A student conducts a breaching experiment by responding to 'How are you?' with 'What exactly do you mean by that?' The conversational partner becomes visibly flustered and tries to explain. What does this reveal from an ethnomethodological perspective?
AThat 'How are you?' is an ambiguous question requiring clarification before a meaningful response
BThat social interaction depends on taken-for-granted background expectancies that become visible only when violated
CThat the conversational partner had poor communication skills and could not handle an unexpected question
DThat social norms exist as explicit rules that people consciously consult before speaking
The partner's distress and effort to restore normality reveal that everyday interaction rests on massive shared assumptions — background expectancies — that are typically invisible because they operate smoothly and go unquestioned. When violated, they surface dramatically. The flustered response is not irrational; it shows the depth of investment in the practical accomplishment of normal conversation. Option D is the opposite of what ethnomethodology claims: these methods are tacit and practical, not consciously applied rule-following. Garfinkel's breaching experiments worked precisely because they disrupted what everyone 'just knows' to do.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
Garfinkel argued that sociologists like Parsons made a fundamental error in their starting assumptions. What was Garfinkel's alternative question?
AHow do class and power determine the rules people follow in everyday interaction?
BWhat biological drives underlie observable social behavior?
CHow do people actively accomplish recognizable social order moment-to-moment through practical methods?
DWhy do some societies maintain more social order than others?
Garfinkel flipped Parsons's starting assumption: rather than taking social order as given and asking how it is maintained, he asked how it is achieved — produced, accomplished, made recognizable — through the practical reasoning of ordinary members. This shift from explaining order to explaining how order is produced is the defining move of ethnomethodology. Option A describes structural sociology; option D is a comparative question Garfinkel was not primarily asking. Option B is biological reductionism, the opposite of ethnomethodology's focus on social practices and members' methods.
Question 3 True / False
Ethnomethodology is primarily concerned with small-scale face-to-face interaction and has very little to say about macro-level phenomena like institutions or social structure.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Ethnomethodology does not dismiss macro-structure — it argues that for macro-structures to have real effects in the world, they must be enacted by people using concrete practical methods. A law doesn't enforce itself; a grade doesn't assign itself; an institution doesn't function without people deploying procedural logics moment-to-moment. Ethnomethodology's claim is that structure and interaction are inseparable: structure is not the fixed cause of interaction but its ongoing product, continuously rebuilt through the very practices it is supposed to explain. This is a theoretical claim about how macro and micro are related, not a dismissal of the macro level.
Question 4 True / False
Garfinkel's most revealing breaching experiments were subtle violations of taken-for-granted norms rather than blatant rule-breaking, because subtle violations better expose background expectancies.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
Dramatic rule violations allow participants to categorize the behavior as exceptional and restore normal sense relatively easily. Garfinkel's most effective experiments were subtle enough that participants could not readily categorize the violation — acting like a boarder in one's own home, treating routine social exchanges as requiring evidence. These created methodological disorientation that revealed the depth of the background expectancies being violated and the extent of the work participants invested in restoring normalcy. The subtlety was methodologically necessary: too obvious a violation short-circuits the exposure of tacit methods.
Question 5 Short Answer
What is the 'documentary method' in ethnomethodology, and how does it show that social order requires continuous interpretive work rather than passive reception of given meanings?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: The documentary method describes how people recognize particular actions as instances of an underlying pattern — each action is treated as a 'document' that points to a deeper pattern — while that underlying pattern is itself constructed from the particular instances. It is circular: you read someone's behavior as 'hostile' based on a pattern of hostility, but the pattern is assembled from your readings of individual actions. This circularity is not a flaw but a description of how sense is continuously produced. Social situations do not announce their own meaning; they are actively constituted through ongoing interpretive work by participants.
The documentary method reveals that even ordinary acts of recognition — identifying a situation as a job interview, an action as an invitation, a person as a friend — require constant inferential assembly. Social order is not simply there waiting to be read; it is produced through the very methods members use to make sense of each other's conduct.