of purported radicalism can better motivate further inquiry fully consistent with Garfinkel’s as well as Sacks’ original initiatives.

On singularity and generic practices

Garfinkel (2002) expressed enduring concern, particularly in his later writings, with

just-thisness, just here, just now, with just what is at hand, with just who is here, in just the time that just this local gang of us have, in and with just what the local gang of us can make of just the time we need, and therein, in, about, as, and over the course of the in vivo work … the missing what of formal analytic studies of practical action. (p. 99, note 16)

This concern for the singularity of occasions may be what Lynch and Macbeth (2016) have in mind by the pursuit of ‘radicalism’. Elsewhere, in response to Sharrock’s (2000: 535) proposal that Sacks’ lectures were not primarily about ‘the explication of singular instances of talk’ as an ‘end in itself’, Lynch (2000b: 544) remains adamant that CA needs more appreciation of the “‘here and now” of each and every occasion of action’. This ideal, however, is by no means news to CA practitioners. It resonates with Schegloff’s (1987: 102) assertion that all social science inquiry, inclusive of CA, ‘must be answerable … to the details of single episodes of action through talking in interaction’.

A question such an analytic sensibility raises is, what level of detail are we to reach for? When is an analysis granular enough? This is a question that can only be answered in practice; it cannot be stipulated a priori. As Wittgenstein (1953: 1) famously observed, ‘Explanations come to an end somewhere’. If there is, as Sacks (1984a: 22) proposes, ‘order at all points’, then no single investigation can exhaust the organization of practices that constitute that order. The investigator unavoidably must decide when, for all practical purposes, an appropriate level of detail – answerable to the phenomenon under inquiry in the context of an actual and not imagined or hypothesized research study – has been reached. Far from precluding further inquiry, a for-now complete study may set the stage for subsequent work exposing further order to everyday talk and embodied behavior.¹⁵ As we noted at the beginning of this article, a progressive trajectory of this sort is precisely what the analysis of epistemic organization in assessment (and other) sequences has accomplished. Heritage’s (2018) own response and rebuttal to the EoE group is eloquent on this point.

The excavation of detail, at a level appropriate to investigation of phenomena, is not only about addressing the ‘just-thisness’ in singular conversational episodes. As we have shown earlier, even as Sacks advocated for the value and the necessity of attending to the single case, he also sought to excavate what was generic and exportable from such materials – the ‘methods persons use in doing social life’ (Sacks, 1984a: 21) – and he persistently argued that analyses of context-specific cases and more generic ethno-methods were mutually informative rather than mutually exclusive endeavors. Sometime later, an allied sensibility would find expression in Sacks et al.’s (1974) discussion of the ‘context-freeness’ and ‘the extraordinary context-sensitivity’ of conversational practices such as turn-taking.¹⁶

This dual interest is hardly a betrayal of the ethnomethodological spirit. Societal members, after all, do not experience their lives as only a succession of irreducibly unique moments. Just as ‘ordinariness’ is a ‘doing’ (Sacks, 1984b) and ‘routine’ is an achievement (Schegloff, 1986), features of social life can embody both distinctiveness and recurrence, which are equally fair game for analytic explication. On the latter, Garfinkel (1967: 9) raised the question of how societal members make ‘familiar, commonplace activities of everyday life recognizable as familiar, commonplace activities’, and highlighted practices by which ‘recurrencies’ and ‘generality’ and ‘comparability’ represent ‘achievements of populations that staff their production’ (Garfinkel, 1996: 6; 2002: 123). As early as in Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel (1967: 9) refers to the matter of ‘another first time’. Later, Garfinkel and Weider (1992: 186) and Garfinkel (2002: 92, note 1) also discuss ‘each another next first time’. These locutions might seem curious or even self-contradictory at first glance, but when we parse them it becomes apparent that they concisely capture the key insight that each occasion combines features of ‘anotherness’ together with ‘first time-ness’.

Finally, then, the making of ordinary scenes as familiar, as through ‘another next first time’, would seem to require that the occasions and moments of everyday life are both produced and experienced in relation to recognizably ‘similar’ ones from the past. Thus, in working with specimen collections, it is not as if analysts are imposing a technical methodology that is entirely alien to everyday experience. The analysis of such collections¹⁷ may draw on how participants themselves orient to the various and sundry actions they perform – including claiming and displaying what they know in the course of requesting or delivering information (Heritage, 2018) – as sharing relationships of similarity and evident family resemblances. Indeed, it is at least plausible that such collections capture an aspect of everyday experience in a way that is unavailable through the single case.¹⁸

Conclusion

Strangely enough, the unabashed formal analyst Robert Merton may have something to say about the present state of EM and CA. In a paper on ‘Social conflict over styles of sociological work’, Merton (1973 [1961]: 55) observes a persistent inclination toward conflict and controversy among adherents to different types of sociology, a characterization that strikes us as fitting for the intellectual and social relations between EM and CA adherents. In the initial Discourse Studies Special Issue (2016), as well as the current issue assembled in response (to which our article contributes), is the public staking out of camps. Merton (1973 [1961]) observes,

The sociologists of each camp develop selective percepts of what is actually going on in the other. They see in the other’s work primarily what the hostile stereotype has alerted them to see, and then mistake the part for the whole. (p. 56)

And, ‘they scan the out-group’s writings just enough to find ammunition for new fusillades’.

Following Georg Simmel and Edward Ross, Merton (1973 [1961]: 69) writes that when conflict remains focused on a singular issue – and here, if there is such a singular issue, it is the notion of ‘radical’ EM and CA and departures therefrom – then the ‘lines of cleavage will have become so consolidated along a single axis that any conversation’ between different groups ‘will be pointless’. When, some 27 years ago, we (Maynard and Clayman, 1991) wrote about ‘The diversity of ethnomethodology’, our primary purpose was to exhibit for the larger sociological world the many expressions and variants of EM, one of which was (and is) CA. At that time, we sought to counter external renditions of EM that categorized and delimited it in such a way as to obscure much of the ferment in the field – the various ways in which scholars in different disciplines were pursuing and productively developing Garfinkel’s initiatives. Little did we realize that, decades later, these external attitudes would be amplified by internal renditions of EM and CA aiming to disallow whatever is construed to be insufficiently ‘radical’ in the ill-defined fashion we have discussed here.

The critique of Heritage’s body of work suggests there is a radical way of doing EM, a radical way of doing CA. With only the barest of indications as to what such radicalness is, we are given critiques that, in our estimation, widely miss their mark. This is mandarin EM, and in this case it betrays a substantial misapprehension of the analytic sensibilities, methods and balance of objectives that inform conversation analytic research, as well as an oversimplification of its complex relationship to the ethnomethodological tradition. We suggest that there is no single correct way of building upon the initiatives of a half- century ago, and that it is possible to position EM and CA inquiries, and allied forms of work, in such a way as to foster and promote diverse and complementary styles of inquiry. In recent years, foremost among these kinds has been the development of what Drew (2018) calls a ‘highly original approach to epistemics that has generated a lively and productive engagement within Conversation Analysis … and more widely’.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Chase Raymond, Paul Drew, Mustafa Emirbayer, and John Heritage for comments on earlier versions of this article. We remain fully responsible for the final version of this article and its contents.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Douglas W Maynard is Conway-Bascom Professor and Harold and Arlene Garfinkel Faculty Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW). His current work includes co-editing (with John Heritage) a volume on Garfinkel and the Ethnomethodology Movement, collaborative work on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported project on the testing and diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder and on a monograph co-authored with Jason Turowetz from this project. Previous books include Inside Plea Bargaining (Polity Press, 1984), Standardization and Tacit Knowledge (co-edited with H Houtkoop-Steenstra, NC Schaeffer and J van der Zouwen, Wiley Interscience, 2002), Communication in Medical Care (co-edited with J Heritage, Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Bad News, Good News (University of Chicago Press, 2003). At UW, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and social psychology.

Steven E Clayman is Professor of Sociology at UCLA, where he also maintains affiliations with the Department of Communication and the Center for Language, Interaction and Culture. He has a longstanding interest in direct encounters between journalists and politicians, practices for questioning and answering in this context, and what their study can reveal about journalistic norms, press–state relations and the sociopolitical environment. In current research he is examining aspects of ordinary conversation, focusing on the areas of turn construction, action formation, affiliation and repair. He is the co-author (with John Heritage) of The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air (Cambridge, 2002), and Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

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