Engaging ethnomethodology for social work

Garfinkel’s “Policies”

In Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel (1967) sets out quite instructive and useful “policies” (p. 31) to guide ethnomethodological practice. The first policy is to focus on people’s actual, in situ practical actions, and to make people’s actions “accessible to study” in “any occasion whatsoever.” Simply, there is no occasion, no matter how seemingly trivial or inconsequential, that cannot become a focus of ethnomethodological attention, whether a telephone conversation between best friends or world leaders, breakfast with one’s partner or a royal banquet with the Queen, providing directions to a stranger in the street or a social work interview. But, just what does an ethnomethodologist do to make any ordinary occasion accessible for study in a way which is ethnomethodological? Garfinkel suggests that to examine any occasion that we start by focusing on “choice among alternatives of sense, of facticity, of objectivity, of course, of explanation, of communality of practical actions” (p. 32) and to see these choices as members’ actions.

Where, when, and how might we identify “choices among alternatives?” First, choices occur in a complex flow of interaction as emerging through lived and experiential time, as distinct from objective or “bound time” (Kovel, 1981). Lived time emerges interactively between people, or to use Schutz’s (1970) terms, ego and alter, interactively accomplish “a common now” (p. 88). People when engaged with others enter into and engage in talk-in-interaction, communication, and use language ordinarily and unremarkably, wherein “two streams of consciousness are synchronized” into a “Now,” and perhaps more importantly into a “We” (1970, p. 88). Of course, the accomplishment of a we, demands that each participant proceeds by shaping turns and responses to engage another. It is in such experiential interstices that choices are made.

Choice in interaction articulates artfully enacted moments of negotiation, reflection, and working past ambiguity and confusion which are part of any and all human interaction. It should be noted that Schutz’s attention to an interactive durée closely parallels the recognition of “process” in Functional Social Work (Smalley, 1967). Further, when a social worker tunes into self and the client (Shulman, 2016), moments of “choice” for next turns emerge. When involved in social interaction, we make choices to work through or “let pass” (Garfinkel, 1967) our own and the other’s apparent confusions, ambiguities, evasions, and elisions. A recognition of ordinary choice in interaction provides a solid link for beginning ethnomethodological analysis.

Garfinkel’s second policy begins by addressing that which ethnomethodologists do not do. Thus, while members define “actual occasions” as “rational, coherent, consistent, or chosen, or planful, or effective, or methodical, or knowledgeable,” to approach these occasions ethnomethodologically, means not presupposing that members are invoking “some rule” (p. 32). Ethnomethodologists do not presume or try to demonstrate that the sense of an occasion was due to “members’ compliance to rules of inquiry” (p. 33). Unlike, those using various theoretical approaches, for example, family systems theory, wherein members at a meal are described as enacting boundaries, hierarchies, structures, organization, and so on, an ethnomethodologists would examine a meal as artfully accomplished in situ, in conversation, and in action as members make it accountably so. The question is redirected to “just how” members to an occasion accomplished their own recognizable orders, identifications, and coherence, as this meal together. How did they interactively produce, for themselves and each other, through such simple matters as turns at talk, holding the floor, telling of jokes, formulating recollections, asking questions, passing the potatoes, and so forth, a family meal? Whatever emerges as such is an effect of members’ “contingent achievements” (p. 33). Contingency simply means that just here and just how members actually produce or do an event as a family supper, a social work interview, a team meeting, or an assessment of child abuse, is examined to the depths of its details.

The third policy is closely allied with the second. As we saw the “efficiency, efficacy, effectiveness, intelligibility, consistency, planfulness, typicality, uniformity, and reproducibility of activities” require that we attend to members’ accounts, and identifications and talk about rules, formulations, and activities that are used to explain interactions with others. Just how members articulate, identify, and name the use of a rule in situ and reflexively rely on that rule to order their activities matters for EM studies. How do members make this or that rule accountable, visible, and relevant for interactive performance of an occasion? For example, a social worker might speak of client/worker boundaries, and then order the arrangement of chairs, physical distance between herself and a client, the orders and content of talk, and so forth. Again, the ethnomethodological focus is on “contingent accomplishment of socially organized common practices” (p. 33).

The fourth policy is that any social setting is produced in ways to make it self-accountable, hence members ¹ to an occasion make its properties “of practical activities detectable, countable, recordable, reportable, tell-a-story-aboutable, analyzable—in short accountable” (p. 33). When a social worker tells another worker that she conducted an interview with a client both rely on each other to recognize particular types of activities as both doing, and accounting for this interaction as properly an interview. The accountability of an occasion unfolds in the orders of the occasion. We see this in formulations such as, “Now I want to turn to ask you about…” “You had just said…” “We are coming to the end of our time together…” The routine “reflective” naming of moments of action are approached ethnomethodologically as constituent elements for the accomplished production of the activity itself.

What EM is not

As we saw earlier, Garfinkel tends to define EM both by what it is not and to suggest often obliquely what “it” is. In the Preface to Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), he “formulates” the policy of ethnomethodological indifference:

Ethnomethodological studies are not directed to formulating or arguing correctives. They are useless when they are done as ironies. Although they are directed to the preparation of manuals on sociological methods, these are in no way supplements to “standard” procedure, but are distinct from them. They do not formulate a remedy for practical actions, as if it was being found about practical actions that they were better or worse than they are usually cracked up to be. Nor are they in search of humanistic arguments, nor do they engage in or encourage permissive discussions of theory. ² (p. viii)

For EM formal analysis (FA) and “generic representational theorizing” are examined as performed in situ as a day’s work. When Garfinkel refers to FA, he points to work performed by a “worldwide social science movement” (2002, p. 91), as conducted by “armies of social analysts,” which includes sociologists, social workers, ethnographers, political scientists, anthropologists, economists, and so forth. Garfinkel (2002) describes “formal analytic procedures” as comprising the following (circular) moves: (1) The development of generic or universal categories or representations, systematic definitions, models, typologies, and maps. (2) Application of such generic tools to “actual work sites” to thereby find, rework and respecify, the site as an instance, manifestation, or evidence of the relevance of the generic tool. (3) Production of theorized accounts of the found “orders” such that “found” details, particulars, evidences express the generic representations (p. 37). ⁴ Accordingly, when social workers account for their own practices as cognitive behavioral therapy, narrative therapy, functional social work, gestalt, and so forth, the ethnomethodological question is: Just how do they actually interact with clients, such that what they are doing is produced as accountably and warrantably this or that way of working? How do they accomplish accountable generalities of their practice in a specificity of interactive enactments?

Garfinkel argues that “there is no order in the plenum is a premier policy of formal analysis” (p. 137) ⁵ while affirming “the plenum is demonstrably and evidently not chaos incarnate” (p. 138). What Garfinkel directs us to consider are the ways social scientists, through the continual development of conceptual schemata, models, and theories, seek to impose their analytic orders over the buzzing confusion of everyday life. In Garfinkel’s account, those doing formal analysis treat everyday life as a chaotic, disorderly, inchoate plenum which social science renders, through its analytic practices, sensible, coherent, and cogent. Through EM, we are called to examine, in detail, the theoretical and working practices of social scientists as they approach phenomena (local sites and its products). We turn to ask, just what is it that they themselves as social scientists are doing? For example, how do Parsons’ AGIL system (adaptation, goal attainment, latency, and integration) (Parsons & Smelser, 1956), Bales’ interactive process analysis (Bales, 1950), Epstein, Bishop, and Levin's (1978) McMaster Model of Family Functioning (MMFF) (Will & Wrate, 1985) direct enquiry and how are such schemata deployed to render phenomena seeable and sensible? For Garfinkel, this overwriting of members’ local indexical practices through imposition of systematic, logical, categories, and orders of science results in an effective, though unrecognized presumption that there is “no order in the plenum.” Rather it is presumed by those doing FA, that order is exogenous, and as such is produced theoretically through deployment of conceptual armamentarium.

Situated and local orders come to be visible as the order found by social scientists through application of generic representations, rather than as accomplished by participants to an occasion. This recognition gives rise to that which Garfinkel refers to as “the missing what” (2002, p. 99). The “missing what” creates an opening for ethnomethodological studies and a turn or shift of attention to explication, in their detail, of actual people’s interactive practices and activities. For social workers, the ethnomethodological question is as follows: Just how do we go about, quite practically, locally, and contingently producing for ourselves and for each other the coherence and order of our activities as professional practice and the orders of our local worksites? How do we make this an office of a social agency, a home visit, an interview, an investigation, the writing of case notes, the formulation of assessments, and so forth, as warrantably and accountably this type of occasion, thing, place, event, and so forth?

Unique adequacy

Garfinkel insists that the ordinary things of the world whether family suppers, library check-outs, bus queues, or social work with clients are inseparable from the methods people use to accomplish and account for these “things.” Those of us who are social workers are also members of families, classes, groups, work sites, and our profession. As we navigate through such local sites, we use and rely on ubiquitous “vulgar competence” to participate in and to effect the iterative orders of such everyday “things.” In the course of our everyday lives, we participate in and use methods that are uniquely and adequately sufficient for the production of recognizable local orders of our work, play, and life.

Garfinkel outlines that members have a “unique adequacy” for performance in and of settings and identifies two dimensions for the use of the term, strong and weak. ⁶ In the weak use, unique adequacy points to the analyst, who in order to “recognize, or identify, or follow the development of, or describe phenomena of order” (p. 175), must “be vulgarly competent” to the local production (p. 176). In the strong use, unique adequacy is about a “phenomena of order,” which Garfinkel argues possesses or expresses members’ methods for producing it, as well as the methods members use to demonstrate and to make the order accountable as such. The strong use of “unique adequacy” locates not just the meaning of “things” but such things themselves in members’ competent practices for making things themselves. In the strong use of “unique adequacy,” for example, a chemical substance already contains or expresses the methods chemists use to produce, identify, and name the chemical. Similarly, for social workers, a family intervention contains and expresses the methods the participants in a family use for making themselves into a family, as well as a social workers’ entry, and orders of practice with these members, to shape their conjoint activities (Satir, 1983) as an instance of family therapy.

Lynch (1993) notes that at the core of each discipline, for example, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and I would add social work, there are “unique methods” used to teach the discipline, to learn its fundamentals, and to produce its things. He explains:

Garfinkel’s “unique adequacy requirement of methods” differed from more familiar ethnographic policies mainly by the stringency of its injunction to master the practices studied (rather than simply learning to talk “about” them) and by its complete disavowal of all established methods for mapping, coding, translating, or otherwise representing members’ practical reasoning in terms of established social science schemata. (p. 274)

Lynch (1993) observes that Garfinkel’s EM promotes a “hybridization” in which EM joins other disciplines and “eschews the specification of a core of methods and theoretical concepts” (p. 275). Although he observes that, “Garfinkel’s unique adequacy requirement would become a pretext for a one-way journey out of sociology,” he refuses to conclude that “the unique adequacy requirement is simply a way to accelerate the demise of sociology” (p. 275). Instead, he outlines that each discipline is accomplished through an “immanent archeology of knowledge” (p. 276), and that as such it is not a question of an ethnomethodologist going into a discipline, studying it, and “coming back” with maps or representations of the discipline, but rather, understanding what it is to be a member of that discipline, how to do the work, how to advance the discipline, and so on.

Garfinkel (1963) infamously observed that “meaningful events are entirely and exclusively events in a person’s behavioral environment… Hence there is no reason to look under the skull since nothing of interest is to be found there but brains” (p. 190). Rawls explains that Garfinkel’s focus is exclusively on social interaction not on persons as such, and certainly not on their projects. She observes:

Garfinkel is attempting to move away from a model of the whole person—as motivated by a range of beliefs and values that intersect with the actor’s personal goals and biography to produce motivations, or specific projects…to a view of a situated actor who has mastered a particular set of situated competencies, or procedural rules. (2006, p. 20)

Indexicality

An early contribution of EM was the recognition and understanding of indexicality and indexical expressions (Heap, 1975). Indexicality leads to examination of just how a statement depends on understanding the context in which it is made. Philosophers have long recognized that ordinary language expressions are almost always incorrigibly indexical and accordingly troubling for scientists, who may search for non-indexical verities or truths (Bar-Hillel, 1954). Bar-Hillel considers the sentence, “I am hungry,” asks what it refers to (p. 363), and finds that “no categorical answer can be given to this question, so long as the pragmatic context of the production of this token is not known” (p. 363). Similarly, the sentence “Now that you are here take this and we can begin” presents a pronoun (you, she, we…), a demonstrative (this or that), and a deictic adverb (here, now, then) (Hanks, 2000), for which the reference and meaning can only be derived from participation in the context of the utterance.

In the work of formulating a client’s story, we can identify three moments: First, the social worker and the client engage in talk-in-interaction, in which a story comes to be produced turn-by-turn. Second, as the worker and client interact, the client is directed or pointed to think about, reference, and give voice to their lived experiences, e.g., interaction with a parent, a fight with a spouse, bullying at school, and so on. Third, a social worker reflects on the information from the interview to write it up as a progress note or case recording. Ethnomethodological attention to indexicality points to multi-layered and incorrigibly interactive emergence of meanings from one context to another. All utterances unfold in situ, in time, and in social interaction, as in vivo sense making by members to “talk-in-interaction.” Just how do participants in any unfolding interaction actually go about making sense and finding coherence and meaning given the fundamental indexicality of ordinary language and expression?

Again, Garfinkel is helpful. In Studies in Ethnomethodology, when discussing a project which “coded” outpatient records, he recognized that making sense of records at hand required knowledge of the organization. Furthermore, he discovered for the coders to code with consistency and reliability they needed to use background knowledge of the ways that the clinic operated. Rather than treating the problems of coder reliability as “error” Garfinkel (1967) approached their coding activities as the accomplishment of a sophisticated “coding game” and asked, “What were these ‘games’?” (p. 20). He discovered that coders, faced with making sense of ambiguous information in files, relied on “such considerations as “et cetera,” “unless,” “let it pass,” and “factum valet” (i.e., an action that is otherwise prohibited by a rule is counted correct once it is done)”(pp. 20–21). He sums these up as “ad hocing” practices. He noted that, all of us rely on such practices when engaged in social interaction, as we routinely produce good enough resolutions of the problems of ambiguity and potential meaningless of indexical expressions through reference to the here-and-now shared context. For social workers, indexicals and indexicality point us to question our own interactive and in situ organization of client accounts. Indexicality cautions us against treating talk as simply representative of some previous occasion and warns us that we are unable to eliminate our own interactive work as a generative element in the client’s narrative.

People and the problem of indexicality

Although social workers focus on the interactive patterns and forms of people’s everyday lives, they also focus on understanding people themselves, not just as they are interactively but as they come to be over a lifespan existentially. That which is produced on any occasion is not only a sociological thing, but an existential expression of people’s lives, and a memory going forward. In social interaction, time-after-time, we are created, in the visible forms of our bodies and through recourse to invisible memories. Embodied and active individuals come together, congregationally, as work and play, to create familiar situations and scenes, from out of which sociological things become possible. Garfinkel’s routine social things are dependent on the life formations of those individuals who act together with others. People are brought into being from infancy, to childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood in interaction with each other, and in interaction they participate in congregational co-production of familiar and everyday social things. As people grow older together, in time, they collectively develop language, orientations, understandings, knowledge, competencies, skills, expectations, values, norms, motives, for producing social occasions as such.

While ethnomethodologists treat the meanings of social things as indexical, as social workers, we are passionately concerned with not only with actually occasioned activities but with people themselves in existential expression of their lives and their meanings. We insist that memories, stories, and accounts of those who testify to occasions are not merely indexical but manifold articulations of a flow of life past, present, and future. Unlike things, whoever a person is and whoever they come to be emerges across diverse and multiple contexts of a lifespan (McGoldrick, Carter, & Garcia-Preto, 2011). Against Garfinkel, who avowed disinterest in what goes on under the skull, social workers cannot be so cavalier. Our focus is not just on the production of social things but on the relationships through which the lives of people and people themselves are produced.

Social workers recognize that an individual’s actions in an unfolding here-and-now are integral for either the coherence or incoherence of the occasion. The accomplishment of any “now” as recognizable, nameable, and sensible absolutely relies on the coordination of cognition, memory, and action of members, who rely on their “brains” under their skulls. Existentially every “now” is somebody’s unique and specific now, from out of which multiple accounts can be developed, albeit bounded by members’ regulation of normative orders. Social things arise from and are dependent on and express embodied resources of living and breathing participants to an occasion. Yet, while an occasion, or a sociological thing might be sliced off as an indexical, it makes little sense to regard people similarly.

That which gets produced in any interactive setting are not just the “things” of a setting, not just the setting but experiences and memories, which in turn shape and create the people themselves. This shift in attention to the production of people is of course at the heart of social work. In a life course, as we enter into multiple and variable situations and forms of interaction with others, we develop demeanors, personalities, knowledge, competencies, and selves. In this extended view of people and their situations as embedded in multiple courses of action, we recognize Marx and Engel’s (1976) insight that “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life-process” (p. 36). Thus, who we become in situ and who we experience ourselves to be, whether members or ethnomethodologists, emerge in processes of interaction in which we shape and are shaped by that which we produce as this or that occasion and social context.

As living persons, we make, leave, enter, and move through ever-changing series of enacted contexts, roles, and performances. As we move through quite different and disjunctive contexts, whether sexual, work or play, private or public occasions, and so on, we perform ourselves as a self (Goffman, 1959, 1967) in social interaction. Once we recognize a self in context, our capacity to treat “it” as a purely interactive and observable phenomenon is unsustainable. What any person is, cannot be understood through simple attention to specific occasioned action but only through attention to multiple and different actions in various social relations, e.g., inside one’s family of origin, schools, child, teen, adolescent, and adult friendships, workplaces, institutions—hospitals, prisons, groups homes, and senior’s residences, and so on. In summary, a refusal to look at what goes on in one’s skull this seems ill advised even for EM.

Jettisoning Archimedes: Locating the observer

Fortunately, Dorothy Smith (1987, 1990a, 1990b, 2005a, 2005b), the founder of institutional ethnography, provides a pathway to think through the challenges of doing sociology, EM, and even social work. She cautions that a focus on “acts” and “actors,” as abstracted conceptual forms, means lifting particular seeing, watching, and observing out of someone’s actual lived context. For example, she reflected on herself sitting on a bus and seeing a man on a street, and noted, “actors are no longer actual people-an old woman sitting on a bus reading sociological theory and looking up to see an old man on the sidewalk—they become scripted personages in a theoretical drama” (2005a, p. 53). Although it might seem a fine distinction, it needs to be recognized that to write about acts and actors is to assume an Archimedean standpoint, which departs from a lived standpoint in the course and flow of our lives.

When we observe another’s acts—Weber (1978) calls this aktuelles verstehen—we don’t simply see someone engaged in an activity—playing saxophone, cutting a tree, skating on ice, we simultaneously assemble understandings about motivations. Weber calls this erklärendes verstehen. When we interact with another, we actively express our intentions while simultaneously observing another’s reactions to our actions. Similarly, we imagine that actions of another are also synthesized inside an evolving, unfolding, and imagined interpretation of another’s intentions and motivations. Just as we recognize our own, albeit often inchoate motivations, so too do we expect that others operates similarly. Yet as Bruce and Wallis (1983, 1985) argue, there is a long tradition in sociology, spanning different approaches, from Mills (1959), through to EM which treats motives as “rhetorical devices,” or as a form of talk that functions as an “interactional device,” or as bits of “discourse.” They argue that ethnomethodologists put motives out of play in favor of the “indexicality of meanings” (1983, p. 64). When motives are addressed, it is under the rubric of accomplishing an accountable order, rather than as that which provided for the accomplishment of the order itself.

Sharrock and Watson (1984) note that Garfinkel does not require that sociologists “ascribe some substantive motives to actors” (p. 443) and that in EM explanation shifts from explaining action as the result of motives, to understanding action and courses of reasoning, and their interrelationship as creating “forms of organization” (p. 443). Simply, in EM, focus shifts from explaining action as motivated, to examining actions as interactive, responsive, and incorrigibly grounded in situ. For Sharrock and Watson, EM is indifferent to accounts of motive, as talk explanations and talk about motives is bracketed, and respecified as that which members do with each other to produce coherence and sense within and from occasions.

Against Sharrock and Watson, and by extension Garfinkel, understanding just how participants to a social occasion accomplish it as such requires shifting our focus and attention beyond any particular occasion or scene. An occasion as such is woven into and is continuous within a diverse fabric of participants’ everyday lives. Any give now is not just accountable and consequential here and now, but manifestly so as an element of a person’s, and multiple other person’s life course. There are extended courses of action that reach from one scene to another, as we arise from our beds in the morning, plod to the shower, slump at a kitchen table, queue for a bus, arrive at an office, dash to a meeting, lunch with a friend, meet a client, write a report, and so on (de Montigny, 2016). The progression from one social space to another occurs through a motivated movement of people living in place after place. Of course, talk about motives is problematic, as people lie about motives, and often cannot even articulate or explain their motives for engaging in particular acts. Nevertheless, as social workers, we abandon attention to the constitutive dimension of motives at grave peril. It is in the nexus of action as motivated, as intentionally reaching past self to another, that we effect our humanity and in a relationship between intention and social effects that we realize ourselves.

The natural attitude and the bracket

We turn to examine Husserl’s postulation of a “natural attitude” and its cognate formulation in EM—that which is “taken-for-granted.” In Ideas, Husserl (1983) describes the “natural attitude” as a feature of everyday and taken-for-granted experience. He notes that philosophy begins, as do we all, inside the natural attitude (p. 51) in which the horizon or the limit of attention is “the world” (5). Husserl writes (1983):

The world is always there as an actuality; here and there it is at most “otherwise” than I supposed; this or that is, so to speak, to be struck out of it and given such titles as “illusion” and “hallucination”; and the like; <it is to be struck out of “the” world> which—according to the general positing—is always factually existent. (p. 57)

Both Husserl and Garfinkel seek to put out of play science and formal analysis through reliance on a procedure of imposing brackets or parentheses. For Husserl, this is expressed as an epoché of the natural attitude, while for Garfinkel, it is expressed as ticked brackets ⦔⦠. Ticked brackets in EM represent “case materials,” that is the effective study of things, including scientific things, in their detailed local production. Although both Husserl and Garfinkel differentiate their work from that of science or formal analysis, as they work toward developing their own methods, or ways of working; however, they part company, primarily as they turn to examine different subjects. For Husserl, the focus is on an apodictic examination of the essences of consciousness, whereas for Garfinkel, the focus is on the interactive and quite practical accomplishment of social “things.”

Although Husserl’s postulation that the epoché is an important phenomenological tool, it must also be recognized that it is not unique to phenomenology, as in daily life, we continually impose various forms of bracketing in everyday and mundane sense making. Social workers recognize, whether in mental health, child protection, addictions, and so on, that people, in the rough contours of their everyday lives, routinely experience ruptures, disjunctions, dislocations, and rude upsets which lead to routine questioning of a taken-for-granted common sense. Rather than an epoché being an exclusive preserve of phenomenologists, people are routinely and repeatedly compelled to bracket, put out of play, put into parentheses, doubt, and question the putative givenness of a world around them. Our moorings are cast off as we encounter those who act other than as we expect. In interaction, we experience profound and deep incongruence and disturbance, which itself unsettles Garfinkel’s claim that there is ubiquitous “order.” Social workers know only too well that order routinely disrupted, interrupted, and even destroyed by novices, dissidents, dissenters, non-conformists, rebels, and incompetents?

Every local order must be recognized as inherently fraught, temporary, and provisional, and its accomplishment is putative and only good enough for practical purposes, as errors, deviations, and irregularities are glossed over and ostensibly “ignored.” Indeed, the observation that “common sense is not so common” reveals that common sense for some is not the same for others, to thereby reveal ambiguous, contradictory, and equivocal forms of accounts. Indeed, Garfinkel’s assertion that there is “order in the plenum” while articulating a putative iterability, simultaneously occludes conflict, disagreement, evolution, change, and mutation in social life. While it is important to explicate just how any “order” gets to be produced, we must also examine how any putative order gets disrupted, upset, and transformed. We need to shift Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological breaching exercises ⁷ from an instructional tool, to become devices for social action and social change, as we disturb, question, and redefine local orders.

Immortal Society?

Garfinkel (1988, 1991, 2002) refers to the ongoing, continuous nature of social order, from which there is no time out, as “immortal ordinary society.” He explains what he means as follows:

Immortal means that at the work site, empirically observable, directly and immediately, there is this about the order of service: It is assured by reason of the turnover of its personnel, who themselves arrange for the turnover in the place where the service is being delivered. (p. 254)

Just why does Garfinkel posit an “immortal ordinary society”? Clearly, this is integral for his postulation of order, and for his exploratory work. He poses two core questions, first: “How is immortal ordinary society put together ‘evidently’ ‘in any actual case’” (2002, p. 96) and “how is it put together ‘procedurally’?” (p. 96). As noted earlier, social workers routinely work with people who sense that their lives and their worlds are chaotic, disordered, and uncontrollable. Social workers recognize that the orders of people’s daily lives are ruptured by mental illness, dementia, violence and abuse, addictions, and so on. Meaning, coherence, and routines in our lives are predictably disrupted by birth, illness, accident, war, violence, tragedy, and death. We immigrate, we age, and we lose grandparents, parents, and spouses, and eventually our own sense of self and life. We live in a present with recollections of family, friends, and life worlds that have disappeared.

Perhaps Garfinkel is indicating something beyond work sites, when he insists, “Indeed, there is order in the most ordinary activities of everyday life in their full concreteness, and that means in their ongoingly procedurally enacted coherence of substantive, ordered phenomenal details without loss of generality” (2002, pp. 95–96). The order he points to is in social interaction. We are to look at what people do with each other in interaction to make and render everyday occasions accountable, cogent, and present.

“Small Incongruities”? Norms?

All of us can recall any number of moments in our lives when someone has acted “improperly.” But what is improper action? Most often these are acts which we deem as violating our own rules and expectations in any given setting, e.g., talking loudly in a theater, interrupting a bus queue, failing to stop at a stop sign, swearing at colleagues, and so on. Garfinkel’s (2002) approach to such events is to respond that such “small incongruities reveal coherence in whole structures at a time” (p. 254). Recognition of another’s “small incongruities” draws our attention to our own taken-for-granted expectations, norms, and values. Suddenly that which was “taken-for-granted” or “common sense” becomes visible as not only violated but tenuous. We find ourselves confronted with an unfolding present which presses, vexes, troubles, and irritates us as we struggle to effect an “intended” or expected present.

Breaches reveal the expectations, norms, and actions member’s use to accomplish the accountable order of the setting, and such violations may elicit angry response, rebuke, correction, or shunning. Breaches upset normal performance and disclose a matrix of expectations members rely on for the routine production of local settings. Such ethnomethodological attention to “small incongruities” and “breaching experiments” only makes sense given people’s routine, expected, competent performance of specific types of interactions: i.e., “norms.” Yet recourse to “norms” for understanding action is something that Garfinkel repudiates. Garfinkel regards the work of identifying and arraying norms as “generic representational theorizing,” and instead redirects or respecifies his attention to essentially indexical accomplishments of settings as “normed” or “normative” as an effect of members’ practices. ⁸

What are the limits of “small incongruities”? Clearly, some events, threats, violence, terrorism, and war cause serious disruptions for people in the daily enactments of taken-for-granted orders. As social workers, we routinely enter into life worlds and situations where we address and attempt to resolve disordering actions of people who threaten or interrupt the ability of others to accomplish “normal” forms of order in their everyday lives. We intervene into the “orders” of a home where a man sexually assaults a child, where a husband humiliates, beats, and threatens to murder his spouse, or where parents neglect children because of mental illness or drug addiction. Taken-for-granted orders need to be challenged and disrupted, especially when these are violent, abusive, manipulative, exploitative, illegal and destructive. However, to make sense, and to intervene in such situations, demands “formal analysis” and “generalized representational theorizing.” Social workers need data on social problems. We need a feminist analysis of “patriarchy” to understand how it is that some men use their “power” to abuse women (Dobash & Dobash, 1979, 1992: Martin, 1981; G. A. Walker, 1990; L. E. Walker, 1984). Incongruities point to deeper problem of contestation or social struggle concerning expectations, competencies, goals, and norms. Indeed, when encountering incongruities, such as violence and abuse, we are morally obligated to intervene and to alter and shift the ordinary and everyday production of that local order. The problem of order is “political.” Every order expresses members’ differential relations of power, authority, status, and control, and social workers know that they are obligated to take sides.

Conclusion: An ethnomethodological turn for social work?

Garfinkel (2002) insists that “FA and EM, are both and simultaneously incommensurably different and unavoidably related” (p. 115), thereby acknowledging that one can neither live wholly in one domain or the other. All of us live and work within taken-for-granted and everyday social relations. We function by presupposing the logic, orders, and navigable presence of a taken-for-granted phenomenal world. Even phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists cannot live wholly inside an epoché or bracket, as neither can provide a full-time vacation or even a permanent vacation from performance of the orders of everyday life. However, EM, like a vacation, allows us to see our lives and our worlds differently after we return to dreary worlds of work and life. This is its invaluable contribution.

An ethnomethodological turn directs social workers to ask just how people act and account for action as patriarchy, male power, racism, classism, ableism, sexism, and so on. What is it that people are doing to make such categories demonstrably relevant and procedurally consequential (Schegloff, 1992)? Despite wrinkles in Garfinkel’s (2002) approach, he expands our attention to “something awesome and beautiful” (p. 206) in a turn to people’s everyday activities. In this sense, EM is deeply respectful of the art, competencies, and strengths people in their mundane, ordinary, and often taken-for-granted everyday lives. Social workers can only benefit by a wonder, curiosity, and an honest desire to describe respectfully, just how people produce a lived coherence, regularities, generalities, accounts, meaning, and sense. Finally, through an attention to interactive practices, Garfinkel, and EM, like social work, explicates an empirical reality where people come together, work things out, get work done, and make things happen.